Unicorn Meat Prompt
Once we made it to mars they stood no chance. Beneath the moon on a lone cloud stood a herd. Some Missouri man saw the shadow of a horn and alerted the officials.
“You’re fucking crazy,” they said.
“You’re fucking missing out,” he said.
He had a cousin in Santa Cruz who worked for a startup that could fly planes. He called him, said he lost his dog, and within a day they were flying high with binoculars.
“Buckle yourself,” his cousin said.
He didn’t listen, he leapt and dove like a peregrine, pinning the unicorn to the ground, driving his fingers and fists into the rib, ripping out the heart. A native man stood in the cornfield, and said, “Watti tabbi tabbeet watti!”
The other river folk noticed and joined the native man with his knife. He took the heart and offered it up to the sun. It didn’t stop bleeding. It made a river the folk drank from.
The Missouri man ripped the eyeballs from the animal and probed its brain. The native cut the flaps of skin off.
Zip zip.
The folk sank their teeth into the bare flanks of meat. The Missouri man followed and couldn’t help but think that it tasted like the thing on the menu whose name only looked appetizing, he asked for salt. The native man thought it tasted like life, and his heart beat more full. A naked man came out from the cornfield with a baseball cap and glove, tasted it, and said it tasted like children.
When the meat was off the bone, it neighed and its bones ascended in a gallop, around the sun and the men watched the plane land nearby.
“How the fuck did you survive that fall?” his cousin asked.
With blood over his mouth and eyeballs in his hand he said, “I’ve survived worse.”
Dragon Prompt
Momma says I’m smart and that’s what I am, but I’m actually hungry, that’s what I am. Momma says she’ll fetch something for me and put it on the table outside. When it’s ready I go outside and see a snack walking up from the St. Lawrence River all shiny from the glare of the sun and eat all of it up except the scroll it was carrying. I go inside and she says, “How was it?” I say, “Crunchy.” She looks outside and says, “But, it’s still on the table!” I guess we just disagree sometimes.
Down the hill, there’s a town full of floating houses with snacks inside who we help by blowing fire on the logs they gather in an area near the middle. Momma and Poppa usually fly down there, but my wings grew in like horns beneath my skin. They’ve tried straightening out my bones too, but the wood always breaks because my legs are too strong. Momma said it’s what makes me special, Poppa said nothing. Poppa usually says nothing. I just sit there and blow bubbles with my drool.
I’m in the town and I’m looking at the snacks and one comes up to me and says something like, “It’s the dumb one. He’d be smarter dead.” Momma says they call me dumb because they dumb themselves. I burp and a little fire comes out and the snack who said it, whose eyes almost pop out from the fat pushing up against his face, seemed to be smiling white when his frown was burnt off so that he fell into a bunch of white things that became disconnected. Making people smile makes me smile. Hee haw hee haw.
The townsfolk came over with some water and put it next to me so I could drink, because I never know when I’m thirsty, but they know when I’m thirsty, and I drank so the burning in my chest would calm down, but I played a prank on them and made the water boil in my mouth so when I spit at them, they let out these screams of joy. Their skin drooped to their clothes before turning into a puddle on the ground and they brought out the loud thingies they called canyons that played catch with me.
They lit the canyon and the ball flew out almost too fast to see but I’m good at this game, so I caught it and threw it back to them, making one snack pummel through a wall into the house. I guess the snacks family was in the house, and he missed them.
Before I knew it, they put a net around me and started sticking me with these sharp things. Fire came out of the holes they put there and burnt the net. It reminds me of when they cut me open as a baby to try and make sense of my condition. It hurt, but it was cool; I made the town turn red and there were these white smiles everywhere. Ma and Pa came down the hill and scooped me up and took me back and locked me in my room. Ma said, “You know better,” and Pa said, “gggRRRRrrrrrr.” I say, “Sawrry aboot thayt,” but I know they know I love being in my room because I have my action dragons there, wearing doohickeys and capes.
There’s this one without wings like me, who has this big goofy smile and diaper like me. If I press down his legs, his wings flap and I throw him against the wall so he flies. He tells me his Momma says he’s smart too. He tells me all sorts of things like how he has a crush on a snack they have roped up and feed slop to. They say a horse kicked her when she was young, and now she thinks she’s a horse. She neighs and lets people ride her and says “Yee-haw” when they hit her with a whip. I sometimes wish it was a horse who kicked me.
Car Prompt
The mens’ clothes held sweat around them as it cooled and evaporated from the air passing through the half cracked windows and vents.
“Why can’t we get past 70?”
“Cuz 60 is peak efficiency.”
“You’re always telling me things I know.”
“Why’d you ask?”
“Just think going faster won’t hurt.”
They passed a Navajo family selling sweet loaf and jewelry made in China. Where the road faced, the land gave way to more land red and barren. In other directions there was smoke and lightning and rain.
“You think she’ll make it?”
“I’m more worried about our gas.”
“Could funnel gas from the ground. Dinosaurs roamed here.”
“We’re not looking for miracles, just peace.”
“She deserves it.”
Tentacles wrapped around a red solo cup with water splashing each turn. Bill grabbed the cup to steady it in his hand and the octopus wrapped around his pointer finger he poked into. It pulsated a few beats and lost its grip splashing more water out of the cup.
The heat morphed the road through the silent steam that fled the V8 to freedom. Sound-waves from the lightning reverberated the water in the red solo cup and the steam turned grey, the engine rumbled and stumbled and slowed, sputtering to the side of the road. The men stood under the hood thumbing their chins.
“We need coolant.”
“Closest coolant is ten miles off the road.”
“We don’t have any water to pour?”
“Unless we let Ollie loose from it.”
“They can live outside, right?”
“Not for long.”
“What do we do, wait for it to cool?”
“Ollie’s on borrowed time.”
“We could push it.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Alright, genius.”
“We can leave a little water in the cup. The storm’ll catch us eventually.”
When they opened the car door they saw Ollie’s scrotum dome display the colors of the galaxy flatlining to a blank white similar to the cup’s inside.
“I’ve never seen her get so white while sleeping.”
They poured the cup’s water onto the engine so it sizzled then hummed when the key turned. They passed fifteen minutes on the road and the air cooled as the clouds came near. A grumbled voice cracked.
“Big blue?”
“Ten minutes Ollie.”
“Thanks babe. Cig?”
“One sec.”
“Thanks.”
He lit a cigarette and gave it to the octopus who curled its lips as not to wet the filter. Ollie only needed two tentacles to hold it. As they came to the end of the road the red land emptied to blue, and large birds flew against the flanking storm. Waves outspoke the thunder when they exited the truck. The octopus finished its puff and wrangled itself around the passenger’s wrist.
“Anything else you need?”
“Just to be tossed far into the sea.”
“Got it.”
The passenger flung the octopus above the waves as a bird swooped down and speared it and the octopus’s colors oscillated the big bang before going spectral with the bird landing on sand and more birds landing on the sand, each lunging and poking and tearing until blackened gills were left for the tide.
“Fuck.”
Eyeball Ring Prompt
Rubber that sticks, lumps and bumps, a red iris floats lazily-the pupil of a copperhead with lashes painted on as if they were triangular chompers spaced out, white on black. It has a lure that invites inspection, a whispering eye, is its erogenous zone where it hinges or where it’s looking? Upside down, the eye goes blank and makes me feel as if I left the oven on at my childhood home. It never makes direct eye contact, what does it know that I don’t? I can’t question it seriously, as its novelty is that of a ring pop, the plastic framing of the eyeball has an equator where the machine fused it. I can see beneath its lid as I pull the eye from it. It's glued to the rubber, the ring, the feeling I remember around myself.
I think John won it at the park for throwing a hoop around a bottle. That night, us brothers beside our twin and bunk beds lined ourselves up, dropped our drawers, and wrote on the wall with a scarlet crayon whether we stretched it or not, giving the youngest, Gabe, a pat on the back and a “You’ll get there soon enough.” I was the middle child, and it mostly fit flaccid, but when it became engorged with blood it’d stretch, but never too much because it’d stop my circulation.
My oldest brother John had steel wool and a firehose. He slept with his pants off and while in bed, he’d say, “Mike, Gabe, look!” and we’d see he pitched a tent under his comforter. We could only pitch a tent with thin sheets. Had he slept on his stomach he could spin like a top. We wished we could spin like a top. So, before and after slumber, Gabe and I would tug it pink, stretch it out over the course of days and weeks and years so that it grew and became tan.
At the dinner table, sly smiles were shot at each other, and we became a subset of the family, almost separate enough to be our own force. “Private Private!” we’d salute each other, our members dangling. We’d whip out the notebook we’d draw boobs in like googly eyes. “How’s this look?” we’d ask. “Ooohhh, Mrs. Petunya! You dirty devil!” Mrs. Petunya was a Pokémon card of Jynx we glued into the notebook. Gabe had to warm up, I was a light switch, John was a dog with guests over. John once said, “Cardboard turns me on.”
He once had a girl over. Cassie had a runners build, skinny hips and boobs that appeared only when she leaned over. Gabe and I watched from the bathroom pipes where a crack shone his bed. We called it the steam room. Just before this, Gabe became big enough to stretch the ring out. Our baby brother grew in front of our very own eyes. We hugged, inconsequentially sword fighting in the process. John knew we were watching, he always looked out for us, we loved him. She straddled him and we touched ourselves, and when she was grinding and saying, “Oh John, Oh John,” he just laid there. She drove her lady parts into him and burnt like a flame at the end of a wick, but afterwards while our bulls were still raging, he was limp. I’d never seen him limp before. Come to think of it, he was only hard around us.
Geology Museum Prompt
I cannot tell if graveyards are an affirmation or denial of life. I will make no argument as to whether museums preserve or deny. I cannot tell the difference between history and fiction except that it stares at me, a wooly mammoth, its tusks smiling wise as dead. I would smile back, but I forget the feeling that preceded my birth, that I’m headed towards. What do we embalm now for moon people to find later? Freaks, of course, the prettiest, the ugliest, tallest, shortest. What is this mummy’s claim?
The antithesis of my wanderings would be a zoo of natural history where bones give shape to flesh and breath is shared between beings. There’d be trees and space and water, and everything would exist in its own little world with bridges between each. This would evolve, of course, and change with the wind, and expand, and correct until its scope reflects the infinite. That is, something, rather than nothing.
My love, this is where I’ve found you. In this museum of the infinite, we’ve made an exhibit, a platonic ideal. I don’t care they’re looking. In this glass capsule floating through space let it be the testament to all matter and debris that it was worth it. When we mold and our bones mesh and we plummet through atmosphere let us spring new life elsewhere so that it, the struggle, the triumph continues.