I always said I’d never get married, but at 39, I’ve changed my mind. I’m ready to commit to someone who will love, cherish, honor, and comfort me for the rest of my days.
Please join me at 2pm on May 14th for my wedding to myself – the person who has always been there for me.
3/30/2022
Day 16
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Adopt
“Look,” Alex said. “I’ve come to love Spot.”
Meg scratched Spot’s head. “That’s because he’s just so darn lovable!”
“But!” Alex broke in. “I’m pretty sure you can’t have an emotional support giant jumping spider.”
“Aww, don’t be a hater!”
4/1/2022
Day 17
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Clear
Shigeru dragged his hand across the fog-coated bathroom mirror, streaking the misty silver surface. He leaned in close, opened his eyes, and sighed. Day six and that third eye looked like it was here to stay.
4/2/2022
Day 18
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Career
Jacob stared at the robotic arm that had taken his job; it was just tubes, metal, gears. A useless hunk of metal.
“Here goes,” he muttered, lighting the soaked rag in the neck of the bottle he held, ignoring the flashing blue and red lights outside of the factory windows.
Jordan arrived at the address printed on the coupon. It read: Come by for absolution – all bad deeds erased – start over with a clean slate!
He breathed a shaky sigh and pushed open the door to the abandoned Waffle House.
3/21/2022
Day 12
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Scream
Alex screamed into the void, pouring their heart out, all rage at the feeling of helplessness. They went quiet for a moment, breathing hard.
The void screamed back, “Could you keep it down please? I just put the kids to sleep.”
“Sorry,” Alex muttered with a nervous wave.
3/23/2022
Day 13
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Output
“My worth is not defined by my productivity, but I’m afraid yours is.” Eileen muttered, pulling up yet another skeletal tomato plant from her garden. Her homemade mulch recipe needed refining. She would have to hunt again.
***You know, this started out as a nice story about anti-work and self-care, and of course it turned into murder. Should we be concerned about my brain?
3/25/2022
Day 14
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Grave
Lin had made an error. Her calculations had been off. Six feet would not be deep enough. She clawed at the dirt as the morning sun gently illuminated the fog-laced clearing, the work of her previous night laid bare before her.
Week two has been fairly successful! I did miss one weekend day when I was out of the house for about eight hours and forgot to write when I got home, but overall, not bad!
It feels good to do a little something every day, to stretch the story muscles, limber up the mind. I plan to keep this up for a good, long time. Won’t you join me?
I support the use of the singular they. But in my case, I am – in fact – 10,000 spiders in a skin suit and it HAS been several weeks since I have feasted on the flesh of man. Luckily, my date has arrived right on time – and carrying flowers. How very sweet of him.
Mon 3/14/2022
Day 7
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Calculation
Kylie double checked their duffel bag: Four rubber ducks, a jar of Vaseline, a Nixon mask, two rolls of toilet paper, and a wireless Bluetooth speaker. They had done the math over and over; this bank robbery was going to work.
Tue 3/15/2022
Day 8
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Pit
Adrian finally realized that it wasn’t the threat of hitting the bottom that made falling into the pit so terrifying; it was the dawning understanding that there was no bottom.
3/16/2022
Day 9
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Hurt
“I hurt all the time,” the well demon beckoned, hand outstretched.
And I took it.
Took her clawed hand in mine.
For now,
I would no longer
Be in pain
Alone.
3/17/2022
Day 10
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Pound
“A pound of flesh?” She laughed. “OK, Boomer. Don’t forget to calculate for inflation. It’s going to cost a bit more than just a pound.”
I know, I know. I need to write more and more often. This is just a truth of my existence; I don’t feel whole unless I’ve created something during a given week. Cooking, sewing, writing – all of these things bring me peace and fill my cup. If I go too many days without getting my hands dirty by making something from nothing, I feel downright empty, listless, and like a faded shadow of my true self.
So! I’ve started a daily exercise for myself and anyone else interested over on my twitter where I provide a daily microficiton prompt and then write a tweet-length story based around it. I think I’m going to post a weekly compilation here of the prior week’s tiny tweeted tales and I encourage anyone looking for a few minutes of writing to squeeze into even the busiest of days to join me in this exercise. Stay tuned for these on Fridays!
Here’s week one:
Tue 3/8/2022
Day 1
#MicrofictionPrompt of the Day: Nightmare. I’ll start!
Wayne jerked awake to his alarm, slick with cold sweat, bed sheets soaked. He grasped at his wrists, rubbing them, swearing they were still sore from being bound. Shaking his head, he got up and watered his vining potted plants; they were growing so nicely lately.
Wed 3/9/2022
Day 2
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Road. Let’s go!
The empty highway stretches on in an infinite parabola, disappearing on the horizon. Sand whips around my bare ankles under a full moon. The desert has a voice, they say, and tonight it is whispering, “You should have gotten gas at the last station, dumbass.” It is not wrong.
Thu 3/10/2022
Day 3
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Fragment
Medusa had mastered many weapons in her life, but she favored a sliver of a mirror she had once shattered with her fist. She heard footsteps approaching her home -ever more common since a bounty had been placed on her head – and readied herself to use it.
Fri 3/11/2022
Day 4
Microfiction Prompt of the Day: Path
Wanda knew the story of Hansel and Gretel, and so she dropped a trail of polished pebbles behind her in the fae-touched woods. She did not account for the goblin child who discovered and gleefully pocketed her only chance of finding her way home.
If you’re a former gifted kid, neurodivergent, or an overachiever with impostor syndrome, I am one of you and I am talking to you today. I’m also, for reference, talking to myself. I struggle with this on a regular basis.
In my experience from many years of making mediocre life choices, it’s not always easy to admit when we can’t do something by ourselves. Not being able to handle everything on our plates at a given time – totally solo – can feel like failure. There’s a gut-wrenching sensation that comes with the thought, “I can’t do this myself.” Maybe we don’t want to burden others. Maybe we think if we ask for help, we’re showing that we can’t handle being an adult – and boy, that’s a terrifying thought.
Here’s the thing, though: Evolutionarily, humans developed to live and thrive in communities. We’ve spent thousands of years as a species leveraging the fact that we’re stronger together than we are apart. A lone human will have a hard time meeting their basic needs without the infrastructure of a community – this was true when we were hunter-gatherers, and it’s true now. To live off the grid and independent of others, to live entirely off the land, to not need to purchase something from someone with a different skill set – it’s basically impossible. Humans survived this long because we’ve learned that we get further when we work in ways that support and take advantage of a wide variety of strengths, providing what we can, and taking the assistance of others who can do what we cannot.
So what would an ideal, evolved, self-actualized human do in a time of crisis? Quite simply, they would ask for help. Machismo and hyper-independence aren’t how we built thriving societies all over the globe – it’s by learning when to lean on one another and express our needs.
Need to move house? We tend to ask friends, borrow someone’s truck, or hire professional movers; most of us are in no shape to move every possession and every couch, mattress, and bed frame we own without assistance. Sick or injured? We know we should go to a doctor or a hospital; it’s easy to accept that there are skilled and educated professionals who can take better care of us when we cannot appropriately care for ourselves. Need a building built? We generally hire a team of expert architects, engineers, and construction professionals with experience in safely and affordably creating a structure to code; we generally don’t try to build it ourselves with our own two hands, a wish, and a prayer.
So when we’re having a mental health crisis? When our house is on fire? When we need assistance to make a work deadline? When we need advice on how to improve our lives? It’s time to turn to family, friends, professionals, experts – other incredible, wonderful, beautiful humans.
It’s not weakness to ask for help; it’s a culmination of understanding your own strengths, your own skills, and then being brave and self-aware enough to ask for someone to bring their time and knowledge to bear to better your life.
Saying, “I don’t know,” takes far more courage than blindly pushing ahead and doing things wrong. Saying, “I need help,” is the greatest sign of our humanity – as is giving our help to others.
Think humans are stronger and better off alone? Well, feel free to wander off into the woods and die mad about it. The rest of us will be here, helping one another, lifting one another up, and making society stronger by asking for and offering help.
This story comes to my blog thanks to my supporters over at ko-fi. With their gifts, I was able to share this piece here on my blog. Thank you all!
Jakob turned the delicate hand over, his own grease-stained fingers leaving smudges on the porcelain finish. Its fingernails looked real in the flickering factory floor lighting over his work station. On the fine wrist was the small pink stamp, branding this as a Sakura S14 – an older geishabot. Must be obsolete by now.
He bagged and stamped the hand and sent it down the line.
The right knee joint, flawless, came next. Then the other hand contained a small crack. He marked the damage on a yellow tag and sent the hand on. Perhaps it could be recycled.
Something lingered in the air. A spiced, floral smell hung over Jakob’s table. It must have been the geishabot. He sniffed his own hands: sweet, cinnamony, powdery, and something springtime green. Then the smell of burnt plastic from down the line took over and he crinkled his nose. The bot’s wrists must have been laced with the scent.
There was the back side of the faceplate then, a kind of smooth mask. He hated handling the faces most of all. For a moment, Jakob pictured himself holding it up to his own face, this perfect doll’s mask that was like a miniature of his own features (though these bots’ faces were delicate, gently rounded, and fine where his own face was made up of a series of roughly hewn rectangles). With a small shudder he turned the faceplate over.
At first, it appeared flawless to Jakob. An eyeless, but beautiful face with a small, narrow nose and delicate flower petal lips. It was lovely, perfection. Then he saw it: the tiniest warped spot just below the right eye: A small air bubble trapped beneath the uppermost layer of plastic finish. It looked like a small teardrop, frozen in time. Jakob breathed out and bagged it up with a yellow tag.
When the end-of-shift bell rang, Jakob stood and wiped his hands on his apron and hung it on the back of his chair.
He hummed a tuneless song as he walked through the misty almost-rain of the late evening. Neon signs flared and glowed in the particulate water drops that hovered in the air. All around him were halos of light that declared Girls! and Beer! and XXX. He turned left down a narrow alley and entered an unmarked green metal door. Jakob sat down at the glowing white and silver bar.
“You want company again tonight, mister? We got some brand new bots in from Suzaku. Real pretty girls.” The barmaid gave him a languid smile and stretched her dark, slender arm across the bar top toward Jakob.
“No thanks, Brandy. Not tonight. Just a drink.” He sighed and pulled his own hand back to his lap.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged and went back to polishing a glass. “What’ll it be?”
“The usual.”
The spiced lily perfume that hung in the air made his nose twitch.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: I need to engage in a hobby or creative endeavor in order to feel healthy, but I’m having a hard time finding the energy or focus to do that right now.
I’m hearing this from a lot of creatives and I’m absolutely saying it myself. I’m barely writing these past few months because I find the whole thing – previously easy – to be like pulling teeth. There’s just so much outside stimuli to distract us going on right now, that it’s no wonder we’re struggling.
As for me, one sure sign that I’m doing well, emotionally, is that I’m writing consistently. Therefore, one of the earliest hints that my mental health is declining is that I stop writing a few times a week. I brought this pattern up to my therapist, so she now checks in with me during our sessions by asking how my writing is going; it’s a solid barometer to read my overall mood with.
My struggle has been being kind to myself during all of this. To understand. To forgive. To know when to push and know when to let myself rest.
Here in the states, we’re living through a pandemic, through economic hard times, through isolation, and political unrest and mitigation of COVID while watching others flaunt common sense and risk others’ lives. We’re living through racial injustice and threats against women’s bodily autonomy. We’re living through an election that threatens to become a coup, through a post-truth world, and through a more divided political environment than ever.
With so much going on, how can I spare the energy to create something myself?
Because I must. Because I need it. Because without, I will spiral into depression and put myself in real danger.
What does your creativity mean to you? How much is it worth to you to keep it up? How much do you need it? Don’t be afraid to carve out time and fight for your hobbies and creative endeavors. I would like to argue that they mean more now than they ever have before.
The Crane Wife is a Japanese folk tale. The version I know is that a man finds an injured crane at his doorstep and nurses it back to health. After it flies away, a woman shows up and the two fall in love and marry. In order to make ends meet, she offers to weave wondrous garments out of silk for them to sell, but she tells her husband he must never watch her weaving. He pushes her to weave more and more and his greed increases while he ignores her declining health. One day, he peeks into her work room to understand her secret and sees a crane plucking out its own feathers and using them to weave. Startled by the man, the crane flies off and the wife never returns.
This story has long reminded me of my failed marriage. My chronic illnesses were the catalyst that tore things apart and ultimately ended in an abusive explosion one night. After years of suffering openly, it became clear that my pain was distressing my husband; so I stopped telling him how I was feeling.
Then I stopped telling anyone.
I stopped talking about my physical or emotional pain. I stopped talking about what I did with my day. I stopped being proud of my accomplishments. I stopped believing that making homemade meals was a worthy chore. I stopped thinking I was a good wife or parrot caretaker. I stopped thinking I was worth anything at all.
Keeping secrets from the world turned out to be a doomed exercise. It ultimately led me to a suicide attempt.
It turns out, I willingly ripped out my own feathers to try to make things work, though they had always been doomed. He was happy to let me pluck myself bare so that, when the time came, I couldn’t fly away.
The night I had to call the police on him, I too disappeared from his doorstep. I fled. I hid. I tried to keep myself safe. I abandoned all I knew, unsure of how I would make my way in the world.
But my feathers grew back. I rose to the occasion. I spoke to doctors and put my needs first and began the long, slow process of healing.
I’m still healing to this day. But now? Now I am free to fly.
No Pollyanna bullshit. Just the truth about how I learned empathy.
I used to be kind of a shitty person. Back in college and in my early twenties, I failed to deal with a lot of internalized misogyny, ableism, classism, and some inadvertent racism that came from a very white, very upper middle-class suburban upbringing just riddled with privilege. I didn’t see anything wrong with my low-key callousness. I was, in many ways, a good person; I was a good friend, a supportive romantic partner, I was charitable, and I was a fair judge of character and a good listener.
But people are layered, as we all know, and I still held these toxic attitudes under all that goodness and light. I would mock people whose grammar skills weren’t up to par — but that’s inherently classist and racist (ask me someday about how English grammar is racist — that’s a fun talk). I thought depressed people should just try harder (funny, since I went undiagnosed with depression myself from the age of about 14 until 25) and that people with anxiety were attention seekers. I loved stories of handicapped people beating the odds and running marathons with two prosthetic legs, who proclaimed that their disability couldn’t stop them. I was a pick-me girl, swore I was different from other women, and competed with my sisters for male attention during my fun slutty years.
In short, I was a mess.
When I was about 26, though, everything changed drastically. My health started to decline; my periods were debilitatingly painful, causing me to pass out regularly from the pain, and leaving me barely able to walk for days at a time. They’d always been rough, but suddenly I was in pain during every week of the month, regardless of my cycle. I lost several jobs. I sobbed in the shower for 20 minutes as part of my morning routine. I was pretty much glued to the couch and had to give up my obsessive gym rat phase.
A year later (and that’s actually very fast for this particular disease), at 27, I was diagnosed with aggressive endometriosis. I would eventually lose an ovary to it strangling the organ to death inside my pelvic cavity. At 28, I got a handicapped parking tag for my car because I could barely walk. My marriage, too, began a slow march toward death from that day forward; at 31, I would be divorced and a victim of domestic abuse.
At 29 I couldn’t fall asleep and I couldn’t stay asleep because of the pain, which was now body-wide and 24/7. I would spend my days on the couch staring at the TV or struggling to write a novel — I could barely focus enough to do anything; even playing video games was difficult because of the pain. I’d pass out on the couch in the middle of the day due to the medication I took (which didn’t work) and then stay up until 3, tossing and turning on the couch, where I now slept — when I could sleep.
Thank god I started to go to therapy during that time. I started to discover my own deep-seated biases against myself and others. I had time to read more pieces on disability and listen to mental health experts talk about depression. My politics took a sharp left turn from the left-centrist point they’d been at.
I learned to listen to other people’s experiences without judgment, without anger, without butting in with my own, different lived experience. Rather than assume my perspective was the be-all-end-be-all-end-all of human lives, I tried putting myself in the shoes of others. If I had suffered so much myself, in ways that no one could see because of my invisible illness, what pain and trauma were other people hiding beneath the surface?
If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. But why did it take such a terrible degree of suffering on my part to become a better human being? Why couldn’t I have grown while healthy? I think this is all too common, especially with Americans — we think we’re invincible and if the thing hasn’t affected us or our immediate circle of loved ones, it doesn’t exist.
We can easily turn a blind eye to disease, to suffering, to racism, to poverty, to hate, to abuses of power — if we think that we never have and never will have to go through these things ourselves. But we’re all just a few bad months away from being homeless — we’re never a few good months away from being a billionaire. Disease or accidents could happen to anyone at any time. They could happen to you. Able-bodied friends, have you thought about what you’d do if you became disabled? Do you have a plan? My money says most people don’t.
We don’t think these things will happen to us and so we ignore them. We ignore them until we can’t. Until they’re in our faces. Until they’re suddenly very, very real.
I beg of you all: Don’t wait for misfortune to happen to you before you’ll believe that it happens to others. Listen to the experiences of people different from you — hear them. Hear their stories. Believe them. And then ask yourself, “How can I help?”
Maybe I’m not okay right now, Susan. Maybe the world is too much. Maybe my productivity is suffering (and it has nothing to do with remote work, but everything to do with the state of the world right now). Maybe staying at home is bad for my mental health. Maybe I’m scared of the callousness of so many Americans.
Maybe it’s all going to be okay, but not right now. Not yet. Not today.
We’ll return to something resembling normal someday, I know, but we don’t know when that will be. We haven’t solved COVID. 100,000 Americans are dead, nothing about this disease has changed, and we have no plan. You’re damn right I have “re-entry anxiety.” I’m not ready to risk my life nor my partner’s life for the privilege of being able to work in the office. Sorry, but catered lunches on Friday aren’t worth the risk of permanent heart and lung damage.
But still we want to go “back to normal.” What does that even mean? What is normal?
Working two jobs and still barely making rent? Choosing between paying a bill or getting groceries for your family? Having your health insurance tied to your job like a Company Store? Not having health insurance at all? Racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for having the audacity to be sick or get injured? Criminalizing homelessness rather than helping to address its root causes? A pay gap for women – especially women of color? Over-policing of marginalized communities? Building pipelines through Native peoples’ land that we continue to try to steal? Burning out working 40 hours a week so we’re too tired to take to the streets and demand change? Working just to live, just to scrape by, just to survive?
If that’s normal, I don’t think I want to go back.
People talk about cancelling 2020. That it’s all too much. Me? I think 2020 is a banner year for the world. It’s shown us our flaws and shortfalls; that we’re woefully unprepared for widespread pandemic and economic problems. That racism still abounds, deeply entrenched in our laws and how we enforce them. They we’re trying to solve these problems in all the wrong ways. We’re not taking care of our citizens and so we, as a nation, have utterly failed in this crisis.
We need to learn from that failure. Embrace, examine it, and rethink how we look out for each other. We need police reform, economic reform, healthcare reform, a prioritization of anti-racism, and community reform. We have to look out for one another. We have to help one another.
First thing’s first: We have to care about one another. We need empathy. That’s the starting point; we need to be able to look at our fellow citizens of the world and ask ourselves, “How can I help?”
Deidre Dykes, Writer 