Bathroom Monologue: “Some say now is not the time to point fingers. We disagree.” –Anderson Cooper, CNN

"Now is not the time to point fingers. I know we settled on a bailout two weeks ago, but it is not yet time for blame-assignment. Now is the time for me to run away, as my fellow board members are. Now is the time for you to continue being shocked things went this badly, and to hug the life savings you once had. Perhaps cry a little. But not to point fingers! When I am out of the room, a safe distance away from U.S. jurisdiction, then will be the time to point fingers. When I am on a beach with a 15-year-old wearing a grass skirt and edible body paint, then will be the time to point fingers. When I can no longer hear you being angry."

Bathroom Monologue: The F.o.S.P.

Friends of Sexual Predators is a controversial lobbyist group. They want to change the name by which individuals who commit sex crimes are called, claiming the group has created “true” sexual predators.

“Some guy messing with kids at a bus stop isn’t a sexual predator,” says Dr. Samual Shelby, an MIT graduate with a focus on theoretical biology. “He’s a deviant. A monster. The true sexual predator is a life form that can subsist off of sex, like the people we’re trying to grow in these test tubes.”

Shelby and his fellow researchers claim to be working on a new system of digestion that runs the body entirely on sexual intercourse.

One of his assistants explains, “The orgasm is a heck of an emotional kick. It produces a lot of energy. The sex drive is already almost as strong as hunger, so why not tie them together? It’ll trump veganism before long.”

Dr. Shelby nods. “No more senseless murder of soy plants. Just because it didn’t scream doesn’t mean you didn’t kill it.”

Dr. Shelby is a happy omnivore, but claims to look forward to “a more moral future for dining.”

Bathroom Monologue: Utters and Cans

[GARY sits on one side of the booth in a lime green tuxedo, minus the bowtie. SAMID sits to his right in a banana yellow tuxedo, wearing two bowties, one banana yellow, one lime green. ARYANA sits on the opposite side of the booth in a chainmail tuxedo. A miniature version of the planetoid PLUTO floats in an ambient purple light between ARYANA and SAMID. GRANDPA sits at the head of the booth in a chair he stole from the bar, wearing overalls and lobster bib.]

Samid: It can’t have been that bad.
Gary: Her orgasm couldn’t have been faker if it had come out of a can.
Aryana: You should hold off for some good religious sex. Nothing like a bar next to a Catholic church the day after Lent. Nobody fakes anything when they’re that desperate.
Samid: You go to church? I thought you were a polytheist.
Aryana: I made out with a preacher and caught mono. His tongue was very convincing.
Pluto: There you go, Gary. Make out with a preacher.
Gary: I don’t want to be converted that way.
Grandpa: Back in my day if you had a cowgirl fetish you banged a girl in chaps and a hat. These days if you’ve got a cowgirl fetish she’s probably got utters and only exists on deviantart.
Samid: What would we do without you, grandpa?
Grandpa: Burn in a Hell of centaur fetishes and estimations of celestial mass!
Pluto: I miss being a planet…

Bathroom Monologue: Elite, oft-conflated in anger with something else

The government of elites was very successful. They had the elite-level speechwriters compose the most motivating things, and they had much to write about. They wrote praise of elite-level foreign policy experts that kept peace on the borders. They wrote praise of elite economists that helped money flow more freely and always paid attention to raising the lower class wages and general job growth. Elite governors delegated funds deftly, keeping necessary programs open. Natural disasters kept happening, and there were crises – unemployment hit 3% one year. But elite decision makers minimized casualties when the earth quaked, and got support to the unemployed before the economy could employ them again. Mostly, the elites got out of the way and let the market do what it needed, but elite judges and legislatures kept very strict laws to keep them from doing anything too selfish, and publicly punished those who transgressed. There were times when the populace got fed up with the slickness of the elite, or how removed they seemed to be from common sense, but they kept re-electing them.

Bathroom Monologue: Elitist, oft-defended in comfort as though it was something else

The government of elitists was very unpopular, no matter which of the two major elitist parties was elected. They weren’t the smartest but they were amazingly connected and wealthy, and with resources came media dominance and the shunting of radical thought. Somebody’s friend ran a national bureau, and so it didn’t respond in time to a hurricane and many people died. Elitist businessmen and elitist politicians worked hand-in-hand, legislating and delegating until the only surprise about a market crash or rampant unemployment was that they’d let it happen again. And all along they turned up their noses at third parties, and ignored polls when the populace disagreed with their choices. After all, this was a government by the wise. The self-established wise said so. The populace, seeing wages shrink, medicine in disarray, and unable even to comprehend issues thanks to wise news organizations, would have loved to kick them all out, or pretended to themselves that the next well-connected candidate wasn’t like all the other cronies. And the elitists kept getting re-elected, because there wasn’t anybody else.

Bathroom Monologue: Anti-Deerism

The life of a settler was hard. Even small discoveries skewed your life. Those berries were poisonous on this continent! And the wildlife? “Holy crap, it’s a small horse with branches coming out of its head! Did a tree rape a pony?” Yeah, to us they’re deer, but to the settler who’d never seen them before, they were the army of the Anti-Christ. And they were eating his tulips.

Stumbleupon the Bathroom

The Bathroom Monologues are now affiliated with stumbleupon.com, a democratic media site like Digg (and we're probably going to link to Digg shortly). Essentially anyone with an account on stumbleupon.com can "stumble," or vote favorably for this site or any post on it, making it more visible to everyone on that network. If enough people give it a thumbs up or a review, it could get a lot of attention. If you have an account or are thinking of signing up, please give us a look at http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/johnwiswell.blogspot.com/ ! The site promotes a toolbar, but it isn't necessary to use their browsing features or vote.

My site was originally stumbled by Cassandra Nichols, but I've just signed up now. So, thank you Cassie! I've also had a few visitors through Lex Paige, who stumbled two of my 55-word monologues. I was very flattered.

Bathroom Monologues: Can I still do this?

Remember when the goblins first tried to storm the great north? They came from a tropic region, so they were woefully unprepared. By their standards, anyway. By human standards, holy shit! I mean, they were driving war machines that belched flamed. Humans didn’t even know what oil was yet, aside from some sort of water that was kind of a jerk when you tried to drink it.

Sure, goblins had invented the wheel, but not the snow tire. So you had these massive engines of destruction spinning out of control and sliding back down the mountains. One of the colonels fell out his war machine and slid two entire miles before almost perishing in a snow bank. As soon as he clambered out he ordered his entire unit to try that.

The campaign was retarded for three days by soldiers converting their shields to toboggans. Taking the next ridge meant sledding back down. Goblin engineers that had formerly invented the war engine converted it into the ski lift.

Half-hearted attempts at storming human civilizations were waged, but they kept returning to their lodges for cocoa and the comfort of ski bunnies. They wound up just making their own country along the border of the north. The only reason northern human civilizations have survived future goblin invasions is that original goblin country, which repels all others who they see as attempting to steal their slopes.

Bathroom Monologue: Anti-Anti-Flag

“It's not that I want to ban flag burning. Censorship is petty and stupid, even when it’s censoring petty and stupid art. I comprehend the appeal of burning a flag. You think they've gravely oppressed, slighted and injured the group that most defines you today. Perhaps they invaded a weak country on phony motivation, or trampled your race's civil rights. So you take their symbol and destroy it. You immolate it, reduce it to ashes, maybe stamp it out on the ground, and maybe dance on it. It's small, selfish and it generally doesn't help your cause unless your cause is spite. If anything it ought to be discontinued not by law, but by radicals with smarter and more progressive things to do with lighter fluid, like throw a barbecue, invite everybody and explain what the guilty party has done over free hotdogs (Kosher hotdogs, if you’re feeling very progressive).

“But the reason I won't cry if flag burning is banned is not because it's moronic. We don't ban Yo Momma jokes and pants with "JUICY" on the butt (nor should we ban burning them). I won't cry because if it’s banned then the tradition would remain in the hands of the truly disenfranchised and pissed off. Something being illegal has never stopped a truly angry protestor. If it were banned, you'd risk something in doing it. If you risk nothing to do it, then some day it will be so mainstream that some nimrod whose greatest woe is not getting Madden on opening day is going to burn one just because he's bored and got a webcam for his 16th birthday. When that youtube rebel co-ops a symbol from people whose homes were bombed... well, crap. Symbolism might as well ban us.”

Bathroom Monologue: Diet and Exercise

The Body Max is revolutionizing weight loss (or it will when some of them sell, we swear!)! Use it just ten minutes a day two days a week to reach any of our patented six body types:

-Unattainable
-Bulimic
-Anorexic
-Rail-Skinny
-Third World Tragedy
-Beige Skeleton

*Please remember that all Body Sizer goals are meant to be pursued by using the machine, radically altering your diet in ways we didn’t advertise, and the consultation of a personal trainer that costs a dozen times as much per month as this machine.

Bathroom Monologue: F13 & V14 (Non-Fiction)

A power outage on Friday the 13th is ominous. Especially when you live in the woods. Especially when it hits an hour before the show time of that new Jason movie you were going to see, but capriciously chose against this morning.

So I went, disregarding that the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” was the first song on the radio, had a good time with two-hundred teenagers, and returned home to find the lights on and no one lurking behind the doors I’d left ajar. It reminded me that Friday the 13th wasn’t a holiday of massacre, but one of bad luck. Or maybe it wasn’t one of bad luck either, but like every day, merely a collection of hours with whatever meaning I let it have, which was an amiable lesson, as Valentine’s Day was tomorrow.

Bathroom Monologue: Calmly

Good morning. Please disregard the explosions outside your window. Please disregard fallacious news reports of millions of invading drones. There are no more than a few hundred in your district. You and your neighbors will be able to overcome them in a matter of hours. Many of your neighbors are already outside providing a heroic insurgency. If your neighbors are not already outside defending democracy, then they are either cowards and you should go outside and set an example, or you live in relative isolation. If you live in relative isolation then the enemy has not sent as many drones to your area, and are likely not anticipating the heroic insurgency you will soon provide. Calmly take any household firearms in hand and charge the drones when ready. If you possess no firearms, calmly look about your home for weaponizable items such as table legs, walking sticks or IV drip stands. If individuals claim these items are necessary for their survival, point out their cowardice in not having charged the enemy yet. If they seem disturbed, urge them to please disregard the explosions outside the window, and then try again. Good luck in defending democracy, citizen.

Bathroom Monologue: The Fry Cook Votes Independent

"I'm liberal in who can prepare the burger - I don't care about the religion, sexuality or race of the cook. Yet I'm conservative in how they prepare it - I want it medium-well, and keep your lettuce, tomato and secret sauce to yourself. Despite my stringent demand for medium-well hamburgers, I will not enforce my kitchen values on others. Once it's at the table, I'm liberal in the amount of ketchup I put on it. Fiscally, I'm flexible on the amount of fries on the side, crossing the aisle to shake hands with conservatives on their judgment that a fist full is enough, but like a proper liberal, I smile on a post-meal surplus. They're nice to munch on during dessert conversations, like ones about oversimplified politics, where they're all this way, we're all that way, and if I don't keep my mouth stuffed I'll end up in a fight."

Bathroom Monologue: Wrath of the Writer

Shirley Porter was an obsessive writer, and her worst tick was a psychotic inability to handle anyone reading anything she’d written until it was done. The characters needed to be developed and the dialogue polished, the prose made immaculate before it could be understood. If she printed something out in the library she would hover over the tray to block errant glances from critically observing a stray sentence. She password protected her PC, bolted the tower to the desk and locked all her papers in the drawers of her desk.

When Shirley suspected a houseguest of sneaking a look at her new manuscript she fretted, and when she reviewed the manuscript and found a typo he might have read, she went berserk. She cornered him in the kitchen and interrogated him with a butter knife.

His promises of not seeing it didn’t relieve her. They merely made her suspicious of all her friends.

Really, she had no idea who was trustworthy. How many had actually seen early drafts of her work without admitting it? How many would silently judge her in the future?

So Shirley tested them.

She placed copies of her latest short story in every room of her house and left them untended. She didn’t mention them. She left them unattended and often walked out of a room, leaving a friend or two alone with those perfectly normal copies.

Perfectly normal copies laced with perfectly normal cyanide.

"Theorobotics" in Alien Skin this April

The Bathroom Monologue, "Theorobotics," was accepted for publication in the April/May issue of Alien Skin Magazine. This is a new version of the monologue. And yes, "Alien Skin" is the most porn-sounding group I've been accepted by yet, but they've published the likes of Orson Scott Card, so they're also the biggest. The biggest and most porn-sounding.

You can check out Alien Skin here. I will be happy to autograph it if you mail it to me, as I maintain the policy that anyone sweet and demented enough to pursue getting my autograph ought to have it.

The sick, sad world of Wile E. Coyote, OR, In the car with a friend monologue

Coyotes thrive in many environments, including in the reservation near the house I grew up in. There they attacked and ate wild turkeys, any birds of flight that stayed near the ground, house cats, and even each other’s young. That potential for cannibalism suggests why Wile E. is alone in the desert. But coyotes being able to live in ecosystems other than the desert suggest he could eat creatures other than that roadrunner. Furthermore, Acme is not only a mail-order hardware store. There was an Acme supermarket near my grandparents’ when I was a kid, which always left me feeling he could order some cereal or beef jerky in bulk if he wanted. No friends, we are left with the portrait of a coyote that doesn’t need to eat the roadrunner for his survival – he needs it. Perhaps the roadrunner is the begotten child of Jezebel, and will bring upon us the darkest of times. Perhaps Wile E.’s sister, Shirl E. Coyote, is suffering from a rare disease that can only be cured by an extract of the roadrunner’s bones. Of course he fantasizes about eating the roadrunner from time to time. He’s a natural carnivore. It’s like me not having a certain occasional fantasy if I keep chasing a pop starlet around. But did you ever stop and think for a moment why such a genius so desperately employs one single plan after one single plan, never saving them up to create an inescapable obstacle course? It’s not for a one-course meal of stringy roadrunner meat. It’s for his sister’s well being. Wile E. Coyote is an altruist.

Bathroom Monologue: Don’t Take the Lord’s Name Intravenously, OR, Did you catch the pun in my timestamp?

Toby slammed on the breaks and gritted his teeth at the jackass in front of him.

“Jesus!” he hissed. What was that idiot thinking, stopping short on a freeway?

“Yes?” asked someone in Toby’s passenger seat. That was odd, since he was commuting alone.

He looked over and saw a bearded man in a blue robe. He was already buckled in.

They stared at each other for a moment before the bearded man repeated, sounding a little annoyed, “Yes?”

“I… uh…” Toby stammered. He suddenly wished he hadn’t taken his mother’s rosary off the rearview mirror. “I didn’t mean…”

“Of course you didn’t.”

The bearded man rolled his eyes. Then he disappeared.

As Toby tried to fathom what had just happened, he noticed the car in front of him had also vanished.

Bathroom Monologue: Genre

To many people, “genre” just means one kind of story that can be told in a medium. Comedy, Drama and Romance are genres. But there is also a malign use of the word, often with a capital letter. This is Genre, which is singular but somehow connotes three things: Science Fiction and Fantasy, even though they’re constantly at odds, and Horror, even though many scary things are not the least bit fantastic or reliant on science. They form an ugly lump. Sometimes speculative fiction and alternative histories are part of the lump, as they are merely fantasies set here instead of a made-up world, but sometimes a few are excluded from the lump. Philip Roth does not write Genre, even when he makes a celebrity pilot beat FDR for the presidency. Why? This is where the membrane of segregation bursts, poked and punctured by the people who erected it. When Michael Chabon or Cormac McCarthy write something that belongs in Genre but hemorrhages out, you begin to realize it’s a silly and insulting creation. And when you realize just how many things hemorrhaged out of there, or have somehow never been put in there in your lifetime despite belonging, or are in there and don’t belong, you may come to think like me. You may come to think that my make-believe is not worse than yours.

Was there a bitterer passing of an author this decade than Kurt Vonnegut, famed for smart Science Fiction? Perhaps the greatest living poet in our language, Seamus Heaney, spent years translating Beowulf and Philoctetes– one the original classic of our tongue about a dragonslaying hero, and the other a play about improbable survival, magical occurrences and a cameo by Hercules. They are not exempt from Fantasy just because they’re old, especially not after a fresh re-write. Fast forward centuries and you’ll find that perhaps the most commonly referenced piece of politically critical fiction of the 20th century was George Orwell’s 1984, the quintessential speculative SciFi jaunt?

When you look at the BBC’s list of the hundred most beloved novels from 2007, what do you find at the top? Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and The Chronicles of Narnia. And who were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but professors of Literature and Philosophy at Oxford, who decided to spend their time in Fantasy steeped in mythology? And what is mythology, but that substance Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell observed was essential to the healthy mind? If it is that, then mythology is at least the fundamental make-believe, upon which you will find nearly all old-world classic literature stands. If you would like to take the conceit out of English, I’ll let you take it up with Homer and Virgil before the gates of Hell.

And don’t say, “That’s Europe.” In this hemisphere, Time Magazine put a comic book as one of the hundred greatest novels of the 20th century. Our literature grew out of fertile imagination and folklore. We needed giants and their blue oxen buddies for a new oral tradition before we could have a new print tradition. Perhaps you will say Washington Irving was our first author in that print tradition, he who told stories about time travel, ghosts and talking books. Or perhaps you will say Mr. Irving was too European in his prose and instead elect Mark Twain as our first – but if so, please regard his tales about talking birds, an engineer traveling back to Camelot, and a vengeful corpse in search of its golden arm.

And if Mr. Irving is indeed too European for you, please pay mind to the Europeans and their historically inaccurate classics about King Arthur, Jeff Chaucer’s opus of impossible and obscene anecdotes, and Bill Shakespeare’s Macbeth chatting up witches. We look to that continent and see the abyss peer hatefully into us, and yet we can still make a man dressed as a bat the number one movie in the world, if we’re smart enough to have him fight a clown.

Even without its roots running quite as deep as Fantasy, Science Fiction is no ignoble playground. Otherwise Michio Kaku wouldn’t have written a book explaining what of their elements might be plausible, and Stephen Hawking certainly wouldn’t have played poker on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Brilliant scientists have come to terms with our modern make-believe, so why can’t the psyche of the English language?

It is in the psyche of our letters, and largely thanks to an A-B argument. Opinions have been polarized, such that it must be A or B. These arguments are usually at (or near) the center of frustrating conflicts.

Here, A is stories for story sake, characters you want to follow, interesting action, rising interest and climax. A is real narrative that captivates someone who has seldom visited the art form before.

Here, B is stories for art sake, with themes that transcend action, tangents from what is necessary to develop the story, unanswered questions and ephemeral wisps of words that leave the audience thinking instead of following.

A is putting what makes fiction meaningful for its characters first. B is putting what makes fiction meaningful for its readers first. A asks. B challenges.

In short, A is garbage and B is propaganda. They are worthless independent of each other, as one is base and the other is all ulterior motive. Just because one requires more critical thought does not make it virtuous. Action must be meaningful to be worthwhile, but meaning cannot attach itself to a void. The value and art lies in the balance of these forces. They are not the two strands in the helix of good fiction; they are what gravity and heat are to life, pulling it together and making it move, both indispensable to its existence, and not objectively comparable.

The “Genre” genres, even after selling much of their premiere real estate to B, have been the unabashed home to A for a century. Most good fiction, in and out of the Genre slums, reconciles these forces, but much as modern America is populated by moderates and run by extremist idiots, so are American letters. So Stephen King’s The Stand was written off as schlock by snobs and too “I don’t know” by fools. The make-believe force is the first put-off, but the desire to entertain as well as think is what fuels the stigma.

My first mentor at Bennington College, Max Gardner, put it best: “A woman fucking her cow is Literature. A woman fucking her cow on Mars is trash.”

Bathroom Monologue: Consumer’s Advocate

Doing market research can be important. Now, if the Titanic is going down you shouldn’t weigh your options, consider which companions will give you more elbowroom in the lifeboat and which looks the sturdiest. Just get on the frickin’ boat and lower it before the fat and hysterical people get here. But if you’re buying an X-Box 360, you don’t have to run above deck immediately. Let the market test quality for you. Here “market” is a euphemism for “morons.” Let the market test the materials for you. Let them buy the first wave of game consoles, and thus let them explain to their insurance agent how trying to play Halo 2 caused their living room to set on fire. Let them deal with the bogus motherboards and chipsets that haven’t been quality tested enough (actually, they have been – the company just doesn’t care). Let the market buy wave after wave of these things, dealing with customer service and shipping defective parts back until the producer has figured out how to mass produce something that won’t explode and be shipped back to them for work that’s covered under warranty. As economics teaches us, the market will correct everything by letting everything go wrong for someone else. Meanwhile all those developers that had never even seen this processing hardware before will have had a few years to take it apart, and figure out how to make strong games for it, because let’s face it – there’s never been a slew of good launch titles on a console I’ve bought. It's like a market force or something.

All I know is that following my plan I come late, know what all the good games are, pay less for the machine, and know it will work. Those guys who beat me by standing in line for eight hours on launch day can gloat about how they’re hardcore, and their doctors can gloat about all the extra visits their blood pressure has warranted. God bless the market.

(But seriously, where are all the fricking Wiis?)

“Give me a lever big enough and I’ll move the world.” –Possibly Archimedes, possibly a clever student of his that got screwed on bylines, 2

Archimedes’s Hell is stocked with various giant levers. Some are made out of wet cardboard. Some are made out of crazy straws, and one is a long slinky. All he has to do is move the world and he’ll free-fall back onto earth. The aim of Hell is to torture, but as the great lever made of balsa wood proves, taunting is a back-up plan.

“Give me a lever big enough and I’ll move the world.” –Possibly Archimedes, possibly a clever student of his that got screwed on bylines, 1

Up on Limbo, the top floor lobby before Dante’s Hell, stood a physically infeasible package. They paged Archimedes for a couple of celestial hours before he came and signed for it. Despite its shape, one had to wonder what in the Hell it was.

Once unwrapped, it proved to be a six-billion-mile-long piece of Styrofoam. At the very middle was an inscription, reading: “HERE’S THAT LEVER. MOVE THE WORLD AND YOU GET AN APARTMENT IN PURGATORY.”

Bathroom Monologue: Things I do not miss about the beard

-Blowing my nose and then having to check in the mirror
-Tangles refusing to be brushed out and requiring banzai-like pruning
-Soup in the moustache
-How it kept my face warm in the winter…
-Milkshakes in the moustache
-Lint getting stuck and cemented in
-Providing me with an artificial jawline
-Random patches of salad dressing
-Lamentably eventful cunnilingus
-The stubborn bald patches
-Looking in the mirror early in the morning and amidst my shaggy hair and mangy beard, feeling I was the last of a tribe of ogres, risen to destroy the bathroom… fuck it, I’m growing it back

Bathroom Monologue: Hot Chocolate Religion

It was tough on the priesthood when the new canon prohibited alcohol. It caused the biggest divide not related to a war in church history. Those who didn’t flee for moister pastures were tasked with devising a new recreation of equal pleasure and, according to an anonymous cardinal, “one that never makes a spiritual leader throw up on the governor again.”

As usual, it was the monks who got around inconvenient canon. This time they concocted milk and crushed cocoa beans. Unlike ale and spirits, it was served warm, sweet and did not intoxicate – at least not in the normal sense. Yet the monks became quite giggly over it all the same, for a property of “special sweetness that enters the tongue and rolls both down the throat and up the nostrils, filling the mind as well as the kidneys.” Friars of temperance happily exchanged the recipe, and soon the fragrance of steaming chocolate as synonymous with monasteries as the fragrance of old paper and eunuchs.

But the monks did not popularize the beverage abroad. That was done by the female priests, a class of priests created just that year to help fill out the ranks of those who had fled to deism and pubs. Women in general adored the beverage as a relaxant and bought it up by the ten-pound bag, for as the first candidate for female bishop put it, “It’s too good not to be made illegal in the next canon.” Female priests claimed it made Sunday meetings more congenial, attracted more children to services, and “lessens the burden of the monthly period.”

Male priests, who were not even certain they had a monthly period to lessen still took to it out of temptation and began private rituals of savoring and competitions of brewing. The addition of the little competition aspect to the drink dramatically increased its popularity amongst men. Even the grumpiest pastors came around, when they realized it was fragrant enough to hide a shot of rum.

Bathroom Monologue: Cobalt

"Spider-Man, meet your new nemesis: Cobalt! … Cobalt! … The menacing… Come on! I got a glider and a blue goblin costume, because cobalts were a kind of goblins, but the word is also a shade of blue. It’s cleverer than Green Goblin, Hobgoblin, Grey Goblin and Green Goblin II, isn’t it? I mean, the meaning of the name is all compacted into one catchy word. Oh, stop laughing! Stop laughing or I’ll throw an indigo pumpkin bomb at you! … No, it’s not full of food coloring and death… Jesus, I’m going back to flipping burgers.”

Bathroom Monologue: Chera and Thermos

Chera was a minor heat deity, relegated to reigning over lava in the domain of a mountain god. She wanted nothing to do with the business. She had it for cold – for sturdy ocean gods and their swim-tightened bodies, and for snow titans, and all their ancient extreme sports.

To be fair, there weren’t so many hot-blooded gods running around that northern archipelago. It was frigid and if she was going to fall in love with someone, he was probably going to have a beard of icicles. She became smitten with Thermos, god of waves that are almost cold enough to freeze. It was a low-paying job and Chera’s father forbid the relationship, which was a popular occupation for fathers in the age of myths.

Yet there came rumors that Chera and Thermos were getting on anyway. At first Chera’s father set people to watch her. She didn’t seem bothered, and like any competent mythological father, he figured if she wasn’t bothered he hadn’t done his job correctly.

So he confined her abstract to his island, figuring she was finagling through the lava. The great god spent many days watching his shore, seeing frigid waves lap coastal lava flows. Often he would order them frozen out of spite, uncertain if any of this counted as lascivious. Yet they always thawed, and he could prove nothing. Was his daughter up to nonsense?

Not according to her. When her sister, the goddess of expensive pumice people sail far too far to collect, asked, Chera said she and Thermos had already had millions of children.

Her father exhausted himself trying to find evidence of this, so that he could stop it. He put out challenges and offered impossible rewards that inspired travails for some of history’s great heroes. None of them actually succeeded, though, and became great heroes in more worthwhile endeavors.

What exactly she was bragging about went unknown for four hundred years. Even four hundred years later science was still slugging – its gods were lazy and enjoyed providing a slow trickle of miraculous discoveries. The one that revealed the secret of their romance came when a scientist identified a kind of water smoke. He called it “steam.”

Bathroom Monologue: Born Too

“I wasn’t born too late. I wasn’t born too early. I’d have died of this condition in the time of the Stoics or Romantics. Hell, given the statistics I’d probably have died in childbirth and taken my mother with me. And I wasn’t born too early because the further we go the more close-minded we get. If I were born in a hundred years into some liberated world where you’re free to think anything and be demeaned for thinking anything else than the norms, I’d be as good as lobotomized. And if I was born in five hundred years it would be a miracle, and a short-lived one, as we’d have so ruined the planet by then that I’d be the second immaculate birth and the human only alive – a messiah who suffocated seconds later. Should I have survived in the past or future, I’d have different experiences, be conditioned different ways, and ultimately not become what I am. I couldn’t have been born any time but now, not too late or too early, because any other birth would have produced another person. I’m me and I’m now and I don’t fit and I’m fitting better than I ever could have.”

Bathroom Monologue: 200 Vs. 40 + 2

“What’s your favorite battle, Lo? You say you’ve served so many.”

“Oh, I have. My favorite would have to be this one on the coast. Joy and I built up a mean reputation on the coastline. Captains had nightmares about us. So when this standoff happened we traveled down together. One side had over two hundred troops, while the other barely had forty. We signed on with the forty.”

“How many made it? How bloody did it get?”

“It was bloodless. They gave up as soon as they heard both of us were on the side of the forty. We won without one head rolling. Innocents were saved.”

“And that’s your favorite memory of battle?”

“Oh yeah. I got paid in advance.”

55 Words is the Minimum and Limit for Pen Pricks Submissions

“55 words? 55 words?!!” John punched the keyboard. “That’s not even a round number! Not 50? Not 100? Not a range?”

He paced around his room.

“Intensely arbitrary! Ridiculous! It insults the author!”

John huffed. He went to the mailbox.

On the way back he had 49 words about a rabbit making her magician disappear.

Bathroom Monologue: Practical Werewolf Defense

The werewolves promised blood. Most townsfolk panicked and made silver bullets.

Dixie scoffed. “Melt down Nana’s silverware? For furries?”

Even skeptics rigged their yards with barbed wire.

“Not on my Kentucky blue,” she said, driving home from Target. “I can handle pups.”

When they howled at her door, Dixie switched on her new vacuum cleaner.

Bathroom Monologue: It was his turn

“Magician vanished in front of a full house. Been missing ever since,” Gordon explained, opening the interrogation room door.

“Only have one suspect. Got motive, but won’t say how she did it.”

On the stable was a white rabbit, sitting on a black top hat. When the detectives looked in she chewed her carrot sardonically.