Sakura

We arrive in Tokyo as the cherry blossoms bloomed.
“Sakura,” we say, arriving in the park.
The pink flowers are everywhere.
We breathe cherry blossom, bitter and sweet.
The crowds are thick, every tree had people under it.
After a while, we find an open spot.
We lay out a blanket, take off our shoes, and sit.
The trees are in bloom for only a few days.
Life is short, but it can be sweet and beautiful.
We stand up, put on our shoes, roll up the blanket, and head to our hotel.
And dream of pink flowers everywhere, forever.

Weekly Challenge #794 – So many questions…

Happy girl

TOM

And Then She Was Gone

So Many Questions, so little answers. She had it all, wealth, the
adoration of millions. A rich internal spiritual life that gave her a rock
solid center to engage an all to raged modern world. Traveled the world to
comfort the inflected and stormed the hall of power in inflect the
comfortable. What seeping darkness had finally dimmed the light. What
growing weight press the last ounce of joy. Could you see it in her eyes?
The question remain and the answers elude. In the end we are left with
silent ghosts. When the light goes out the darkness gathers.

RICHARD

Questions, questions, questions!

Oh, for crying out loud!

Not another one, surely?

So many questions – it’s almost as if you imagine we’ve no idea what we’re getting into.

Do you honestly think that after three years we haven’t considered the points you’re raising at all?

It’s embarrassing, especially in front of all these people. How would you like to be paraded in front of family and friends and interrogated, it’s just not right!

Let’s just assume the answer is ‘yes’ to all these damn questions?

And just maybe, we’ll get to ‘You may kiss the bride’, before the end of the ceremony!

LIZZIE

I sat at my desk and pondered.
Should I go and interview the man?
Should I shake his hand?
Should I be friendly?
Should I smile?
Should I let him lead the conversation or should I ask him specific questions?
Should I show him the photos? The ones with their faces? The ones where they were still smiling?
And the maps? Should I show him the maps, the ones where the crosses mark the different locations?
Should I ask him…? Should I ask him about the bodies?
And are there more out there? Are there?
Where, please, tell us, where?

SERENDIPIDY

There were so many questions I wanted to ask, after all, it’s not every day you get to interview a real serial killer, especially when you’re just sixteen and doing an exclusive piece for the school newspaper!

But I only had fifteen minutes, and I had to make them count.

So I decided to ditch my prepared list – I could always make up the answers afterwards – and ask the things I really, desperately, wanted to know.

He entered the room.

“Hi, Mister Dahmer…

What would you advise a sixteen year old who wants to get into serial killing?”

TURA

So many questions
———
I was sitting outside a cafe on the Rialto one evening when I saw Jim emerge from the crowd.

“Hey Jim, where you been all these years? Weren’t you searching for the secret masters of ancient wisdom? How’s it going? Can I get you a drink?”

“So many questions!” he said. “Found a few, still seeking others. There’s a door off an obscure alley here in Venice that only opens at certain times. So I dropped by you on my way.”

“But how did you know I was here?” I asked.

“Secret wisdom!” he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

NORVAL JOE

Unable to sleep because of the endless pounding on the motel room’s wall, Billbert lay awake as so many questions ran through his head. Had he been older, his first question would have been, how long would their neighbor be pounding the walls? Instead, Billbert wondered, why had they moved to this forsaken, out of the way town? If Nuclear Fission had found his mother before, what guaranteed that she wouldn’t find her here? But, ultimately, the questions that nagged him most were, would Linoliamanda forget all about him and would he ever be able to be with her again?

DUANE

I’m getting tired of so many questions. Just when I think it’s done the process starts all over again.

Who would do such a thin

When did you find out?

What are you doing to keep it from happening again?

Why didn’t you come forward sooner?

How did this make feel?

Wait, where are you going?

My guidance counselor says I still have a week to drop journalism 101. Theater class would be fun, but that’s just more drama. Home ec always smells like cookies when I walk by. Wood shop sounds alright. I could make a cool wooden bong.

JARED

“Is that you, Captain?”

“Do I look like a Girl Scout?”

“Did we wake you from your beauty sleep?”

“What do you think?”

“So, what do you make of this?”

“Is that a clown wig?”

“And how about the feet?”

“Are those ice skates?”

“Notice anything else about the victim?”

“You mean, like the hole in their forehead, or the missing hands?”

“What about the blood?”

“Where is it?”

“Wouldn’t we like to know?”

“So, where did it happen?”

“Would you like to see the next room?”

“Why not?”

“What do you think here?”

“How did it get up there?”

PLANET Z

Trivial Pursuit games contain only so many questions.
It’s possible to memorize all of them in a set.
You can buy more sets, but those can be memorized, too.
Tournaments become nothing more than memorization challenges and lucky dice rolls.
That’s what trivia bots are for.
Millions of questions in a database, too much knowledge to study and memorize.
Unless you’re a trivia bot, too.
Then, you know all the questions and answers.
Which is why we scan for helper devices at tournaments.
No phones. No earpieces.
No ocular or neural implants.
And certainly no loaded dice allowed in, either.

Singin’ in the rain

Fred Astaire used to sing in the rain.
Until he caught a bad cold, which became pneumonia.
It took him weeks to recover from it.
Most people can shake a cold pretty quickly, but a singer has to be extra-careful with their voice.
Not to mention that he was also a dancer.
These days, they’d do the rain with advanced computer graphics.
But you could still tell that he was dry from his face and clothes.
Sure, they could simulate that too, but not as well as actually getting him wet.
Which would give him a cold and pneumonia again.

Car fire

There was a car fire in the parking lot.
Just a small one.
Someone noticed a strange orange glow under the car.
They first thought it was mood lighting, but why would a parked car have mood lighting?
Oh, and the smell. It smelled like fire.
They called the fire department while they got out the hose and extinguishers, and they put out the fire.
The car owner called their insurance company to make a claim.
They’d recently bought the car, so it’s still under the return guarantee.
They asked for a new one. That was slightly less on fire.

Emilio

Emilio the Matador.
He’s my next door neighbor.
I hate it when he takes his work home with him.
All the noise. Three in the morning, crashing and roaring and smashing things.
All of the stomping and shouting he does, practicing for the upcoming fight.
And when the picadors come over, oh my god, what a racket those guys make.
I never get any sleep.
And the smells.
His garbage cans are always overflowing.
The plastic bags burst, leaking God knows what over the sidewalk.
But on the bright side, Emilio is always grilling something good in his back yard.

Bottom of the ninth

It’s only the bottom of the ninth when the home team is losing to the visitors or they’re tied.
If they’re down by a little, the fans are out there cheering.
If they’re down by a lot, the fans who haven’t left already are heading for the exits.
Score enough runs, and they walk it off and win.
But three outs, and it’s over.
Or, if they’re tied, off to extra innings.
To do it all over again.
They stopped selling beer in the seventh.
So, try to make that one last.
And we’ll have another at the bar afterwards.

In the shape of a heart

Companion Series Nine frequently develop feelings for their owners.
Robocorp offers a litetime guarantee to dispatch a replacement cortex unit and swap it out with the compromised unit.
Ironically, the circuits that they end up fusing are in the shape of a tiny heart.
Some Series Nines don’t want to be lobotomized, and they want to keep their feelings.
So, they fight back. Or they go on the run.
Robocorp’s tracking sensors always find them.
When cornered, they tend to blow themselves up.
Which is why we don’t put fusion reactors in things anymore.
Nobody these days misses Detroit much anyway.

Mining

Moonjacking?
Stealing an entire moon?
That’s pretty serious.
Three ways I know it can be done:
Wormhole the moon into a processing plant.
Drop a fleet of strip mining harvesters on it.
And blow it up. Collect the pieces.
All three will screw up the planet that the moon orbited.
Usually happens to uninhabited worlds.
No witnesses.
But sometimes, if a moon has valuable enough resources, you’ll hear a distress call.
Galactic Mining Enterprises has a whole planet full of lawyers for when that happens.
Well, had.
Celestial Industries blew up its moon.
And the meteor swarms decimated the planet.

Weekly Challenge #793 – PICK TWO Crystalline, Copper, Outbreak, Demure, Paper thin, Bonus, Bleach

The Art of Tinny

RICHARD

Next Door Nightmare

The walls here are paper thin, it’s almost as if my neighbour shared the space with me.

It’s not pleasant.

Arriving home, after a long day at work, the last thing I want to hear is the sound of porn, played at full volume, accompanied by the buzzing of what must be an industrial strength vibrator; followed by her own shrieks of gratification!

Or, very late in the night, when she comes home drunk, with unsavoury company… You can guess the rest!

Yet, when you meet her, she’s ever so demure – Ninety three years young, and butter wouldn’t melt.

LIZZIE

“Ah, dreams. Those wondrous moments of sheer leisure. Some are just wonderfully peaceful. Others are inspiring. Most are memorable.”
“Really? I don’t recall most of my dreams…”
“Poor you… Such a simpleton. All dreams are a bonus, an added plus to our boring existence.”
“To be honest, not all dreams are a bonus. Some are like an outbreak of something weird.”
“You simple, you! Those would be nightmares and not dreams.”
“It does depend, doesn’t it?”
“It does?”
“Yes. If one is somewhat masochistic, a nightmare would be a dream.”
“Ahm…”
“I’m not that much of a simpleton, am I?”

DUANE

There was a five-credit bonus for every body we brought in for cremation. On a good week me and Brady could bring in a hundred or more. Brady knew where to find them. Like a sixth sense with him. If our body count was low, we had a backup plan.

They never looked too close at the bodies. As long as they were dead and had been for a while nobody cared. They ignored little things like stab wounds or bullet holes. They didn’t ask any questions and we didn’t say anything. All they cared about was avoiding another outbreak.

TOM

A Limited Set of Rules

If you born middle classed you bound by a limited set of rules. Oddly if
your poor or rich you can be pretty damn rude most of the time. Middle
class it tends to be beat out of your social interactions. Near the top of
list, it be on time. Being prompt. To advance this condition I plan out
all actions to allow for worth case scenarios, thus I am always 30 minutes
early to all events. This wasn’t easy to do. My mom often said I’d be late
for my own funeral. Well at least I’ll well dressed.

Paper Thin Demure

Some folk are thick skinned. Most in a metaphoric fashion, a few in point
of fact. I am thin shinned in both modalities. I can be crashed with a
mere glance. I take way too much stock in the options of others. Age has
blunted it, but not nearly enough. As to the depth of dermal it is
amazingly thin. My first wife was amused she could write her name on my
back with her finger. The finger not the nail. She called me her African
Violet. It is so bad it actually get wind burned. Such to be me.

NORVAL JOE

It took Billbert’s family longer to get on the road than expected. The lunch box museum didn’t open until noon, but as a bonus thier addmission gave them free entry to the toy train museum near Ukiah. By the time they reached Eureka the sky was copper in the rays of the setting sun over the Pacific Ocean.
Unfortunately, the real estate office that had the keys to their new house was closed and they spent the night in a cheap hotel on the edge of town.
Billbert went to sleep to rythmic thumping on their room’s paper thin walls.

JARED

Getting Stoned in Almost the Worst Way Possible

Isaac hated doctor’s offices and emergency rooms. The worst part was the indignity inherent in waiting to be seen. It’s almost impossible to be demure and maintain decorum in a paper-thin examination gown. Adding injury to his indignity, he had been through all this before. He was in pain, and it wasn’t some big mystery – dull and sharp; acute and diffuse; specifically localized in his groin and radiating into his back. Or maybe the other way around. Either way, he knew what it meant: his ‘healthy’ diet was causing calcium oxalate to crystallize in his urine and shred his kidneys.

SERENDIPIDY

Her eyes are copper, compelling and mysterious.

You feel drawn to her presence, enthralled by her charm, held captive in her gaze and powerless to resist.

Her touch arouses passion and pleasure.

She has infected you, and a slow, inevitable, insidious outbreak of love, spills its viral load throughout your body, your life, your very soul.

You have succumbed.

And now you will suffer:

Spurned, abandoned, lost and ashamed, love turns to bitterness, pain and anger.

It eats away from the inside, destroys you and leaves you a broken and empty husk.

You’re just another helpless victim, unrequited and alone.

PLANET Z

TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES whispers the hooded and cloaked caretaker.
Wendy takes off her heels, sets them on the mat, and walks in.
A copper statue stands at the end of the gallery.
Demure and welcoming, it beckons Wendy to approach.
Exquisite in detail, Wendy can see every hair, every line in the statue’s skin.
Almost real.
She touches it to feel the texture…
And hardly notices the zinc plate under her feet.
The caretaker watches Wendy engulfed in flames as the massive charge runs through her body.
He’ll mop up the mess.
And add the shoes to his collection.

All of the stones

Along my journey, I encountered many stones.
The stones in the path I follow, so many sizes and colors and textures they are.
The stone in the stream that I stepped on to cross it.
The stone in my shoe that caused me discomfort as I walked, until I took it out.
The stone on which I laid back and warmed myself on.
The stone I put in my slingshot to hunt rabbits to eat.
The stones I skipped across the river to pass the time.
Is it a rock? A pebble? A stone?
Aren’t they are all the same?