The swan pecked off my fingers, one by one, and afterwards everyone told me it was my own damn fault and I should have left the poor thing alone
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Notes:
1. Written on September 5th, 2018
__________An infinity of ephemera
The Parrot
The parrot learnt to mimic human speech so precisely it could earn a thousand pounds a day tricking old women out of their pensions over the phone.
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Notes:
1. Written on September 5th, 2018
__________Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!Cobweb
In the corner of my room, there’s this cobweb that’s been there for years. I’ve never seen a spider there, but the web seems to grow thicker and stronger over time.
Occasionally I’ll see a fly caught by it, unable to escape. Is it worse to die pointlessly like this, in a dead, abandoned trap? Or is it just as terrible the other way too, just as pointless and upsetting and unjust to die in an active web?
Should I die alone, or somewhere the worms can find me
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Notes:
1. Written September 5th, 2018
__________Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!Egg trick
My granddad used to do this egg trick when he came round on the weekend. He’d line three eggs up on the table, in these brown plastic egg cups we had, and then he’d say, which one of these eggs is the chicken in, and we’d point to one of the eggs, and he’d slam his hand down onto the egg, causing it to explode, and he’d say, no, it wasn’t that one, pick another, and we’d pick another, and he’d smash that one too, and there’d be yolk all over the table now, and bits of shell hanging off his hand, and egg white covering everything like slime, and then he’d point to the last egg and say, do you think it’s in this one then, and we’d say yes, it has to be, and he’d slam down his hand, and blood would spurt out everywhere, and feathers, and bones, and he’d slowly lift his hand up, and you could see a beak embedded in his palm, with blood in a circle round it, egg trick stigmata, and then he’d look down in exaggerated horror at all the blood and bones and sickening mess and say, see, no, it wasn’t in that one either, you don’t get chicks in eggs, not these eggs anyway, eggs from the shop are unfertilised, and none of us could tell if it was a trick or not but he’d do it every week and it was always the last egg and now he’s dead from un egg related causes and we’ll never find out the truth of the egg trick
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Notes:
1. Written on September 3rd, 2018
__________Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!Elon Musk
Elon Musk was on the telly, his dead face glistening under the studio lights.
“Rrrrrrrrr” he said, as the motors that powered his jaws slowly powered up. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”
A single drop of blood welled at the edge of his final human eye, seeming to defy gravity at first until you realised it was a fake, made of resin or wax or plasticine or from carbon nanotubes or jam or something, created to evoke a sympathetic response in the viewer. “See,” your brain went, “he’s human just like you.”
You hated your brain but it was the only one you could afford.
His other eye pulsed through sixty trillion colours a second, each one newer and more expensive than the one before.
“If we’d kept the old tv, we’d never have been able to see them all,” your brain said.
“I like that one,” your mother said, freezing the image and then cycling back through the frames until his eye was teslorange (a sort of purple). “I wonder if I could get some antimaccassars that colour.”
You pressed his eye and the catalogue opened up directly into your brain and crowded out most of your other sensory inputs until it had loaded the page.
“They cost $87348732.21,” you said, glumly.
“Oh, that’s quite a bit,” your mother said, but by the end of the week you knew she’d have one over the arm of every chair in the pod.
You wondered sometimes where the old antimaccassars went, but you never quite dared ask.
The image on the tv unfroze. “Hsssssk,” Elon Musk concluded, as his hour came to an end. “Hsssssssssssssssk.”
It was Mark Zuckerberg next, the camera centred on his jumper, the top half of his head protruding out of the shell of the telly and half way up your living room wall.
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaater,” he began. “Proooteeeeeeien.”
Your mother was entranced. You feigned disinterest. Later you bought four decilitres of water and several unsorted proteins.
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Notes:
1. Written on September 3rd, 2018
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