Quincunx

He clawed his fingertips into the sleeve of his hoodie, wadded it up, and swiped the wad across the side of the bus shelter. Plenty of grit and road grease smeared onto the fabric, but that patch of plastic only improved from opaque to filthy. Nonetheless, he maneuvered the sunshine onto the area and smiled at where his reflection ought to be, while the girl perched on the balance-beam seat inside the shelter looked up from her book. "You've got something stuck between your front teeth," she offered. He rubbed his thumb against his teeth; she pretended to re-read the current page. "Is it gone?" "Look at me and I'll tell you," she replied. He twisted his head around. "Nope." She drummed her index and middle fingertips against the page briefly, then removed the bus-schedule bookmark and handed it over to him. "This is the closest thing I have to a toothpick." "Mmkay." He picked out the dark bit with one corner of the cardboard, then held it over his shoulder. She took it back, wrinkling up her nose, but slipped it back into the book. After a few moments, she also took a nearly empty tube of mints from her pocket and poked him in the small of the back. "Wait, what's this for?" he remarked after looking at the new gift. "If you didn't have time to brush," she said while again pretending to re-read the current page, "cover it up. And. . .uh. . .good luck." "Thanks!" He popped a mint into his mouth, put up his fists and threw a mock jab at the half-cleaned patch of plastic, and grinned.

*dum dum dum* One is the loneliest number that you'll ever knoooooooooooo--*SPLASH* Yeesh, everyone's a critic.

Tadpoles in the arteries? Man, this raw food trend is just not doable on a shoestring budget. Stick to certified types of sushi!

The IRC conversation began with Creative Ways to Croak Before I Reach My 30th Birthday, and then doglegged towards the silly. Tzimfemme: Drowned in a chocolate factory. Resisted attempts at rescue. (Last words: Screw you, I'm in the chocolate!) Alternately: Impaled upon her own Wile E. Coyote chocolate-thieving contraption. Rydia: Starved to death while admiring a backlit shiny. Minta: Finally got to drink of a can of Red Bull and accelerated so quickly she became the Big Bang of another universe.

The chain gang shuffles to a rather ripe and unpreserved stop. One zombie's buttock gives way at the last jostle and falls to the floor--thwip. Once the canopic jars they clutch stop moving, some gelatinous and thready mass lifts itself a few inches over the lip of the jar and leans toward the orc. "Hey. . . hey. . . hey. . . yyyyyyyoooooooouuuuuuuuu," sing the leeches in barbershop quartet style (tenor), "care-to-have-some-back-up-siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiingers. . .?"

Rydia earspeaks emphatically enough to put out the eyes of anyone who stood too close to the SHINY!

Rydia squeals with delight! "Carp!" The little cloisonne trinket winked one painted eye.

I don't know what a 'smoking pillar' is either, but with the fine alliteration in the translation (and your wise idea to jam the words together in English, which keeps the string of S's whole) it works well enough. I can't comment on the accuracy of translation.

I mixed the monster with the gelatin dust an' a livin' fungus that tasted like rust I put in the leeches an' a pixystix too an' now I got a jiggly musical stew The mixture in the canopic jars lifts up dozen of little leech heads to sing the chorus along with Minta. I dunno what to say the gnomies won't do (dunno what to say the gnomies won't do). . .

Finally another cueball-bald male gnomie with a runner's tag on the back of his robes, pinned on with two safety pins and proclaiming "Blatin", tumbles down the ladder and begins to cast a spell. *POP* A white tiger cat-lady materializes on top of the caster, picks him up by the scruff of his neck and the beginnings of his cloak, and carries him out of the Garden Gnome Recreation Center.

dull gray Plain, yet moving. The end, with the only real description found in the piece, worked well as the only point of interest in the dreary life. I stumble a bit over whether he sees her raised hand or not, though, since I had pictured his head still looking at his feet. Was that intentional? Also, "as one collective body they gave there answer", ought to be "their".

This does more properly belong in Scarlet Pen, the spot for topics which raise eyebrows*, although we seem to have gotten good results from leaving it out here. I'll probably shuffle it in there, but not right away. As for commentary. . . Damn, I wish I could have written that. *Both serious and. . .er. . .well. . .the Thong Song.

reverie has jarred my memory--I dreamed once in gibberish. Everyone around me was speaking gibberish, and I had to shrug and go about my duties with the scraps of communication I could get.

Sometimes our standards change. Sometimes maturity makes fools of our younger selves. Sometimes we just don't care if writing has the literary merit of a plateful of mashed potatoes. Love is blind. Youthful Folly: I read everything I could get my hands on. No discrimination whatsoever. A sense of shame did not develop until I had plowed through The Babysitters' Club One through Sixty-Something inclusive. . .although I recognized the formula before I had hit Ten. So What, I Still Like It!: In seventh grade, I had the option of reading one of two "classic books" about the French Revolution, and chose The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. It's awful. The plot is as thin and hole-filled as pantyhose after it's gone through a briar patch. The characters are cut-outs. It's a soppy mystery/love-story/dashing adventure novel that makes Burroughs appear deep. I wince when I read it nowadays. . .but I still read it. Contact Embarrassment: Walking past the "A" section in Fantasy/Sci-Fi. Ye gods, Piers Anthony uppercuts me in one eye while Robert Asprin blackens the other! Don't leave that many puns lying around where they might hurt someone, namely me!

Things I Did Recently for the First Time in Years #whatever-we're-up-to: Purchased a book at full retail price. Waterstone's (the U.K. book supermarket) restocked its shelves recently, so I did my usual scan of interesting authors. They had restocked Fiction - G. They had more of William Golding than simply Lord of the Flies. They had three books, two of which I hadn't read before, compressed into a trilogy for the same price I've been paying for used Golding paperbacks--perhaps the BBC, which had made the trilogy into a miniseries, leaned on the publisher to keep the price affordable. Sale! To the Ends of the Earth is not, and I doubt it ever will be, one of my favorites from among his works. The three books end with pessimistic, irresolute, and optimistic chapters respectively; that tilts the entire trilogy towards the positive and that is not what he's best at sustaining. Tensions of class and station (the books are set on a ship in the early 1800s), which I simply don't care about, are major plot points. I understood enough of it on the first reading to not need to reread it, which isn't a guarantee with Golding, but don't care enough about what I might have missed to go back over them frequently. Still, talent is talent; I accidentally exposed myself to the beginning of the Master and Commander series, and it was refreshing to see how much more a skilled and multilayered author can explore with a similar setting and main character.

Minta marches back through the thread in the opposite direction, chanting: I dunno what to say the gnomies won't do (dunno what to say the gnomies won't do) they got a plan for a super-gross stew (dunno what to say the gnomies won't do). . . The zombies have now been tied together, intestine to rotting intestine, and lurch along like a chain gang after the gnome. They tote enormous canopic jars with water, and the occasional six-inch-long leech, slopping out of the top. Got a jellycube monster from the underground an' taught the leeches to sing the icky boy-band sound I dunno what to say the gnomies won't do (dunno what to say the gnomies won't do). . .

Sixteen years of study, the radiance of proper spelling and neat pencils in a row, a deeper thrill when those funny X's conjoined with the numbers and multiplication became real, leaping upward through the studies, no time for exercise, no care for anything that was not intellectual, the degree which meant little when stood against the pride of being a Thinker-- Unacknowledged. His arms on the chain around her waist. His face framing the smile that had found the mother of its children. And I laughed when S--- said she was going into uniform. I bet she'd have been able to break him over her knee, by now.

Review located here so as not to break the flow of the story.

Stumpies Cutting and pasting an indented word-processing-program story directly into a post usually doesn't look good; board software ignores most formatting. Above the reply box, the odd symbol to the right of the Size drop-down box inserts an indent tag into your post, but that cannot properly indent an entire paragraph: it shifts every line over by one tab, not just the initial one. People in the poets' area, the Banquet Room, have figured out how to place indented lines within a post with board code (see the list of sticky topics in that forum). However, for situations where code is too unwieldy, try web-formatting with a single blank line in between paragraphs, as this review has. After awhile, it will become instinctive when typing posts or stories which will eventually be posted; I even add the bracketed tags for board formatting while typing in a word-processing program. Queen of the Dream World is a common enough plot hook, but I don't believe I've ever seen the legend of headless people dragged into it previously. That was unique enough that I was disappointed when it was revealed to be another dreamwalking story. Your skill with the absurd description (with any description, and the characterization) is very solid. Why not hearken back to Kafka and not bother inserting an explanation for the absurd world? Just say that your narrator is "one of us", and never mention a title or a purpose--if he's that sick of explaining himself, couldn't he have clammed up and left the narrator standing there with no answers? Make the second post, and perhaps other installments after that, into a pursuit of answers. There are very few proofreading-level problems with the story. The beginning jars slightly with you revealing that you would never again tell anyone about the stumpies, then plunging back into telling us about them--why? It jars. (By the end of this first installment, you still haven't declared that you are writing a journal or anything like that, which is the simplest possible explanation.) "I sensed the familiar, vibe that I get whenever I’m in close proximity to a Stumpy" does not need a comma; pluck it out and move it to after 'head' in "So many thoughts raced through my head my mind was numb by the time I got home." In "Then, a deep breathe", you wanted 'breath' instead. There's many fragmented sentences here, which are necessary, but the need for them has gone by the end of the piece--please make sure they don't bleed over into the first part of the next installment.

That doesn't even begin to cover the smart-alec teenagers who stand in front of you with the God Pose (arms uplifted at the side) and say "Let it be Open!" . . .yes, I enjoyed reading this.

Rydia sits in the middle of the That Look lineup, bending an extra-sharp eartip towards a block of soft rubber. Bits of eraser-like debris sprinkle out of the cavities her ear cuts into the block. Much later, she puffs air into the completed carving, applies it to an inkpad, and then to the discussion: General reading level: Comfortable. Roleplaying swaddling still recommended for delicate egos. Once again safe to mix fact and opinion in a post. Once again safe to make remarks after the perfect time for them is past. Still not safe for passive aggression. 'Safe'=unlikely to be misinterpreted as hostility. With that done, she massages her overextended pointy ear and turns the lineup into a tea party complete with cream cakes (yes, we still have pre-Lent cakes left over, help me go through them, please!)

(Tzimfemme slinks out of the depths of 90% ((!)) packet loss. . .) What's a question swap? Describe please, because even if you provided a link, I'm not sure I'd be able to take advantage of it. . .Praise this site to the skies for being mainly text, since it's about the only one I can access right now! You mentioned contemporary theater in another thread, maybe you could make a story, or news article, out of some anecdotes from that class in the Recruiter's Office? Set up a stage--wait, no, stage in front of Wyvern can be such a bad idea, since his grasp of "onstage" is so strong he never leaves it. . .

The framework of the poem appears nearly complete to me: the number of lines, the positions and periods of the spaces, the suggestions and repetitions of 'drip' and 'drop'. The only part which seems out of place is the line "hear it fall to the porcelain", which in my bathtub would happen before the drop hit the drain and the tube (pipe). If "let it flow down" is flowing down your skin as I assume it is, it needs to remain where it is relative to the porcelain; that entire couplet needs to be moved as a unit.

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY MADLIBS! an' I hope you're gettin' a house inna less allergic spot. I got my crayons! 1. syrupy 2. squelch 3. paint fumes 4. nose I smell somethin' funny. 5. paddle 6. knee bone 7. realization Uhoh! I used the magic gnomie-makin' crayons! Um um um. . . 8. desperate 9. vacuum *beep* Will be okok, it's a wet an' dry vacuum cleaner, an' the lake of paint will be gone quickquick! 10. gesture 11. we 12. exhilaration 13. wrong Am not. 14. veined 15. fingertips 16. wrinkle 17. soap 18. scrub NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNodon'twannaaaaaaaaaa. . . 19. tooth 20. pouting 21. dye

(Rydia rounds up the females in the thread and forms a line of fire.) Project That Disapproving Look #986 in three. . .two. . .one. . .!