Took liquid ibuprofen with a fork.

I made a biscuit sandwich with lots of butter (so much that it seeped through to the crust), bacon and cheese. I set it in the cabinet and when I pulled it down to microwave it, webbing and bugs — not spiders exactly, something like large black mantises or ants standing upright — stuck to one side of it. I wiped it off and put it back, not realizing I was placing the plate right in a spider web. I took it down again and the bugs were back and there were twice as many, and a bite had been taken out of it. I was so frustrated I started crying and tossed the plate aside, yelling at Momma about it and behaving as if the whole thing was completely unavoidable.

– April 2, 2012

© Wicked Sushi

Old Wife’s Tail

by Mekenzie Larsen

Whiskers tickled his chin. A weight on his chest, no lighter than a bowling ball, shifted languidly from one rib to the other. His wrists bled. His ankles were bruised. His foggy eyes rolled in their sockets till they landed on hers, sharp blue and full of poison.

He whimpered, waiting for the next strike. It didn’t take long. A practiced set of crimson-stained claws flashed across his cheek, his nose, his lips. “Why?” He could hear the others, light feet pacing the room, flooding the stairwell. Some had wandered into the basement in search of smaller prey. “Why do you do this?” He wept, salt burning a trail from his eyes to the hair at his temples. She drew closer, smiling.

“It’s not your breath we want,” she hissed. “It’s your tears.”

I’ve also been reading Anti-Requiem: New Orleans Stories by Louis Maistros (fantastic) and the increasingly irritating (because it never ends!) Moby Dick.

Now, Cujo and Baby are big dogs — they carry almost 300 pounds between them — but there’s no way they did that. One, I’ve never known them to flip the furniture over, even though they could. Two, they couldn’t have flipped it other, pushed it against the wall, scrape it past the door, then flip it forward, up and over another chair without pulling a shit-ton of junk (cardboard boxes, a small trash can, their water bowl) along with it. Neither could the wind, for that matter. If the wind had been strong enough to pick it up and toss it, that would be one thing. But then we’d be talking about wind capable of lifting something that weighs more than I do yet leaves papers and cigarette butts and spindly tree branches behind.

The dogs were scared. We were paranoid. Stuff like this always happens when we start packing. Three houses and countless cases of furniture moving, pipes bursting, and photos vanishing from their frames. My mother blames it on gremlins she’s only read about. I blame it on ghosts I can see.

That, or the bench was drunk. I just hope the tread marks were worth it.

Guns by Stephen King
“Hungry” by Robert E. Stutts
“Wildness and Wet” by Lee Hallison
“The Time Travel Device” by James Van Pelt
“They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson
“A Hairy Predicament” by Melissa Mead
The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You by Johnny B. Truant
“The Mountain” by Andrew Kozma
“Coffee Pot” by Jez Patterson
“I Heard You Got a Cat, I Heard You Named Him Charles” by M. Bennardo
“Hazel Tree” by Melissa Mead
“The Princess of the Perfume River” by Aliette de Bodard
“White as Snow, Red as Blood” by Melissa Mead

I got my first camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT, for Christmas 2007. These were some of the first pictures I took.