there are many endings. [day 16]

As you enter that city, you will meet a band of prophets

and they’ll ask if you want to know all your deaths. You have to pay with coffees for each musician and a box of hot wings for them to share. The vocalist with a tambourine is the one who asks you to hold out your hands. Don’t you love a good mystery, she asks her companions. Their skins are all hues of leather from traveling under the sun. While Anita works her companions pinch steaming red wings between their teeth. We came all the way out from Austin, she says, pressing the base of your thumb. Now we get here and my son won’t let us stay with him. You are not impolite, though you wonder how long the investigation of your hands will take. So you got a lot to worry about. I know how it is when you don’t have money. Her finger glides around your palm to show you. You’ll do what you want, but you’ll never have money. She folds your hands into fists and turns them to the side. You want kids? You want to get married? I don’t know, but what about what you said about dying. She touches the folds beneath each curled litte finger. Four here, five here. What did you think I was talking about?

Constructed with words from Kimberly Alidio, Ching-In Chen, Jai Arun Ravine, Hoa Nguyen (via Kim), Daniel Hudson (via Pia Cortez), William Warren (via Jai), and the Bible.

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Prompts: 

That he gave her this particular flower as opposed to that particular flower, that he presented it to her in such and such a way, that the cow’s behavior was odd indeed and cow flops were unavoidable, that although it was a pleasant day, the chilly night air moved slyly in, and that they disagreed about the shade of the dusk sky should not fool the casual reader into believing that the scene was set in such and such a way at random and without purpose. After all, in the editing room, the editor often wields greater power than the director.

—Jenny Boully

Kimberly Alidio:   A silbilant tweet: “@tomandlorenzo Why must we always suffer through the Seacrest to get to the dresses? #GoldenGlobes”

Ching-In Chen:  “The bus is an aqueduct, a portal for song.” - from Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Mental Commitment Robots 

Jai Arun Ravine: I’m A Cyborg But That’s OK    (Embedding was disabled and this version had the best subtitles I could find—yael) 

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Housekeeping

Please post in the comments section of this blog entry with: 1) your writing in response to today’s writing(s) and 2) a prompt or question to share for tomorrow.

And if the comments are down, feel free to send your work to arkipelagirl [at] gmail.com, and I’ll post for you when the comments are fixed. 

Full info on the process and this project can be found at this page. 

Dear Collaborators, tomorrow is the last day of the project! So I’ll save the goodbyes for tomorrow.