100 Word Challenge: Fear

A global pandemic threatens. Bacterial viruses evolve before our eyes, immunizing themselves against drug treatments--yet still some people disbelieve in evolution.

An asteroid could destroy us; space travel still fringe. Six humans in space live in one station. One little basket hovering over a larger basket.

Glaciers are falling to pieces, washing up dead penguins and polar bears.

Nuclear explosions still fill me with tears. I can't watch them anymore. Historical footage, in grimy technicolor is more horrifying than the best special effects Hollywood can buy.

I'm standing outside your bedroom door, listening for your breath. Keep breathing, baby girl. Just keep breathing.

100 Word Challenge: Awesome (retraction of Wrong)

My wife is awesome, the jetsam to my flotsam. Not so much my nemesis as my nom-de-bliss. She takes this feeling of fleeting forgotten happiness and fills it with fortunate terms of endearment. I am an experiment in errant arrogance. To think that she would digress, my empress of progress, this husband needs a train-wreck head check.
In recompense for this offense I can only offer apology and devotion to her ever present willingness to proceed in strengthening our empathy; she sees me. Indeed, love, I'm sorry.
Oh, we've got a long long way to go to get there, we'll get there:

100 Word Challenge: Wrong

My wife is my nemesis. Regression my mistress. Hot head in a lizard state. Anything I say is wrong. Everything too late. Overkill. Frustrate. My buttons are being jammed in harder and deeper than ever before. Thick glottal stops and slamming doors. Give me a moment so I can push against this pressure. Let me breath a second before I spit a torrential Tourette of fuck. fuck. fuck. This is not me, this thing that I'm becoming. Are we growing old or growing up? Pressed under or rising above? It may not be happiness, but it's got to be love.

100 Word Challenge: Epiphany

The molecules in my head just exploded into a sunshine effigy of memory and lightning epiphanies. I'm all aflutter with toxic exhaust, bleeding forth from my inner thoughts. I'm approaching the center of centrifugal force; it's pulling me in and around it, a whirlwind tidal wave Buckminsterfullerene, caging me with solidity. The weak forces of gravity have no hold on me, I'm floating like flying inside this cavity. My head is all spun up like a jackhammer wind up. I'm singing to myself in this déjà vu voice, looping tones in memory. Insanity or synchrony? This cage can't keep me.

100 Word Challenge: March

We march all night, through the mad burgeoning streets, passing the ghosts of slaves and the solid bodies of the limbless and lifeless. The roads seem to curve and meander, split and branch in vain, as if a path to nowhere, this writhing fractal of cobblestone and walls. Traversing it is simply an act of blindly choosing one direction or another, each time making a left where you had previously chosen right and a right after your left. It's the only way to prevent going in circles: weaving a zig-zag until, perhaps, someday, we will finally get to the point.

100 Word Challenge: Doorway

I'm standing in the doorway, watching over you as you sleep.
You're dreaming of cats that fly through the air, swinging to the ground, stopping to let you grab hold and ride them. Piano keys make music in the background, decorating the landscape in black and white stripes. Your mother dances for you, covered in smiles and shaking her booty. You laugh at the sight of her. I'm herding the flying cats, purring their praises and singing you a pathway through the sky. We sing together.
As you dream, baby girl, remember, I'll always be there to play the piano with you.

100 Word Challenge: Merry

Merry, merry, oh contrary:
The world is restless and growing wary. Children in Haiti are malnourished, suffocating. Happy Yule-tide Palestine. You wake up to find today, like every day, the Israeli army has killed another child. Wake up Zimbabwe. You are free from apartheid but free trade has stolen your water supply. Korean workers commit self-immolation. Remember to be P.C. F.Y.I. or Y.O.U will be outcast, out-fast. Gave all your money to the world bank and it sank into some military abyss, you won't miss what you never had. Freedom, it's the right to disobey. Your rations are few. Happy Holidays.

100 Word Challenge: Anger

It's the bleeding hearts that get me, the screaming, thrashing, singing, dissident crowds, holding firm in the face of adversity. Break free from tyranny, they scream. The lollipop laggards stand back, mocking, laughing, squirreling away hidden admiration for the ones who stand. Crypto kids clap hands in code and shrink away in silence, live another day, anonymously blending with the passersby, watching from the sidelines as the riot gear cops push in.
Someone throws an apple and gets a beanbag bullet in the face.
You don't know anger until you see it bleed out the nose of a rebel with a cause.

100 Word Challenge: Time

It's time to say goodbye to bad dreams and steam visions, and all the things that made you want to cry. The bleeding edge of the unknown is never going to stare down at you again, leaving you stranded, uncertain of your own abilities.

This time you are the one in control. Let gravity pull until it's heart stops beating--until it screams at you for your unwillingness to go down. The wind around you will tear at you.

Flap your wings thunderously. Pound against the wind fervently, certainly, without restraint.

Now, before you leap, close your eyes, take three deep breaths and dream.

100 Word Challenge: Intuitive

"I'll change her. It's poopy, I just know it," says the father, intuitively.
"It's not poopy; she already pooped today," retorts the mother.
"Oh, great JuJu under the sea! There's more poop than I could have imagined." Points out the father.
Later, the father is heaving the baby into the air, playing rocket ships. The baby is laughing, going up and down and around, upside-down over the fathers head.
"She is going to puke on you." Says the mother.
"She isn't going to puke on me. I can see it in her eyes. She's having a ball." Says the father, intuitively.
*Blaugh!* Says the baby, sickeningly.

100 Word Challenge: Resurrect

He's one of them, a Sleeper. You can see it in his eyes, with that phosphorescent shine you only get from instant caffeine withdrawal and a whole bottle of Clear Eyes, coating them with a glossy glow. Big glassy red balls. The freaker, he probably gets up at 3am, resurrecting from the dead, pops some pills to keep awake but I bet he looses it, standing in the shower, falling back into dream. I bet he's got hops in his blood, trying to kill the bacteria that's been eating up all the sweetness in life. Sleepers, Dreamers, they're always awake.

100 Word Challenge: Adjustment

"I think what we need here is an adjustment."

"What kind of mint is a Just Mint?"

"No, no, um... it's not a Just Mint; it's an Ad-justment."

"Oh. What kind of mint is an Adjust Mint? Does it have orange in the middle?"

"Uh, no, there's no orange at all..."

"Is it like an Advertise Mint. I don't like them. I don't like Govern Mints or Punish Mints either."

"Well, I guess it's kinda like all those things in that none of them are actually mints, but..."

"Ok. No adjustment then."

"It sounds like we're having a disagreement."

"You can have a Disagree Mint. I don't want any."

100 Word Challenge: Blend

I begin by slashing four strokes into the blackness, slicing out a square, occasionally hacking an 'X' through the box before it falls away like fabric, revealing a cloudy blue sky. I dive through the opening and I'm falling fast. The ground manifests in curvy planes, adapting as it unfolds into mountains, plains, a cityscape, ocean.

Now flying through the clouds, splashing into the sea or touching the ground running I'm always on the move, allowing the world to define itself. I try not to intrude.

Control blends into release, consciousness into subconsciousness and the event stream is uncontrollable.

Now I fall asleep.

100 Word Challenge: Moral

Morality is a logo you wear on your jeans. It's just a brand name for ideology, painted in neon lights and flickering in the mimicry of LCD screens.

A mother screams and everyone watches it on YouTube, you're glued, included in the cheerful masses, witnessing reality through fearful glasses. Step back, relax and get back to the facts. Get with the low-down, strip down your defenses, download new senses. Discover and create, uncover the hate, grab onto your lover and alter this state. Look at life through a clean and clear lens.

The moral of this story is this story never ends.

100 Word Challenge: Yearning

I lay my head, eyes closed, but my mind is a network of busy signals and electron light, flashing and rushing through an enthralling stream of consciousness. Visions of butterflies with nanotech wings fly by. There are trees with fractal leaves and back-slashed roots. I've got a Technotropolis brewing. It's filling my mind's eye with the rhythmic patter of drum beats, visual indentations on a moving landscape, overflowing my inner ear with the splattering of hi-res images as audio interpretations. My senses are all jumbled and direction looses its meaning.

I'm yearning for sleep. It comes to me in my dreams.

100 Word Challenge: Twist

Hear this! I solemnly swear,
with this pen, I speak the truth.
Listen closely, if you dare.
I've retained forbidden youth.

This pen, you see, brings misery
and laughter, life and death.
But it leaks its ink right into me
and brings me living breath.

On this pen I have depended
for years, centuries even.
Long ago, life would have ended
no deity to believe in.

Indeed, this small device
is elegant engineering.
With no intent on playing dice,
men are nature fearing.

This pen is mighty, more than sword.
It's only flaw: perfection.
I hold it closely, bring it toward
my face for close inspection.

Within my fist,
wound and tightly bound.
A simple, subtle twist
and it snaps without a sound.

100 Word Challenge: Fusion

Come on into the Cipher Citadel, the code-corner of the continent. Scientists are creating the new crypto-cracking machine, an autistic cyborg.

Steam galvanizing fissures fill the flesh, lest any part be left fusionless, regressed. The imagination is caressed with unnatural neural networks. Steel runs through open pores, molding into nano-enhanced capillary tunnels, funnels of liquid information and electrical current capturing finesse. This is a new world. A dreaming machine unfurled. Broken up and torn apart, reborn with a heart. Pneumatic neurons in the arms and legs think outside of the mind, distributing data. Listen. It’s the sound of a cipher breaking.

100 Word Challenge: Evolution

I dream of fish scales, wrapped around my torso like a corset, extending large dragon wings out my back. A tree is growing out from my scull, squirrels and birds living in my thoughts. This is the next phase in the growing evolution of human potential.

Being the base of a tree is hard on the back, so the roots must grow into the spine. From the bottom, a tail protrudes, fashioned from rootstock and bone. My feet are no longer flesh. They have become frames for little wheels, greased and ready to carry me wherever my dreams may wander.

100 Word Challenge: Faster

The neon-synth populous drinks elixir made from rainforest frog saliva. It carries our fantasies to fruition upon the lamp-lit phosphorescence we call dreams, visions, sacred moments of inhibition. We dance to the music of the modern mystic, the digital shaman, broadcast bright, symphonies of light, binary beeps and photon pulses. Tune in, zone out, dig it. It’s all abstractions and mental mischief, merging our ideas into syncopated steps. Adrenaline pumping, skin touching, blood rushing, it all blends in and bleeds out faster and more furious until finally it crashes into a frenzied crescendo and POP.

100 Word Challenge: Fresh

The ocean water is so damn fresh and I'm swimming in it. This is not like the commercials would have you believe. It's not a zesty ocean spray, splashed on the faces of beautiful, smiling people in the sunlight, all distilled into a glass, poured over ice and tonic with a lime twist. This is not a cocktail; this is the ocean. It's the untamable and virulent water of life, dark and treacherous but beautiful all the same.

I'm in it thick and deep, levitating with the jellyfish, dancing with the squid, splaying fingers with the anemones.

This little beach is mine.