Ugh. Another one of these prompts. Well, there’s a couple in a wood where there are a lot of red leaves on the ground. Stylized autumnal shit. Someone’s fantasy of what fall in Maine is supposed to look like except of course it looks totally fake and computer generated. It’s so uncanny valley. It’s a canned idealized version of something that in real life is precious and specific. Local and authen...

This bicycle is lying in the street not for any obvious reason. No one got hit by a car or swerved to miss a dog and fell off it. No one got dragged off it to be abducted. This isn’t that kind of story. It fell off a van. It was not broken when it first fell off the van but it broke when it fell. The van was being driven by a man named Adam Bunk. It was getting dark outside and Adam and his friend...

I had studied hard but maybe not in the right way or maybe not enough. You can always study more right? I mean, I could have gone completely overboard on all the review. I just studied more than I usually did which granted was not very much because I was smart enough but certainly not brilliant. I knew well that I need to study in order to get high grades. I wasn’t one of those people who could ju...

Playgrounds. I remember the adventure playground in Holland Park as being quite scary. Didn’t get to go there often and it wasn’t really safe. Playgrounds in the 70s and 80s were a lot less safe than they are now. More sharp edges, rickety equipment, things that were flat out dangerous like trapezes,no safety locks on swings, and above all no soft place to fall. I remember being pretty much unsupe...

A mirror is something that reflects back to you. Some mirrors may be distorted and reflect back to you as fatter or thinner or greener or wonkier than you really are. Mirror of the mind is something that reflects your mind back to you. I’m thinking of three ways this can happen. Through a really good psychoanalyst. Through “say back” when you are expressing something and someone does the “I hear y...

This is what the little girl asked me. I was of course tempted to tell her that the sun is not sentient. It is not a person or an animal so technically it is impossible for it to feel lonely. Then I began to think about various Sun gods including RA and wondering if they were considered to be the Sun itself ever or whether they were separate entities. Indeed it seemed as if the gods certainly had ...

This is such a dark question. It makes me think of soldiers at the front. Or even of a very grim hostage situation where people are imprisoned or POWs. My mind goes back to the Hanoi Hilton and remembering the story of how the tree and walking around it meant everything to them. Then later reading studies that show how important nature and exposure to it matters to our wellbeing. I wonder sometime...

Before we moved I went to the library and looked at pictures of the Arctic circle. There was mostly just pictures of glaciers and very cold looking water. There was one though that I couldn’t quite shake from my mind. It was a wooden pier stretching out into a dark sea with big chains chunks of ice bobbing in it. Snow and chunks of ice on the wooden pier too. I wondered who would walk out there an...

One time I was staying over with Caroline Moriarty. I loved staying over with Caroline because the house was so big and busy and there were people and animals around. I got so lonely sometimes at our place and bored. I liked that a Caroline’s there was always something going on. Someone making something in the kitchen, someone watching something on TV in the den, someone playing a game in the base...

There were all kinds of activities with prizes. There was a cake walk but it was all weird cakes that didnt use eggs because of course those were hard to get. Mrs X was all dressed up like a fortune teller and was sitting inside a little makeshift tent made out of a sheet. She had a candle and a big glass paperweight with swirls in it that she was calling her “crystal ball.” She called herself Mad...