Oooh boy:

1.Milk that is two days or so beyond expiration date, so it probably doesn’t smell sour, but your imagination is running a little wild so you think there might be a hint of sourness in it, so you ask someone else to smell it to be sure, but ask in a way that is leading them to be in the same ‘it might be’ loop.

2. Chum Biscuits

3. Home of an irresponsible cat owner

4. Mystery Leftovers

5a. Mixed Berry
5b. Segregated Berry

6. Fetus

7. Bag of corn chips left in a car, during the summer, for longer than a week.

8. Their fart – not yours – yours are fine.. it’s their’s that are fucking atrocious.

9. Transformer’s Taint.

10. Safe Word: A mix of fear, lust, lube, and leather

So the more I go through this writing prompt book – the more I keep running across these weird ones… I said I was going to try and do every prompt in this book – so I guess even silly things like this count.

1. USERNAME: EBunny // PASSWORD: Ivurry
(..get it?)

2. USERNAME: Eostre // PASSWORD: NorthUmbs4Lyfe

3. USERNAME: BigFuckinRabbit // PASSWORD: IShitEggsOhGodWhy

1.   Hallo. I am looking for cousin Larry Appleton.

2.   Truly I say to you that one of them will betray You.

3.   Did you think perhaps I was happier in that cookie?  No. No you didn’t. You only think about yourself.

4a.  When immersed in water, this fortune turns into a sponge.
4b.  Watch, your date is about to put their fortune in water. Just laugh, don’t tell them we know.

5.   This cookie was inspected by #445. Dry clean only.

6.   You are thinking of the number 15. Yeah, I’m that fucking good.

7.   ♫ Never gonna give you up.. never gonna let you down. ♫

8.  My mixtape is straight fire, check it out:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

9.  When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

10.   A/S/L?

Paul glanced down at his cellphone and realized that he was late. Very late. Questioning whether he should bother going in late. The type of late that you call in and invent a story about a Nyquil haze due to a temperature in three digits late.

Laying on his side, looking with bleary eyes at his phone, he startled when he felt the bed shift behind him. He didn’t have a pet and he didn’t bring anyone home last night… but…

yes he did.

His mind raced trying to piece together the missing block of time. He had gone out to have a drink to.. why? Why did he decide to go out and have a drink? This was the first question that was plaguing his mind. He wasn’t the ‘go out and drink’ type, but he definitely would if there was a good reason.  He went to his text messages and there was nothing. His emails, his social media. Both nothing. There were two calls to the same number at around 9, but they weren’t connected to any contacts.

“…mmpaul?” a mumbling feminine voice came from behind him. “…dwanna get breakfast?”

His stomach gave out a pleasing yelp. He did want breakfast. This lead him to the weird consideration that he wasn’t hung over. If for some reason last night, he had gone out and gotten drunk, and then brought a random woman home with him with a missing block of time, why the hell wasn’t his head just pounding? The further this situation went, the harder it was for him to comprehend and the harder it was for him to not turn around and see whether drunk him had made a smart move or a drunk one.

He had one last idea and tapped Tindr.  Bingo. His recent messages included a conversation from last night with a woman by the name of ‘ProzConz’. Her picture was cute too, and was exactly the type of woman Paul would swipe right on. They typed at each other for a half hour and the conversation stops with them agreeing to go meet at a local bar for the potential of a late night hook-up.

With the first part of the mystery solved, Paul rolled over and looked at ProzConz and just like her picture, she gave him a charming lopsided smile. “Thanks for a good night…” she said, still half asleep.

He nodded, picking his words carefully. “I’d love to get breakfast, but I’m already late for work, so I’m going to have to get dressed and go.” Without knowing how well they had hit it off the night before, he was hoping she would get the message that she would have to go too.

She nodded, ‘Mmkay. Let me just get myself together.” She sat up, and quickly got to her feet striking a very nice naked profile against the incoming sunlight.  He watched as she moved around his bedroom like she knew it well. Before he even had slipped on a pair of boxers, she was dressed, long hair bundled up in a messy bun, and slipping on her shoes.  The more he watched, the more annoyed he was that he didn’t remember the previous night at all. Between the grace in which she moved and the fact that he definitely was attracted to her, he had no doubt they had a good time.

“So..” he said as she was getting ready to walk out of the bedroom with no further conversation of prodding on his part, “can I call you again?”

She grinned, stray auburn hairs falling in front of her eyes. “Of course. Any time next week would be fantastic.” She walked up to him, kissed him on the forehead. Before he could even fathom what the next sentence should be, the door to his apartment banged shut and she was gone.

The sequence of events was the most ideal outcome. He had time to figure out who she was, and hopefully get back whatever weird drunk time he was missing. Now though, he had to figure out what to do with his work situation, which was still a huge ordeal left in the day.  He stepped into the bathroom and his phone rang before he could even prepare his toothbrush.

The phone number showed as his bank.  Odd. He put it on speaker, the automated message loudly echoing through his tiled bathroom.

“This is a courtesy message for, PAUL R ANDERS, concerning unusual activity on his, checking account ending in 7544. If this is PAUL R ANDERS, please stay on the line to speak with a representative.”

He held, taking his phone into the bedroom and sitting back down. A cold chill started to touch in Paul’s stomach. He was very responsible with his money, and had never had a late payment let alone unusual activity.  When he finally heard a human voice on the other side of the phone, he was starting to actually feel sick versus having to pretend for work.

The woman’s voice on the phone verified his name, his birth date, his address, and each question felt more and more excruciating than the last. After all of that she asked quite plainly, as if it was a common occurrence, “Mr. Anders, last night did you withdraw the entirety of your checking account from an ATM on Sycamore Drive?”

The cold chill was now a full blown hailstorm in his gut. “No.” he whispered quietly.

“Hmm.. I see that Sycamore Drive is just under a mile from your home. Did you lose your card at all? Have your wallet stolen?” And then asked, still with the chipper voice of a woman who was completely oblivious to the fact that she was about to make him vomit. “Do you have your card now, Mr. Anders?”

Paul looked around his floor and found his pants in a heap at the foot of his bed, and wasn’t surprised at all to not see his wallet there. “..looking..” he whimpered into the phone as he stood up and left his bedroom for the first time since waking.

He dropped the phone leaving his customer service representative saying ‘hello’ loud enough for him to hear her. He didn’t hear her though, or at least he didn’t respond to her. Paul was too busy looking at his completely empty apartment. An apartment where he had lived for the past few years was now empty like the day he had moved in. There was clutter around. Piles of papers, books scattered around, garbage strewn about the kitchen floor, but the entirety of the apartment was gone. Couches. Television. Kitchen appliances. Bookshelves. DVDs. All of it.

Gone.

He bent down and picked up his phone slowly.

“i’m…. gonna have to call you back…”

He hung up before the customer service rep could get a word in edgewise.

There was only one thing he could think to do. His mind was a mix of dread and his stomach was moments away from expelling everything.  ProzConz… Pro-Con.. how could he have been so stupid? He had been had. Drugged and taken for every single thing he was worth. Tears were falling down his cheeks, and he was doing his best to not just scream. The police would be here soon enough to take a report from him, he didn’t want them showing up before he could call them.

He began to move, ever so slowly through his apartment. His phone was blinking for some reason, but he didn’t pay attention. He was too busy remembering the way his apartment looked the day before, recognizing everything he lost. His laptop. His Ikea kitchen stand with all of the spices. The sound system…..

The sound system.  He had, when installing it, hammered just a little too hard and left a quarter sized hole in the drywall.  The spot was gone and looked just like regular wall.  Did whomever ProzConz was working with fix his wall before they left? It seemed impossible, especially since that means they would have had to paint over the whole so well that it looked like it never happened.

His phone let out a noise that sounded like a submarine was about to dive.  When Paul turned his head, he could also see the screen blinking red.

“What the hell..” Picking it up revealed one word and a button.

REBOOT

Paul couldn’t help but wonder if somehow they had done something to his phone, too.  The noise was getting louder, as if the phone insisted on being rebooted.

Paul was scared and unsure if doing what his phone insisted was the right idea.  The fear was that it might make his situation worse, which was the ultimate catalyst to him hitting the button. A clear-minded part of him, somewhere secreted away bubbled up briefly to point out that there was very little that could happen that would be worse than what had already transpired.

Just as his finger brushed the screen, the klaxon stopped his screen blanked.

—

Paul woke up with his head drenched in sweat. His stomach felt like he had done a hundred sit-ups. He sat up and felt his head being weighed down, only to realize he was wearing his giant noise canceling headphones.

“Fear Dream Sequence, Completed.” A chipper computer voice spoke to him.

He followed the headphone cord to his phone which was hidden beneath a pile of blankets. The screen showed a timer which seemed to have counted down from 60 minutes. Hitting back he came to the first screen.

Binary Creations Emotional Dream Simulator
Please select:
Adventure
Embarrassing
Erotic
Fearful
Happy
Weird

Paul sighed. He had hit the wrong button. He seriously wished there was a way to get a more precision click on his damn cell phone.

End

The book that I picked up has a lot of inspirational questions that I’m not answering. I will though, use each prompt to try and create something.

List ten things on your bucket list.

Mitch coughed blood into a tissue. He couldn’t help but examine them when the coughs wracked his body so hard that he found some of his insides coming out. They were these horrible Kleenex Rorschach tests that he would look at and try and quickly imagine what the first thing he saw was. This one had an unsymmetrical gob of dark red that looked like nothing more than a reminder that Mitch was dying.

He balled it up and methodically took a plastic baggie filled with a rainbow of these tissues, placing it inside. “Why, Mitch. That shit is disgusting.” Vick made a gagging gesture, and Mitch wasn’t entirely sure if it was real or mocking, but he still continued stuffing the kleenex in the bag, rezipping it up and then placing it back into his shoulder bag.

“I’m not leaving my cancer rags on the top of this mountain. We’re already up here crunching in the snow, fucking with the wildlife. I’m not letting some poor mountain goat eat my cancer. It’s gross.” Mitch had given this a lot of thought. He saw his cancer as this living and breathing entity. It was a monster that he wasn’t going to defeat. It was a force of will greater than his own. The best he could do was try and do good things while living in its shadow, but there would come a time when that shadow completely enveloped him and all that was left would be the tales of his adventures.

Adventures like this.

The bucket list was Vick’s idea. She had read it in some ‘dealing with loved ones dying’ kind of book, of which there were a surprising amount of. Mitch also got that too. He hated how much of these things he now understood, like cancer opened up some sort of amazing door to the inner workings of man, yet depleted your time to use it well. People all mourn differently, so when their loved one dies, some people write a book about how they think they should get over it. After that works for them, it must work for someone else, so they sell it. It guarantees that even if the life didn’t mean something, the mourning did. Mitch was trying to leave an imprint on this world, the hypothetical book writer was trying to leave an imprint about their grief on the world. It was just an ego trip all the way down.

Mitch took in a deep breath, testing his lungs against the thinner air after a vicious coughing fit. It felt strained and tight, but he was able to take in the whole of it, and it felt amazing. The air here was untouched. His breath, with particles of the city, and the plant he worked in for most of his life, his car, and a hundred other places were dirtier than the air he was taking in. Even if there were particles of other places of the world, they were filtered through hundreds of miles of mountainous expanse.  Mitch felt like if he stood here and breathed that air forever, perhaps it would be enough to clean out whatever darkness was clinging to his lungs. Similarly, Mitch was aware that that thought process was how snake oil is born.

“Ok, I’m set up.” Vick said, breaking the incredible silence. Mitch turned from the view of the mountain ranges in all directions, and towards Vick and her tripod. On top was a state of the art video camera on a small, but powerful, stabilizing rig. Both machines clicked and then began to whurr softly, telling Mitch that they were ready too. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Mitch had been asking himself that same question for the last twelve hours. This was nuts. This whole premise was batshit, as his mother would say. It was the last one on his list though, so it had to be the biggest. It had to be the one he might not come back from. He started his journey with no regrets, and now that he was at the first idea he had written down, he would end it with no regrets. Up to the point a few months ago, when he realized he was living on borrowed time, he had never lived like that. He held back ideas. He made safe choices. He planned.

Now he was on the top of a mountain, ready to do the craziest thing he had ever considered. He had done the simplest stuff first. He met a relative from a distant part of his family. He wanted to know if there were similarities between himself and them, and was surprised to find out that there were subtle ones like the small patch of grey both he and his distant cousin had on the left side of their head. Mitch’s father had it, and apparently so did his relative’s. He did a day of roller coasters, which he had previously avoided because of an incident from his childhood where he threw up at the peak of one, raining down his sick on the people behind him.

He didn’t vomit, but he was still certain he didn’t like them.

When he walked into restaurants, he asked to talk to the cook. He was surprised how many places let him do that. He would ask them to make him their favorite dish on or off the menu. Sometimes he got whatever was on special, but other times he received this amazing concoction of meats and sauces that he never might have known about.

Each one of these would cross a line off his list of things he wanted to try, and even though it was completely in his head, he felt lighter with each passing one. Like he had unburdened his soul and was closer to heaven-bound. When he told Vick about that, she just held his hand and told him how much she loved him.

Today though was the biggest challenge yet. When Mitch had been 8, his family had taken him skiing and they all had a fantastic time, but Mitch stood at the top of the mountain, frozen solid.  He felt like his feet were locked in the skis and the skis were locked into the earth, and this would be where he remained forever. He couldn’t imagine surviving the experience of throwing himself down a mountainside. He saw no enjoyment in the concept, only blood curdling fear. When he relayed the story to Vick, he had told her the one fact about the story that nobody had ever known, not even his parents. Standing on this very mountain, near to this very spot, staring down this same wide open field of snow. He had pissed himself as a kid. It scared him so much that he just stood frozen while warmth just traveled down his leg, which somehow made the fear even more real.

That’s why this was the first one on his list, and the last one to be completed.  It was his greatest fear, and now that his body was giving up on him, he was going to defeat the last self-made demon he could.

He turned to the camera, and smiled at Vick. She looked amazing in the cold. Her pale cheeks were more flushed, and the frost that clung to her hat and wisps of hair framed her face beautifully. “Hi. I’m Mitch. I’m your dad… I’m sorry I don’t get to meet you, but, well, this world sucks sometimes. I just wanted to tell you a story before I do something completely nuts…”

He told his tale into the camera. The ski trip. The fear. The pee. All of it. He spoke to his unborn child in a way he didn’t think he would have been able to the day before he had gone into the doctor’s office with a chest cold he couldn’t seem to get ahead of. He spoke more earnestly than he could have when he was picking pieces of mirror out of his fist, the day the results had come back as completely, mortally, positive. Every word was built around accepting who you are and doing what you need to, but also not being afraid to take risks. He did his best to explain to his future child who he was and who he had become, and how much he loved their mom.

At the end of it all. He told both Vick and the camera that he loved them. He gave Vick one meaningful look, her face encrusted with salt and tears from listening to him pour his heart out in a way he had never really done all at once like that. Mitch simply smiled, put on his goggles, turned, and pushed off, throwing himself both down the mountain, and the trail’s inevitable end.

If you fell down a rabbit hole, what do you think you would find?

There comes a time in one’s life where you have to look at your achievements and ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?’

Alex had been circling that drain for the better part of two years when he saw the rabbit. Calling him simply ‘the rabbit’ doesn’t do him justice at all. From his crushed velvet jacket, to the pristine miniature pocketwatch he was holding. From a consideration of species, he was a rabbit, but from his state of dress he was clearly something quite different than the floppy eared pet you may have initially thought of.

“Escuse me?” the rabbit shouted towards Alex as he bound towards him. A soft lisp to his voice, that Alex questioned if it was due to the creature’s elongated front teeth. “Escuse me, sir.. do you happen to have zhe time?”

Alex glanced at his watch. “4:30.”

That was not what the rabbit wanted to hear. “FOUR SIRTY! FOURRR ZHIRRRTTYY! I am quite quite quite quite late!” And in a blink the rabbit was bounding past the stunned Alex.

Is this all there is?

His life felt empty. Boring. Devoid of interest. He barely felt connected with this world most of the time. As the rabbit was just cresting the horizon, Alex charged after him. “Mister Rabbit!” He yelled, and where he was sure the rabbit had heard him, he gave no sense that he would stop or pause for a moment.

The average rabbit, the sans coat and pocketwatch kind, are notoriously fast. This one though was running not with the same bounding leaps you imagine, but on two legs which made him fast, but not as fast as he could be if he was on all fours. Alex, giving chase now, was certain he was catching up by inches every second that passed.

They toured through the woods, around trees, over fallen logs, and then at least, he watched as the rabbit simply disappeared. Within the span of a blink, the rabbit was nowhere to be seen. Alex kept running and skidded to stop when he saw where the rabbit must have gone.

A hole.  A giant hole.

At least five feet across, this hole fell into darkness, and Alex was certain his new puff-tailed friend had taken his leave down there.

“HELLO?” He shouted.

There was no sound in response.

The young man tried to think about whether he had been into this area of the woods before, but the more he looked around for context of his exact location, the more he realized he was completely lost.

From somewhere deep within the hole he heard the lisping voice of the rabbit, “Are you zhoining me? I’m laaaate!” The voice echoed off the walls, and it took him until the second report to realize that somewhere beneath the earth the rabbit was speaking to him.

Is this all there is? 

Alex sighed. Finally, a moment of unique experience. A moment that few, if any, had ever experienced. It was the beginning of a grand adventure that was surging through his bones, and that was what pushed his feet from the ground and sailing through the air. It was the potential of flights of fantasy and a new world that lay at the bottom of this hole.

—

The rabbit, Morris, listened as the excited yawp from above ground grew closer. He glanced at his watch again, a nervous tic he had since he was in the warren with his dozens of brothers and sisters. His foot tapped impatiently. He wasn’t as late as he had let on, but he found it was the easiest way to not have to answer questions.

Morris had gone through this so many times, he could tell from the pause in the excited yelp that there were only a few seconds left.

3…

2…

1….

Morris took a step back as Alex landed, spraying ichor and gore to every corner of the small landing chamber. He glanced at his watch, wiping the watchface of liver or spleen on his vest. From a connecting passage, Morris’ wife dressed in a powder blue sundress entered the anti-chamber and gasped as she saw the sight of the young man, with the growing pool of colors that his body lay in the center of.

“That’s the third this week. You are doing wonderfully this season.” She commented, leaning over and kissing her husband on the cheek.  Morris looked and smiled as there was a touch of pink just beneath her twitching nose. “Now come on, sweetie. I put dinner on the table just a few minutes ago.”

Morris’ head tilted to the side. “Oh, darling, I apologize. I really am late.”

Their laughter filled the halls as they headed home, thrilled at the life they had built together.