Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Leaning back, he let loose with one drop, shifted to the other eye and let drop again, as he’d done every day for decades.
After a moment, he realized he’d dropped both into his mouth, and laughed. How silly he was getting as he got older.
It wasn’t so funny the next time he did it.
But the third time…well, the third time, it wasn’t even noticed.
A bathroom at last. Now he knew how his father felt, and his uncle, having to take a piss, asking with a fast, low voice almost everywhere they went, as soon as they arrived, “Excuse me, where’s the bathroom? Is it near? I need to go, like now.”
And now it was him, just like them. Had to be genetics. More than pissing, though, he had to do a dump. Sitting on the commode, he sighed relief as his body did its thing, and mourned what he was seeing of his future.
He’d forgotten his phone. “Fuck?” For real? Where the fuck? What the fuck? Where? When? Shaking his head, he farted and grunted and stared at the floor in concentration.
The floor…was kind of cool, like those photos NASA or someone put of nebulae on it. His uncle was always pointing things out to him about space, using an app on his phone to show him constellations and nebulae from the bubble telescope. “That’s the crab nebula. See how it looks like a crab?”
No, Dylan never saw how it looked like a crab, but the floor looked like it had nebulae. His uncle would love this fucking floor. One possible nebula looked like a friggin’ crow outlined with stars, and another —
Reaching for the T.P., he stared, eyes growing wider. That fucking thing looked like a dragon nebula, like a dragon flying through space, like a profile of a friggin’ giant dragon flyin’ through space on ginormous friggin’ wings.
Holy shit, the dragon nebula changed.
The dragon nebula was facing him.
The dragon nebula…was growing larger. He could see its wings flapping. In seconds, Dylan made out its heads, its teeth, its eyes.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Dylan scrambled to wipe his ass, pull up his underwear and pants — and flush — all at the same time so that he could leave, leave, leave, because that friggin’ giant dragon nebula —
“Is here,” he said in a whimper, pants still down.
The dragon’s head burst up out of the floor. Falling back, Dylan said, “Fuck,” not noticing that his hand went into the toilet as he fell backward. The head was soon huge, breaking the walls out. A long fucking neck followed. As it rose, breaking through the roof, he heard people screaming. Then he was looking at the beast’s pale, scaly chest. He wanted to scream but he had no air in him. All he could do was gawp, except the smell was such a stench, like the bear’s slobber on his backpack once when the bear stole it when he was camping out. He wanted to puke but he didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move.
“Hey,” he heard.
The dragon was speaking to him.
“Hey,” he heard again. “Up here.”
Dylan looked further up. No, the dragon was looking down at him, but above the dragon’s head was a girl’s head, or maybe it was a dragon’s head, maybe the dragon had a second, human head, or some strange shit. Whatever the fuck?
The girl was smiling at him.
“Hey,” she said. “You okay?”
“Where’d you come from?” Dylan said.
“There.” She pointed at the floor. “Want to ride a dragon?”
Calmness washed through Dylan. “Sure,” he said. “Fuckin’ right.” He was going to ride a dragon. Fuckin’ right.
But first, he was going to wash his hand.
I brushed off writing my synopsis like I was signing a birthday card with élan when I wrote about it in a post earlier this month. Writing a synopsis wasn’t that easy for me.
It’d been yonks since I’d written one. I wanted to do the best that I could. I knew the idea was that it’s a brief summary. How long should a synopsis be? How much detail should be given? Should I describe the character and setting?
Searching for answers, I pulled out books on writing and publishing that I have on hand. I read magazine articles, newspaper articles, and blog posts about how long a synopsis should be, what it does, and what it shouldn’t be. I panicked. I read agents and publishers’ opinions about what’s at stake in the synopsis in their opinion for accepting or rejected a novel. I read what authors shared about their rejections and their initial efforts writing synopsis, and I grew disheartened. Then I brushed that off and got busy.
After creating a synopsis file, I opened the latest version of Four on Kyrios and began reading it. After refreshing myself with the chapter, I wrote one or two sentences about what it was about. I did so chapter after chapter. One paragraph typically captured a flow of events about what the characters were doing, where they were doing it, and results. I resisted doubts and over-thinking it while I was doing it.
I won’t lie, working intensely, it took me most of a week to write. Did I do it right? I don’t know. As with everything, I learned what I could and applied the knowledge and tried to do the best that I could. As with everything else in life, that’s all that I can ever do.
Got my coffee in hand. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Floofclectic (floofinition) – a housepet with unusual markings.
In use: “He called her Heinz because the sweet, floofclectic feline appeared, in his words, to be half-Siamese, half-Maine Coon, with a black short-hair tabby tail, some calico and European blotched tabby markings in her hips, and big ginger paws. Her eyes were almond-shaped sapphires, her meow was a strident grunt, and her purr was a drowning gurgle, but, damn, she was smart.”
Discussing my dreams with the cats as I fed the coffee maker and overfloofs, we went out for the paper and agreed, yep, just another day.
Paul McCartney’s song, “Another Day” (1971), squirted into my stream. Milliseconds later, I’m singing, “It’s just another day. At the office where the papers grow, she takes a break,
drinks another coffee and she finds it hard to stay awake, do do do dit do do. It’s just another day.”
The song is an observation of a woman’s life as she cleans, dresses, and works. Under that melody and the surface word, as they sing, “So sad, sometimes she feels so sad,” is a sense of milieu ringing through other pop-rock songs of that era, is this it? Is this life? And accepting that, yes, this is life, people hunt escape. It’s just another day, over and over and over, going through motions while looking and hoping for some unspoken other thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH6v9JS26xc
Michael Seidel, writer 