![Prompt 5 [next is Prompt 6]](https://img5.doujinstars.com/storage/10/dc/bz/a4542c-019e8dfb-d13d-7af5-b66c-ede090c057a0.jpg)
Prompt 5 [next is Prompt 6]
Added 2025-01-04 22:34:13 +0000 UTCI'm about to go "off-grid" for the next day or so to tie up the last of my holiday loose ends and I will [see] you all next week. The "scheduled post" feature has been iffy for me so we're just going to post this baddie a bit early. Oh, and a reminder that while I don't *heart any of your replies on these I 100% read them all - even on old [prompt] posts! So please add to any one at any time. I consider it a lovely treat to see a notification pop up for an older one :)
[Original Prompt: He poured the broken pieces into the dust bin. “Clumsy oaf,” he muttered aloud. There was no replacing]
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He scoured the broken pieces with despair in his heart. “Clumsy oaf” he muttered aloud to himself. There was no replacing Humpty Dumpty. Humpty was unique - being born in the house situated between the nuclear power plant and the egg farm. His parents looked normal enough, but Humpty was a giant egg-human hybrid made of flesh who would [apparently] could shatter on impact. Had this monster really never fallen over before today? As relieved as he was not to be covered in guts and gore, the fact that Humpty didn't seem to be carrying internal organs or blood was incredibly frightening. This fucking thing was made of eggshell skin. It looked soft but fragile... what the fuck?
And yet, he felt responsible. Humpty asked for a smoke and he threw one up. It hit that egg-shaped bastard right between the eyes and next thing you know - CRASH. Not even a yolk inside.
"But if Humpty was empty..." he thought, "maybe we can rebuild him!" and a fire lit within. "Hey you - Gingerbread! Get your tasty ass to the castle and get all the kings horses - ALL the kings horses and every man he can spare - no, fuck that. ALL the men too. ALL the horses and ALL the fucking men. I imagine time is of the essence but fuck, this is so weird. Maybe we can do him like a puzzle or some shit, I dunno. Just go, Gingerbread. Run as fast as those fucking cookie legs can carry you and get everyone the fuck over here now!"
And they came, the men and the horses. All of them dropped what they were doing and ran. And so came the women and the children too to witness the great rebuilding of Humpty Dumpty - the local human/egg creature who always knew a relevant limerick and could whistle any Alanis Morissette song in a jazzy style. They tried. They tried until the sun had set. The were still trying when it rose again. They tried and tried in vain, and it never caused them anything but pain. No one was sure what had happened but most said that there were just too many pieces and it was impossible to tell what went where. And so all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put Humpty together again - and I live with that guilt every single damn day.
fin
Comments
The anthropomorphizing of a trash can - your imagination knows no bounds Caro! This was poignant and beautiful and I love it. And at the same time it reminds me of PUSH (the speaking trash can in Disney World). Because I'm crazy like that.
Jamie
2025-01-10 04:23:46 +0000 UTCHe poured the broken pieces into the dust bin. “Clumsy oaf,” he muttered aloud. There was no replacing it, his watertight conclusion seemingly confirmed by the tinny crystalline clash of shards hitting one another mid canyon fall from dustpan to bin. There’s a lot of this lately. Slapdash, frustrated opening of gray-green polypropylene plastic bin lid. Sweeping and pouring of refuse and life dust punctuated by the staccato of expletives and verbal self-flagellation. Now I see Daniel at his most emphatic and troubled. It didn’t used to be like this. He’s a mutterer and putterer by nature, not prone to outburst. Often absorbed in a Wikipedia wormhole or an audiobook about pirate radio, his atonal humming meeting the low buzz of human noise as he dances the mechanical shuffle of apartment clean. Cha cha real smooth polished surface. But she’s gone now and he’s different. Lost to the altogether altered, darker dance of one left behind when there are no longer two to tango. Anyway, he’s sad and he’s mad and he’s trying his best to focus on work. These days he throws himself at translating and interpreting a seventeenth-century Italian manual on rhetoric. [I told you he liked a wormhole]. I know about this mammoth translation project because I’ve swallowed hours and days of lines scratched out in editor’s red ink. He shouldn’t use me for paper, but Daniel is not good at recycling. And I’m always here, tucked under the sink and prepped with fluorescent white Glad lining. [Parenthetically, where does a trash bag company get off on the name Glad? It pains me that people are rarely Glad when they deal with me. Trashcan. Not exactly a pretty name or thing, is it? But I get over this musing quickly. I’m so well fed]. I’d been reading Daniel’s latest discarded attempt at analyzing a passage on imagination when he’d burst into the kitchen in this whirlwind of “Clumsy Oaf.” Witnessing his emotional storm, I thought I’d surely receive another draft of the paper. So, I was shocked when the pieces of The Her Thing hit my tongue. Bitter, metallic and salty, with a strangely sweet finish. Melancholy? I can’t immediately identify The Her Thing. My palette is wide-ranging [life has so many flavors] but it’s been mostly paper, ink, and back-of-the-fridge-and-forget-about-it pasta sauce this week. The Her Thing disburses, its pieces running down my throat with purpose, competing to fill gaps between pages, a tired old sponge, counter crumbs, a fishbone. But I sense it doesn’t really belong to me yet. There’s a little too much life left in The Her Thing for my domain. I want to tell Daniel this. But I can’t. [can you imagine if your trashcan started talking to you? chaos, surely]. So, I let the shards settle between my tastebuds, teeth, tongue. Until I remember it. The passage from the rhetorician’s manual that I’d poured over this afternoon. [this is where I get my kicks. in the reading. and sometimes in the stuff, like The Her Thing]. The paper is partly covered in the ancient pasta sauce, but it's mostly legible. And Daniel’s red pen conveys a captivating translation: “[The imagination is] all heat, sulfurous and fiery… [It] never returns through the path it took first but, instead of that, tears a mountain open just to find a new way.” I’m familiar with sulfur and heat: I’ve known the flameless fire of a too hot dish poured into plastic. I roll along the path from kitchen sink to curb twice a week. I’d read about mountains in a 2022 National Geographic issue. And imagination I’ve learned, watched, heard. She and Daniel used to tell stories while cooking, listening to something magical called music. Holding hands until hands held waists or someplace higher or lower or both at the same time before giving way to lips. I’ve consumed so much that imagination grows here even among trash, in my Wastelands. So. Can I tear my mountain open and find a new way to reunite Daniel with The Her Thing? I think I can. After all, pieces were once whole. I see that every day. No reason they can’t be put back together again. Wish me luck! Finally had a minute and loved this prompt. The quote is my translation of a passage from Giovanni Battista Manzini’s Delle Meteore Rettoriche (1652). Conjures one of imagination’s beautiful, challenging faces to me. Love yours, Doc! Particularly the detail about limerick expertise and whistling Alanis Morissette in jazz 💥
caroscope
2025-01-10 03:27:32 +0000 UTCI love this! Your imagery is powerful. And the hope is so good
Jamie
2025-01-07 08:28:40 +0000 UTCSecond version (totally not procrastinating…but may go play with this in Canva and post to IG…but NOT procrastinating) _____ She swept the broken pieces into her hand with a deliberate tenderness, though they bit into her skin as if resenting her touch. They glimmered faintly in the pale light of the room, catching the moon’s glow through the half-curtained window. They looked like the fragments of a fallen star, though to her they were something far more intimate, and far more lost. “Clumsy,” she muttered, though the words were quiet, almost gentle. Her voice hung in the stillness, too loud for the room and yet muffled, as though the air itself was too heavy to carry sound. There was no replacing it, after all. Not truly. Not this. She tipped the shards into the dust bin, the sound of their fall like distant chimes, faint and sorrowful. It wasn’t just an object, she thought. It had never been just an object. It had been a vessel for so much more: a moment, a memory, a sense of safety or joy that had long felt fragile in her hands. Now it was gone, scattered into a thousand irreparable pieces, and she stood with the unbearable knowledge that some things cannot be made whole again. She wrapped her arms around herself, the silence of the room pressing in, close and cold, until it was no longer silence at all but a hum that buzzed beneath her skin. The shards were gone, and yet they weren’t. She could still feel them lodged somewhere deep, sharp and invisible, like wounds that hadn’t quite healed. Not everything lost is beyond repair, came the faintest whisper, though it didn’t come from anywhere she could see. It came from within, perhaps, or from the air around her, carrying the weight of things she’d forgotten how to believe. She blinked, her gaze falling again to the shards in the dust bin. They were broken, yes, but not entirely lost. Not entirely gone. Their shape was shattered, but their substance remained. And substance, she thought, was enough. Her fingers reached into the bin with care, brushing against the jagged edges. She expected the sting of cuts, but instead, she felt the tiniest spark—like something waking up inside her, just enough to remind her of what she had thought was gone. Pain, she realized, wasn’t the end of the story. It never had been. It was a beginning, raw and quiet and unbearably tender. The pieces wouldn’t fit together the way they once had, she knew. Some parts were too small, some too sharp, and some were simply missing. But perhaps that didn’t matter. Perhaps the beauty was not in restoring what was but in creating something new with what remained. She knelt on the floor, the moonlight catching her hands as they moved, gathering the fragments one by one. Each piece felt different now—not just broken but full of potential, humming softly beneath her fingers. She began to trace patterns, not of what it had been but of what it could become, the jagged edges forming something wholly their own. In the quiet of the room, with the world hushed and waiting, she began to create.
libby (feral.libra)
2025-01-06 22:03:41 +0000 UTC
