Tag: fiction

aSoSS 41 | Minimum

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I’ve decided that if I’m not going to succeed socially, I’m going to succeed professionally. I gotta make use of something… if I can’t be in a sorority, imma be in a business frat.

Alice Lloyd Hall, 9:30PM, 1/21/2025

relegate your goals to the backseat. how low is the bar, anyway? along the margins, the minimum viable product that you need to sustain yourself. don’t you know? you are living in a dream and all dreams must end. i sit and watch the advertisements fly by on the wall of the station, a square meter of air compressed into a single breath. an inhalation of eternities, a sunbeam of love: i am speechless at your gallantry. you press your mouth to mine and say that you have found the words for both of us.

His technical skills were crazy because he would put in twenty hours a day when he couldn’t sleep!

DOW Building, 11:30AM, 1/16/2025

the steps to greatness and the steps to madness are often interchangeable. like a genetic sequence, one misplaced brick can rebuild generations and shatter entire worlds. on this climb, a fall from at the beginning and a fall at the end are of equal heartbreak. it is a fall in the middle, when you have gotten comfortable with the ascent and are just beginning to hope, that hurts the most. take fortune away from a poor man, he will think nothing of it. take fortune away from a rich man, he will think he deserves it. but take fortune away from the man who treads water and watch him sink like a stone.

That’s all you need: nice pizza and windows and a bed.

Markley Hall, 10:00AM, 1/17/2025

there are two ways to approach life: directly, or not at all. change your perspective, accelerate your reference state–as if your room were a prison and not a shelter! a deluge of thoughts, liquid gold, envelops your brain in a cast. the migraine spills over, sharper than lightning, splitting teeth and tongue. your nails leave indents in my wrists like a paragraph. essays have been burned and blood has been spilled over less.

LOG_040_TEMPLE

Traveler Leave a comment

Despite pouring countless hours over every photo, drawing, and recounting of the ancient structure, even the most accurate of those facsimiles paled in comparison to the real thing when Dr. Tareste first laid eyes upon it: a moon-blue dagger of a tower rising out of the undergrowth, flanked by a pair of eroded statues, almost luminescent in what watery light filtered through the verdant canopy.

The better part of xir academic career had been dedicated to the study of these sites–the remnants of an obscure culture, the bones of another people, of xir people–and now xe stood within hiking distance of this one. All those dreams of reaching out and touching the same walls that xir ancestors might have once touched, standing where they might have once stood… The thought inspired a burst of energy, and the doctor walked on with renewed determination.

aSoSS 40 | Leeway

a-spider-on-state-street Leave a comment

…and she responds, and doesn’t get weird, or defensive, like you.

[mouth agape]

Yeah, yeah, it’s okay. Me too.

Trader Joe’s, 12:00PM, 11/24/2024

every shipman is aware of the dangers of slack, a knife of potential cutting across the air. and yet we have tiptoed around the topic for too long, each of us too scared to wake the current and lose the line. like a cruel childhood game–whoever moves first loses!–your hands are at your mouth and i am on one knee (as if to tie a shoe, i tell you, but really, do you believe that?) and the moment is frozen in a dream, so vivid a memory could not do it justice. the orange is left to spoil on the counter, unpeeled, unsplit. pure and perforated and rotten, at the same time, in all the wrong places.

If you don’t like it, you just hand it to Eileen, be like “cool, now you have two!”

Food Mart, 12:00PM, 12/26/2024

the vice of the human condition is the systematic approach to an unstructured life. you have been tasked with falling in love: go and sit on the bus and hold eye contact and brush the snow out of her hair. a look of surprise overwhelms you. even the most artistic are drawn to scientific conclusions, eliminating every variable at once. everything must go to plan or else it is not the plan at all. a senior thesis: is it, or is it not? the numbers quiver in their sockets.

when you board, the bus is empty, the driver wears sunglasses, and all the snow has melted.

That’s my job, and yeah, you and I have to stick to it because we’ve been way too accommodating!

Traverwood Library, 5:00PM, 1/14/2025

the tap water runs clear and straight–an ominous sign. it was the vietnamese activist Duong Thu Huong who wrote there’s no river without a bend just as there’s no life without its unhappiness. i look around; the room is littered with peanut shells. i am an elephant with a blanket on its back and the room is nothing more than a cage. outside, panem et circenses. the carnival band starts to play and the world is filled with all the notes of an obituary.

LOG_039_HUIJ

Traveler Leave a comment

Above: the beginnings of a village established on KHEPRI-1c. Though most of the planet’s population were transient researchers, some found their calling among the icy peaks and igneous valleys and sought to become permanent residents. Powered by geothermal activity beneath the crust, their massive radar tower was the main source of communication with the outside world, and it expanded into one of the biggest outposts on the planet. However, less than a decade later, misfortune struck: a major earthquake followed by a particularly harsh storm wiped out most of its population, and the remaining survivors elected to abandon the crumbling town to the mercies of 1c’s eternal winter.