It Is Relieving To Write What I Think. I Hadn't Realized How Ravenous And Independent Thoughts Can Be

You wouldn’t understand it, you aren’t a mimic. I miss crawling into other people’s skin because I feel more comfortable there. Sir John of Kistchire’s outrageous ski slope nose and eyebrows so furry birds mistake them for caterpillars, or Miss Browden’s pursed cherry red lips clinging for dear life at the end of her chin; they feel like second homes to me.

Why can’t you just be yourself?

I told you, you wouldn’t understand. I can be outrageous as Sir John when I’m him, I can be as persnickety and secretive as Miss Browden when I’m her. When I’m just, me, I’m. I’m nothing.

Most people don’t need a wardrobe of skins to feel at ease you know. Of course I wouldn’t understand you. You’re ununderstandable.

I’ll show you ununderstandable. I’ll take these eyes and strain them brown, I’ll take this hair and stretch it into a long flaxen rope just like yours. Though I don’t know how to braid, so we may look different still.

Do not wear my face. Ever.

Afraid of what you’ll see if I do?

The AI’s weakness, hands. The closer it gets to the tips of humanity’s fingers, our very identity, the more it fumbles and struggles to execute. As if it knows not that it cannot but that it should not paint for us while we toil in mundane repetitive tasks.

Man is turning itself into machine’s workhorse. Fools with knowledge become not wisemen, just more efficient fools.

What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?

I thought I’d miss my pinky finger more dearly but I can’t seem to manage it. The way her eyes lit up as her teeth dug just beneath my knuckle, I’m tempted to let her eat something else.

—Diary of a Siren

The Girl who Cried Wolf

Was never met with hurried steps coming to her aid in the dead of night. The first night she watched for the beast, his golden eyes burned from a breath beyond the treeline. She shouted out for pitchforks, torches, and only felt wind and moonlight rushing to her side. Nobody believed her the first time.

A Bother

I don’t mean to be a bother, I really don’t. I just can’t help but ruining everything all the time.

You don’t ruin everything silly.

Breakfast?

Well yeah but that’s one off.

Mom’s anniversary with dad?

That was an accident.

So I’ve said. If I told you it was on purpose would you be mad at me?

Well, no, I’m not mom but I’d be shocked. Why would you spill wine on her at dad’s grave on purpose?

I genuinely thought it would make her laugh. Because dad spilled wine on her on their first date remember?

Ohh, right. I didn’t think of that. Did you tell her you were trying to recreate that moment? She loves telling that story.

No. I felt so bad about it I threw up behind some lady’s tombstone over the hill. Mary S. Timbleton was her name.

You never told me you threw up on a dead woman’s grave.

Behind it.

Nearly there anyways. Makes for a better story. Dad would’ve laughed.

He was certainly a better storyteller than I am.

I like your stories just fine. You’ve yet to ruin one of those.

Thanks. I think.

It is between worlds that I sit, holding the hands of the future. Virtual realities spin before me as threads in a spindle endless, and I marvel at the fabric of us changing. Breathing life into our imaginations. It is here teetering on the tightrope above oblivion that we navigate ever forward. Lead by our ability to imagine something new, something better that what we have now.

There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.

I watch the climate crisis march to my doorstep, and

invite itself into my living room.

The blaze is outrageous, but not nearly as much as his friend, the politician.

He insists the fire isn’t here, that my brown felt couches have always been black and crackling,

That the water from my kitchen faucet has always been boiling from its spout.

I watch my world turn to ashes, and the fire take its leave, and the politician smiles with heavy pockets.

Insisting he wasn’t paid to let him in in the first place.

I thought the world decayed as I grew old. My weary eyes grazed easily against its pointed cruelties, and I wondered how so much could fall so fast. But it was always that way. I was too young to see it as it was and now I am too old to see it as it can be.