i got a potato in my pocket

who put the potato in my pocket

i didn't put a potato in my pocket

why would i need one there

do i need a potato in my pocket?

potato pocket panic sets in

i will never let go of this potato

i will die if anyone ever takes this potato

someone takes potato while im asleep

how will i live without pocket potato

hear potato rolling around

no no no

pocket potato haunting me

move to new house, pocket potato there

pocket potato in my mind, they tell me

pocket potato ruins all my interpersonal relationships

the end

Notes on drowning oneself in potato-leek soup.

1. Allow to cool. Act with too much haste and you will end up scalding your nose and not much else.

2. Use a sufficiently sized bowl. Even if it may be more meaningful to use the shallow ceramic dinner bowl you first served this dish for her with, drowning can only be achieved by completely immersing ones nostrils and mouth completely, which is quite logistically difficult when you are focused on the act of drowning itself. Your nose will crush on the bottom of the bowl in a painful manner, and continued adjustments to try to immerse your mouth as well will prove very complicated. I suggest a bowl at least 3 ½ to 4 inches deep, though preferably one should use a six inch deep serving bowl.

3. Don’t be afraid to modify the recipe to be more liquid. While a traditional potato-leek soup is quite thick, this can lead to issues with intake. While your intention may to simply breathe the soup *in*, your body will attempt to expel the aspirated soup, and if it is too thick it will allow for a channel to be created from your mouth to the surface, where oxygen can be attained, as well as spattering soup all over the table in a big mess. Return to the pot, then add water to the soup at a slow simmer until the desired consistency is achieved, about the thickness of half-and-half. (Remember to allow to cool before your attempt!)

4. Expel all breath from your lungs before placing your face in the soup. Otherwise you are just blowing bubbles.

5. While your mind may be convinced that this is the only way to express the internal turmoil you are feeling, remember, your body doesn’t want to drown! It is worth practicing mindfulness exercises, and coming up with mantras to soothe your body’s rejection of the experience. Keep these short: “This is how I want to be discovered, I need this, I can’t go on like this, I need this,” is too long. Something pithy like “She will never be able to forgive herself” is more appropriate. If words are difficult to keep in your mind, try visualizations, such as her screaming face, or everyone sitting far away from her at the funeral.

6. The mind is only half the battle, and once you’ve aspirated a fair amount of soup, the body will take over. Be sure to bind your hands behind your back with zip ties from the garden shed.

7. Do not wait until the following day to continue your attempts, as the soup you have already aspirated will potentially induce pneumonia, making you very, very sick.

8. Don’t be afraid to use chemical assistance. Alcohol in excess and a handful of pills she left in the medicine cupboard will help numb the ability for your body to try to pull away from the bowl, spilling soup across the table and floor, shattering the ceramic into a huge mess you then have to spend hours cleaning up, barely able to see through tears.

9. Try more pills and more gin

10. Try more pills andn mo re gin

11.

The light from the dog’s mouth carries with it an uneasy quality, and standing exposed in it for any amount of time makes the illuminated person feel deeply melancholy, and activates their salivary response to an uncomfortable degree.

Still, it’s the only light down here, so we take turns holding the dog, who is very at ease with being held and seems pleased with the physical attention, and shine its mouth light ahead of us as we navigate the darkness.

“Let’s take a right,” I suggest, at the next junction, though the passages left and straight-on are clotted with some sort of wet stringy stuff that reminds me of pumpkin pulp and seem exceedingly uninviting. Still, I’m trying to re-establish myself as leader of our group after being completely humiliated at the meal we called breakfast yesterday.

No one speaks, but we all turn right, and I consider that at least a small win. The dog shifts in Mel’s arms, yawning, temporarily illuminating the entire right chasm.

“Food!” Stefan cries, and rushes towards the hole in the wall seeping McDonalds fries and what smells like KFC gravy onto a pile of undifferentiated fast-food matter, slowly decomposing in the fetid air. Everyone rushes to it, greedily scooping anything that seems edible into their rucksacks.

As their self-appointed leader, I make what I consider a very leaderly choice to not tell them about their own faces protruding from the far wall, staring at their backs as they chatter and are overjoyed with their find, scarfing handfuls of fries, gravy, patties, bread soaked through and glistening with Subway sweet teryaki sauce. They’ll see it soon enough.

My face was not on the far wall, so I take leader’s privilege, collect some of the items they dropped on their run to the fast-food wall, a large knife, a bag filled with survival supplies, the dog’s kibble, and back quietly into the darkness of the other room with it held in my arms. If they survive this encounter, they will need a strong leader, someone well supplied, someone with vision, someone with a clear head and their wits about them.

There was a singular moment, then, after a long, satisfactory dinner of conversation and fellowship, as he stacked one dirty dish atop another to pass along to his wife, who was at the sink up to her elbows with suds, laughing at a joke told by her father she’d heard a thousand times before, but laughing with tears in the corners of her blue eyes as if it was the first time... and he was surrounded by beloved friends, beloved family, happy chatter, the warmth of the kitchen, and outside the leaves were collecting on the ground in a lazy carpet that signified the arrival of fall, and children chased each other with sticks and discovered whole new worlds under overturned stones, and at this singular moment, he felt all the collected beauty of the world converge here, in this kitchen, with these people, and his mind reeled with devastating, immense, profound love, with the importance of this, here, now, and he was overwhelmed with the need to tell them, to let them know how beautiful and special each of them were, how…

“Do you…” he started, but too quietly, his voice trembling with emotion, and no one heard him over his wife’s father telling another old joke, and he realized he did not know what words to say, and he tried, desperately, to hold onto that feeling, still surging within him, and he opened his mouth again, then closed it, then opened it again, and he said, again, “Do you…” and his oldest friend turned to him, face still grinning from another conversation, and his oldest friend said “What’s that?” but he found himself incapable of putting it into words, representing this unbearable beauty in any comprehensible way, he just shook his head, smiled meekly, kept handing over dirty dishes, the clear, perfect images of crystallized beauty crumbling within him each passing moment he found himself unable to describe any of it, until it was gone, until the moment had lapsed into a hazy, incomplete memory, until he had lost that moment, that feeling, forever.

That lost moment planted itself in him like a seed, twisting roots through him, and with each setback in his life it grew, breaking him apart, if only he’d said something, even a clumsy, halting thing, incomplete but grasping at the whole, he could have preserved some of that beauty, kept the friends from growing apart and forgetting their love for one another and then forgetting one another entirely, kept at bay the little squabbles that grew into squalls that tore his family apart, kept away the doubt and self-loathing that grew in him each day, hating his own cowardice and stupidity, until it obsessed him, until it drove his wife to resent him, until it drove her to leave him entirely and seek solace in the arms of someone better, more whole, more capable of expressing themselves.

The moment was gone forever, and losing it destroyed him, and as he stared at the notebook open before him on the scratched and stained plastic kitchen table, even now, decades later, a lifetime later, he was still unable to express, explain, even to himself, how any of this happened.

So he left the page blank, hoping that where words failed him, maybe whoever discovered his body, a week from now, two weeks from now, could see, could intuit, some of the beauty he had seen in his life.

Creepy pasta.

We like pasta. It has carbs and is coated in good juice. But. What if a pasta was creepy? That would be bad. No one would like it. These are the conversations we must have as members of the human race, to consider these things, like what if pasta was creepy instead of normal.

What if I saw a creepy pasta? Maybe I did… it was on a plate at a restaurant. It said some really upsetting things about people with brown skin and trans people and then went on to state a bunch of statistics that are not even true, but it did it in a weird dog-whistly way that I think it thought I was supposed to find funny. The rest of the pasta at the restaurant was really normal and just tasted good, and didn’t say anything about anybody, good or bad.

I said, creepy pasta, you are wrong about all those statistics you just quoted from the weird forums you go to. None of that is even true, and it is insulting that you think I am part of the “in group” for your mean dog whistle jokes. I think trans people and brown people are good, actually. They’re just regular human beings trying to get by like anybody else.

The creepy pasta told me to get on Facebook to debate it. I did not want to and so I didn’t. It called me a racial slur and a coward and said I was just proving its point. I asked how I was proving its point, and it said, oh, so now you want to debate me, and then sent me a gore video from a Mexican cartel and called me a homophobic slur. Then when I didn’t respond it sent me another homophobic slur and then the r-word and also a photo from Google Maps of my apartment and said we know about you now. I said who knows about me now but then it just sent me the flag of the Republic of Kekistan and instructions on how to kill myself. Then later that night it sent me a flashing gif meant to give me a seizure, but I don’t have epilepsy so it didn’t work.

Anyway, I had a cacio e pepe at the restaurant, which was not creepy and tasted very good. The interaction with the creepy pasta, however, did not improve my life. It traced over a picture of my face and tried to turn me into a wojack meme but it didn’t catch on, so it put my sister’s phone number on its forum and she has had to change it twice because she kept getting death threats in the middle of the night.

I would rate the creepy pasta a solid no-way-Jose out of ten

Accidentally sucked in a spider now the gone darned thing is makin webs in my lungs.

The egg sacs I don’t mind, they just tickle a little when they pop. But the webs make it hard for me to breathe good.

Gotta have to take up smoking again.

SPOOKTOBER STORY 8.

In the beginning, there was nothing, forever and forever, except for Stel, the Lady of the Moon. Stel wondered for a long time what that meant, “Lady of the Moon,” since it was just her, there, in that void, and things like “lady” and “moon” and even “of the” meant nothing, since “of the” implies one thing having a relationship to another thing, and there wasn’t another thing. There was just Stel.

Stel didn’t know how she knew that she was the Lady of the Moon or that her name was Stel, she just did, and she wondered if that meant someone else had created her for some reason. She thought about that for a very long time as well, and did not come to any conclusions except that she knew her name was Stel, she was the Lady of the Moon, which was not very much, but she guessed she should do something about it.

So, at what can’t be called the end of a timeless eternity but was just before the start of a timeful eternity so it might be helpful to think about the thing before the beginning of time as the end of a span of time even though such a thing didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t forever except until it did, Stel invented time.

This new thing (time) gave Stel some little measure markers to organize things into a neat row, sort of see things in perspective. It was pretty helpful! She thought about what she should do “first,” a concept she had just made up off the top of her dome.

The “first” thing Stel did now that time existed was invent matter. Bloop! She made a little rock.

Unfortunately, she didn’t think the rock through very well and it was composed of extremely volatile and unstable compounds. It exploded in her hand like a firecracker and created the universe.

Hey, give her a break. It was the first time anyone had done anything like this. She was making it up as she went along!

Stel, the Lady of the Moon, felt pretty overwhelmed. In the beginning, forever and forever, there had been nothing, and now not only was there time, it was filled with a whole bunch of junk floating everywhere! What a mess! She zippy quick invented gravity to try to scoop things together to make them easier to clean up.

All the little chunks of random gas and matter and junk started collecting themselves into convenient spheres, and Stel nodded happily to herself, pleased with her reflexes and quick thinking.

She took another week or so inventing different, better forces to keep the spheres of junk together once gravity had collected them, and she saw that it was good, but that it wasn’t really an end-game, because there was a whole lot of trash everywhere, it was just in balls now.

So, over the next few billions of years she spent time and effort cleaning up the mess, but in doing so, she discovered another new concept: fatigue. She’d cleaned up and destroyed a lot of matter that she had inadvertently created, but there was still a lot more to go, and cleaning was a lot less interesting than creating.

Stel considered this. Was there a way to invent like a destroyer thing, that would do her work for her so she could sit back and think about new things to do instead?

She found a nearby ball of junk and squinted at it. There was an idea brewing in her head, but she hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Something to do with the composition of this ball of junk. If she jazzed it in just the right way, could it… maybe…

Stel, being able to see all of time and possibility, kept one eye way forward in time, and experimented with the ball, until she came across an eventuality that suited her needs. “This will do,” she said, the first words spoken in the Universe since the beginning of time, and then she picked up some random nearby crap and threw it as hard as she could at the ball of junk.

Whammo! The crap hit the junk ball and blasted some of it apart in just such a way that pleased her. It created a lot of heat and high pressure that caused a chain reaction with some of the junk remaining.

Now all she had to do was wait. She went over to the random junk that had been ejected from the junk ball when it was impacted by the crap, which gravity had already started to collect into a rough sphere, locked in an unsteady orbit around the junk ball.

She sat on the accreting junk, which seemed like a good vantage point, and decided to wait and watch what happened. Over millions of years, the heat and pressure she had created by hitting the junk ball with the random crap created little self replicating chains of stuff, and those self replicating chains started replicating in more elaborate and interesting ways. It was fun to watch.

When Stel wasn’t watching the self replicating chains of stuff, she was inventing new dimensions and physical laws to toy around with.

The replicating chains of stuff became bigger and bigger, and developed ways of protecting themselves from the elements. Stel thought it was a hoot.

Some of the chains started destroying the other chains, and it was good.

One particular set of self-replicating chains started spreading over the whole junk ball, destroying a lot of junk in its path, and it was good.

A while after that, the same self-replicating chains started destroying the junk-ball, but Stel wasn’t worried, she could check the width and breadth of all of time whenever she wanted, to make sure the process was continuing correctly, and, it was. Good!

The self-replicating chains destroyed enough of the junk-ball that, as a method of self-preservation, they developed ways of getting off the junk ball and going to other spheres of collected crap. The process repeated whenever they populated a new crap sphere, destroying a lot of it, moving on.

Stel was pleased with her little destructors. They kept developing new methods of destruction that were better and quicker and more effective, zapping whole crap balls out of existence, even (or especially) if it was covered in other destructors.

One day, Stel went into one of the other dimensions she’d invented and created a new branch of metaphysics composed of numbers she’d found scattered around (and it was good), and when she returned, everything was gone. The damn destructor things had destroyed all matter in the universe, even the little ball she sat on, and she was surprised to find that she was saddened by its loss.

“Oh, huh,” she said. “My ball.”

There was nothing for it. They’d done exactly what she’d foreseen they would do. She looked around at the completely empty void, and spent a few days grieving the loss of all the different types of junk, and the destructor things she’d grown fond of, and then moved on with what she was doing. She still didn’t know what “Lady” or “Moon” meant, but at least she’d figured out “of the,” which she supposed was a win.

She created a pyramid made of thought and then destroyed it. She destroyed magnetism for a little, then brought it back. But as she did these things she felt a strange sensation, a little itch, that bothered her. Stel ignored it for a few millennia but after a while the itch became all she thought about, so, she investigated.

It wasn’t in time, it wasn’t in space, it was somewhere in between. She pried open the veil between the two and peeked around, and there it was. One of the self-replicating chains! It had survived! Wow! What a trooper!

It was very old, and had degraded quite a lot, but she shrunk herself down to its size to see what was going on. “Hello,” she said in its clumsy language. “I thought you had all destroyed yourselves, what’s up? How are you doing?”

The last destructor chain lifted the part of itself that could perceive visual wavelengths to perceive hers. “You!” it cried.

“Me,” she agreed. “What’s up?”

“I am the Heleth Nelbik, Trewþe Emperor of All-Space,” croaked the destructor chain, through its severely decayed noise-making parts. “I persist, past Frashoketeri, past the theomachy against Gog and Magog, past the cleansing fire of Elspith’s Gun, and have waited for impossible aeons in my sheltered abomination of desolation, that I may seek a single answer.”

“Oh?” asked Stel, Lady of the Moon. “That’s nice. What would you like answered?”

“My lady,” whispered the chain, through its ruined anatomy. “My question is simple, I only ask… why?”

Stel considered this. She squinted at the chain, trying to divine its meaning. “What?” she asked.

“Why?” it begged, trembling, pulling itself from its throne, collapsing onto the floor of its shelter, its lightwave orbs turned up towards her. “Why?”

“Uhh…” she said, backing away. “What do you mean.”

It crawled towards her, pulling itself on its ruined limbs. “Why…” it gasped. “...the suffering… the defiling… insanity… cruelty… the… the…”

She backed all the way into the corner of the room, watching the ruined chain dragging itself towards her. This was very unpleasant.

“Why? Why? Why?” it screamed at her, before sagging, its energy stores spent.

Stel stared at it for a while. “Um,” she began. “I guess I grabbed some random crap and whipped it at a ball of junk? Does that make sense?”

The rapidly disintegrating self-replicating chain did not move when it spoke. “No.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, anyhow, goodbye.”

The chain lay still and silent, and she saw that it was crumbling at its seams. It seemed very distraught. She reversed its entropy, so that it would persist forever, but removed its ability to interact with her, so that she would not feel that annoying itch any more.

Then, she left, and thought about all of this for a week, then moved on to projects that were more entertaining and forgot about it for forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever.

Everyone I know is dead and I am impaled upon one of the many glass-sharp, sickly antlers protruding from the Wall of Rot, beset by the boiling curse smeared across my flesh which keeps me alive through unknowable and terrible means.

The Fallen Beast stalks the length of the Wall of Rot, inflicting its disease and scourge and torture upon those of us unlucky enough to have survived and be hung. I think I am really getting on its nerves. It plucks my right eye from my head and forces me to eat it.

Once I’ve swallowed the slick viscera of my eyeball, I shrug and say, for the thousandth, thousandth time, “Ah well, these things happen.”

The Fallen Beast really hates it when I do this. It grunts, steam rising from its back, its dozen legs working in frustration. The tortured, bloody chasm of my eye socket begins to regrow the eyeball, each time more painful than the last.

“Ah well, these things happen,” I repeat once more. It tears out my tongue and rips from me my arms and legs. “Ah well, these-” I begin, before it tears out my tongue and eats it.

I wait in darkness, as pain blossoms through me, the boiling curse keeping me alive despite everything, the destroyed parts of my body knitting together in horrific agony. I hear the Fallen Beast stomp away, muttering in bestial grunts to itself. I can’t wait for my tongue to grow back. I know exactly what I’m going to say.

God’s not dead, but He is very sick. He sends out an AM radio broadcast updating everyone on His condition, but by this point, we have all sort of figured it out for ourselves. The gossamer veil between Heaven and Earth had started to degrade a few months ago. Plague and famine spread across the lands, the animals left somehow, the crops turned black, fallen Seraphim, driven mad with some unknowable hunger, convened on Vatican City and started feasting on locuses of holy artifacts. I, myself, saw some wild shit crawling up the stairs of the Queens Plaza Station and went insane for about three weeks, but I’m better now.

“Hi guys,” God says, His voice crackling over the medium-wave AM band He chose for some reason. His voice lacks any identifiable accent or timbre, maybe a side effect of compression, but maybe He just sounds like that. “Hate to do this, I’m more a hands off sort of watchmaker guy, but I figured I should give you a heads-up. Been feeling pretty bad for a while now, and from what they’re telling me, it’s not going to get better. So uh… hi, and bye. This was fun, you guys were fun.”

Our makeshift bunker is silent except for the hiss of the radio for a while. I really have to pee, but I figure I should stick around to hear what else He has to say.

“Um. I really liked The Stooges, you were really doing something there. Didn’t read as much as I should have, but I liked the King James translation, that was fun. Movies… movies… you ever see Airport? 1970, Burt Lancaster picture. Exciting stuff. The Japanese got food right, but I guess you know that already. Oh, and jollof rice, jollof rice is great. Nailed it.

“Anyhow. Sorry about everything. I didn’t do things as good as I could have, I was just sort of making stuff up as I went. Er… what else. You could have done less war, I sort of told you guys not to murder right off the bat, but whatever. Oh, and, and, being gay is okay, all right? You can be gay or straight or bi or whatever. Just to clarify, I don’t really care about any of that.

“Okay. Anyway. I’ll try to get to a few more prayers before I’m, uh, done. Gone. Goodbye. Thanks. Sorry again.”

The transmission ends. Everyone else in the bunker is very excited by the broadcast, and start shouting at each other. I take the opportunity to sneak a tin of stewed peaches off the shared food shelf, take it to my bunk, and eat it in secret. Stewed peaches, I think to myself, are good.

SPOOKTOBER STORY 4.

Got a devil in my basement
Sez he wants to eat my dog
Already give him sister’s cat
But he’s a big dog hog

I say ‘devil you are greedy’
The devil laugh and shrug
I say ‘devil have a pretzel’
Give devil pretzel nug

Devil eats nugget quick
Says ‘ok dog time now’
Give him another pretzel
Tell him dog is not for chow

He eats another pretzel
And another after that
Feeding devil lots of pretzels
Now the devil’s getting fat

He likes the nugs with mustard
He likes the nugs with cheese
He likes cinnamon and sugar
But he never does say please :(

One day, a wicked fox stole all of the children from the village. Many of the parents were upset by this, and begged the old farmer, who was the leader of the village, to go talk to the fox and ask for their children back. The old farmer put down his pitchfork and picked up his walking cane, and for a day and night and day again climbed up the mountain to the fox’s den, as the sun was setting and the shadows were growing long. The fox met him at the entrance.

“Hello, wicked fox,” said the old farmer.

“Hello, old farmer,” said the wicked fox.

“Did you steal all of our children?” inquired the old farmer.

“Yes, that’s right,” replied the wicked fox. “I needed them for my wicked forest experiments.”

“I see,” said the old farmer. “May we please have them back?”

“No,” replied the wicked fox. “But I will give you something even better. This is a magic seed,” and upon saying this placed a small seed into the old farmer’s wizened hand, “and if you take it back to your village and plant it in the middle of the town square, and tend to it with water and sunlight, by the time it has opened its first flower, you will all have forgotten your woes, and the lives of everyone in the village will have improved tenfold. You will all have many new children and live prosperous lives you cannot even imagine.”

The old farmer accepted the seed with thanks, and walked down the mountain for a night and day and another night, and the fox returned to his wickedness.

Another day and a half later, the old farmer returned to the wicked fox’s den.

“Hello, old farmer,” said the wicked fox.

“Hello, wicked fox,” said the old farmer. “Everyone is very angry with me for taking this magic seed and leaving our children in your wicked clutches. I would like the children please.”

“Yes, that was very foolish of you,” conceded the wicked fox, taking the proffered magic seed. “I do not know why you did that.”

“I think that perhaps you placed a glamour on me, or befuddled my mind with wicked forest magic,” said the old farmer.

“No,” said the wicked fox. “You are simply somewhat stupid.”

“I see,” replied the old farmer, sullenly. “Well anyhow, may I please have the children back.”

“No,” said the wicked fox once more. “I am not done with my wicked forest experiments yet. However, I can solve your problem, which is even better. It is right that a leader be wise, and you are dim as a moonless night. Take this powder, and mix in with your evening glass of wine. Within a week you will be a wise and just leader, within a year, you will be among the wisest leaders who have ever lived, and within ten years, courts of kings and sultans will send envoys, seeking your wisdom, and you will be celebrated through time and time and time forever forward, talked about in songs and manuscripts and so forth.”

The old farmer accepted the powder with thanks, and walked down the mountain once more.

Another day and a half later, the old farmer returned for the third time to the wicked fox’s den.

“Okay. They said taking the powder was even worse than the seed. Everyone is extremely incensed with me and say that if I don’t come back with the children then I should not come back at all,” said the old farmer. His face was drawn and sallow.

“Yes,” said the wicked fox. “It was very strange that you didn’t ask questions or anything. You are pretty astoundingly uncurious about the world around you. Anyway, I have been really going to town on these village children for a pretty long time now, there’s not very many of them left. I don’t even know if you’d want the ones who are around any more.”

“I have to come back with the children,” explained the old farmer. “The villagers are really quite insistent.”

“Here’s what I’ll do for you,” said the wicked fox. “I’ll do you one better. This is a magic bucket, and whatever-”

“No no,” interrupted the old farmer. “None of that. No magic bucket, no magic seeds, no magic powder. I need to return to the village, with the children, there is no way around it.”

“Well…” conceded the wicked fox. “I guess you’re really standing your ground on this one. You’ve really talked me into a corner here. You’re a great negotiator.”

“Thank you,” said the old farmer.

The wicked fox removed a small ring from a satchel, placed it upon his finger, and gestured grandly, appearing to perform some sort of wizardry. “There you go,” said the wicked fox. “You have convinced me. The children have been returned to the village, and all is well. You should return there, and you will find the children asleep in their beds.”

The old farmer thanked the wicked fox, pleased with his cunning, and turned to the dense forest surrounding the den. “It’s all right!” he shouted. “You can come out now. The children are asleep back in the village, I have convinced the wicked fox of the errors of his ways!”

The parents from the village emerged from their hiding spots behind brush and tree, as they had followed the old farmer to the den, to observe the interaction. The baker frowned and spoke: “Old farmer, you are a dunderhead who has ruined everything, and you do not deserve to live.”

The parents from the village attacked the old farmer and hacked away at him with rather dull garden implements. It took him a long time to die, and when he did, they continued hacking, until he was mostly just a sticky red paste in the dirt in front of the den. The wicked fox watched all this impassively, and when they were done, he spoke.

“Okay, okay, point made. You can have back what’s left of your children.” He stepped aside and waved the parents inside the den. “Feel free to take any pieces of them you find along the way, I don’t need them any more.”

And so, this story is concluded.

Do not trust a wicked fox, even if he offers you powders or seeds, it will get you painfully hacked to death by dull garden implements.

I have stopped leaving out ghost pellets, and the ghost has gotten quite angry with me. “I cannot afford ghost pellets any more,” I tell it, or I try to, speaking out loud in the empty foyer, hoping the ghost is around to hear. “I am on a fixed income, I am old and cannot work any more. I can barely afford food for myself.”

The ghost howls and breaks some of my things. “Oh nooo,” I say, and “Dammit you,” but I know this is improper ghost etiquette, as ghosts do not respond well to negative reinforcement.

“That’s okay,” I say, picking up the pieces of the plates George and I bought on our honeymoon, and I am crying quite a lot. “You’re okay. I understand you are just upset about the ghost pellets. I will give you some now and again but it can’t be an everyday thing, okay?”

The ghost says “hooooo,” and a door slams several times somewhere upstairs.

“You will be okay,” I tell the ghost, although I do not think things will be okay. “You will be okay.”

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As it turns out, the world 𝘪𝘴 a vampire.

One that can be slain.

But it is 𝘐, Jon, who was sent as a secret destroyer.

To hold the vampire world and expose it to flame.

As for my pain, well, you’ll see.

I knew. I still know.

The guild saw me, cool and cold.

I’ve done well thus far.

In order to remain undetected I strip naked and paint my body midnight blue.

I paint my teeth, too, because I tend to smile as I smite.

I get the sense that my fellow guild members don’t believe in me.

They laugh at my naked form.

Slay the vampire, they say.

Slay the world.

Why don’t they do it?

Why won’t they help me?

The townsfolk need a spectacle, they say.

They need the novice to stand in glory.

To create a new legend.

I think I get it.

I feel the urge.

The support, however ethereal.

There can only be one, and the only one is me.

I grab my staff and my knuckles whiten.

The reincarnate.

They who made the sea stand still.

They who must be reborn.

They who must die once more, and then again.

I stand, backed only by spirit but not by force.

Alone.

I venture.

I journey.

I quest.

And yet, despite all my rage, I am still just a level 2 mage.

TEN YEARS OF SPOOKTOBER STORIES: A CONVERSATION WITH JON PHILLIPS

When I meet Jon Phillips on the patio of his Malibu home, he’s painting a pointillist landscape from memory. He stands back, peering, trying to get the clouds right, and begins to dab again with the brush. He’s healthy, lithe, his full head of black hair well coiffed and shot through with a little respectable grey, marking his thirty-five years. He’s clean shaven, and his lean, handsome face is tan and unlined by worry or self-doubt.

It’s a far cry from how most of us know him, playing a distorted version of himself on the hit “Spooktober Stories,” which is beginning its tenth year this October 1st.

The “Jon Phillips” in that show never left Phillips’ real-life university town of Milwaukee, is an underachieving slob, a layabout ne’er-do-well who fancies himself an undiscovered creative genius (despite never actually creating anything other than the titular ‘Spooktober Stories,’ which he inexplicably posts on Facebook just one month a year), can’t hold down a steady job, sabotages his relationships, and struggles to accomplish even the most basic tasks. ‘A schlub without much of a future,’ as the Spooktober Stories series bible succinctly describes him.

The real Jon Phillips hops off the patio with an athlete's grace to walk and talk with me through his elaborate garden, which he takes pride in growing and maintaining himself. I compliment him at maintaining such peak physical prowess, despite being best known for playing a role that’s quite the opposite.

“I always feel lighter when I’m not carrying him around,” he says, patting his belly and laughing. (Phillips is a streamlined 150 pounds, but to portray his rather more sedentary alter-ego, he has to go through a grueling makeup process every morning, concealing well-defined muscles, adding jowls, the beard, deep eye bags, putting in crooked, yellow teeth, and then strapping on a *sixty-five pound* prosthetic belly, sometimes heavier, depending on how hard “Jon” has been hitting the McDonalds and the McKenna that season.)

Phillips has a complicated relationship with the character. “He’s a comic character, obviously, and we’re supposed to laugh at his bumbling personal failures and rapidly disintegrating mental capacities, but honestly, sometimes I feel sorry for him. This could easily have been me, if I never did anything with my life, if I just gave up. But then sometimes I get really angry with him. I just want to reach through to him and scream in his face, ‘what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing! Why aren’t you doing anything! Please, God, please, you’ve wasted your whole f---ing life!’”

He stares off into the distance, ruminating on what he’s said, but soon enough the shadow passes from his face, and he turns to me with a boyish, charming, full-toothed smile. There’s always a twinkle in the real Jon Phillips’ eye, a little mischievous glint, and I joke that getting rid of that to achieve the famous dull-eyed glaze for “Jon Phillips” the character must take an extra hour in the makeup chair.

Jon laughs. “No joke, I’ve gotten in so much trouble for that. I’m always supposed to be avoiding certain lights and turning my head just so, and… Jessie [Fievan, series director of all ten years of Spooktober Stories] will shout ‘Less joy! Less joy! You’re supposed to hate yourself, get rid of that g-d-damned zeal for life, Phillips!’ It’s a struggle. It’s a struggle.”

Before I leave, I ask him, should we start gearing up for ten more years of Spooktober Stories?

“I think if we pretended with the direction his life is going that Jon was going to live another ten more years, CinemaSins would send a trained hit squad to ding us to death,” he chides, referencing the popular YouTube series that ‘dings’ when there are factual inaccuracies in movies and television. “No, no, we won’t hang it up prematurely, but I think when a natural ending presents itself, we’ll take it.”

“Besides,” he muses, walking me to the door. “It’s hard enough to watch a relatively young miserable bastard failure not doing anything. If I had to watch a program about a middle-aged miserable bastard failure not doing anything I think I’d shoot myself in my own f---ing head.”

WELCOME TO SPOOKTOBER STORIES: SEASON 10.

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The Planting, Part 2.

That morning, which morning I did not know for I no longer counted the days, the sky was painted orange and I felt its warmth on my bark and the thick curve of each of my leaves, and drank goodly from it. I now looked down on the plot of land which was my own, and saw my friends and felt it soon would be time again to change in the way which I did each year, the change which the chill of the first winds asked of me, and the change felt good.

Then I still retained some hearing and some sight, but it was as through a veil of gossamer, a distant sensation remembered but not present in the place I lived, and I could see the field, and I could see the dirt road leading to Mr. Friend’s field, not used for years, now, for the field around me was overgrown and I no longer thought of it as Mr. Friend’s field but as my own, and I could hear my birds and I could hear the swaying of the grasses, and I could see far, for these past years I had grown some many rings and some many branches and I now towered as high as the treeline that obscured the road to town.

There was an ugly sound, a gutteral, grunting sound, that I did not recognize, or almost did not recognize, but it reminded me of another time, another place I had been, and it grew louder and my hearing was no longer distant but I focused on it intently, and my leaves trembled with it, for what it reminded me of was not a pleasant time nor place. And then a second sound, which I realized was coming from the trees, and it was laughter, ugly laughter, the ugly laughter of three men which had planted me here many long years ago. Then I grew scared, and fear seeped up my trunk like sour water, and I could taste the fear.

Mr. Tice’s Studebaker sneaked out from between old old oaks and grumbled and grunted its way to the bare earth before me where in these long years nothing had ever grown, stained as it was with ugly things that I could not name. The Studebaker was worn, rusted, and barely able to move, but it moved, and in it it carried Mr. Tice and Mr. Friend, but Mr. Miller was not with them, and for this at least I felt some relief.

I saw to my surprise that Mr. Tice and Mr. Friend were old, now, the roundness of their backs bulging through their threadbare cotton shirts, their hair thinning and shot with gray. They were both smoking, and their near constant, manic laughter coughed clouds of smoke from lungs that I could almost see through their chests, throbbing with their laughter, their bones jangling loose inside them, their skin jangling loose atop.

They were speaking in between bouts of crazed giggling and their words sounded alien to me, I could not follow their words as I knew I once could, and they passed a bottle between themselves and though I tried I could not work out their intent. Were they here to finally destroy me, had they brought axes and saws and hammers to destroy me, even now, had they remembered, were they here to do as they had intended, years ago?

They tottled around to the Studebaker’s trunk and opened it, and I thought, here it is, here are the tools of my destruction, but instead they hauled out a young man, black as wet earth and dressed in an undershirt and briefs, his hands bound behind his back with jute twine. They danced around him, joking in their cruel way which was familiar to me, and dragged him to my base, to my roots.

Never did they look at me. They had forgotten me. I felt a sensation which I had long lost, but I found with a readiness which surprised me, and it filled me with warmth, but not the goodly warmth of the sun, but a burning, a fire, and I recognized it as anger. Fury. There was a horrible fury building inside of me. Not just at their actions towards this man, or the sorrow which they subjected me to long ago, but for being forgotten, forgotten! Bitter fire spread through me.

They handed the young man a spade and insisted he dig with wrists still bound behind him. He lay curled on one shoulder, and I could see now he was weeping, his face covered in sores from where they had beaten him, and he scratched at the soil at my base ineffectively, barely moving an inch at a time. They ignored him and leaned against the Studebaker, conversing, passing the bottle back and forth, watching the young man’s impossible task with disinterest.

Mr. Tice leaned over to Mr. Friend and whispered something, and that brought Mr. Friend’s laughing fit back. I watched down on them in my fury and did not know what to do. I prayed to God in Heaven for guidance. I wished lightning and roaring wildfire upon them, I wished for tornadoes and flood, for rot to fill their trunks and for sickness to weaken and blight their branches, and for blindness and disease.

But I could not reach them, for I was not able to move, nor speak, nor did God strike them down. Mr. Friend trod forth and spat hard on the boy, who had lost hold of the spade, and hauled him up to his knees and cut loose the twine with his bowie knife, and bade him dig hard and dig deep at my feet, which he began to do.

One long and spiteful Winter weakened me terribly, I tasted no sustenance and felt my own death riding near, a chill ran through me which I could not temper. I grew stooped and crooked, and even with the coming of a late Spring, my new branches paled and were laid through with weaknesses like brittle bones. The hale years which followed allowed them strength, but still I felt their weaknesses, spiraling, hidden fault lines which crossed their breadth.

I grew five new branches that bad year, four which came with faults, and I saw now that two of these laid over the dig site, over the young man, over the old men, over the rotting Studebaker.

And I found, with careful pressure

with careful pressure, at the right juncture, at the joint that I could feel the line’s crest

The fault burst and the first branch, a long, thin branch, but heavy, for it had grown in these past years, cracked off my body, and it crashed down upon the Studebaker’s windshield, bursting it and caving inward, knocking the steering wheel from its column, scattering glass and plastic through the cabin.

The old men leapt and cursed and tossed aside their cigarettes and the nearly empty bottle, and held their heads in their hands and circled the vehicle, its body caved. They howled and were no longer in such a hilarious mood, and chattered and cussed.

In their distraction, the young man with the spade rose, and instead of running away, as I had wished him to do, ran towards Mr. Tice with the spade raised, and brought it down on him. Mr. Tice turned quickly away and caught it on his shoulder, but it was a new spade with a sharp edge and went deep, separating tissue down to the bone. Mr. Tice cried out and swung a fist at the man, but missed, and the man used his foot to push Mr. Tice down and pull out the spade from the meat to protect himself from Mr. Friend, but Mr. Friend had gotten to him already and was tearing at his face and eyes with his fingernails.

They collapsed down in the dirt, and I had another branch I could loose with some effort but I did not want to hurt the young man. They rolled, and there was blood from both, the young man was knocked about the face by Mr. Friend’s open palmed hand, and they both screamed an awful, animal sound. The spade fell aside, and the young man looked as if he was lost, but then, he rolled over with a quick flip of his mass and pinned Mr. Friend down, down, his face in my dirt, and Mr. Friend could not breathe, he could not breathe and he could not reach the young man to pull him away, who was holding him by the scruff of his hair with one hand and pressing down on his neck with the other, and Mr. Friend jerked, and writhed, and jerked, and then lay limp in the pale earth.

The young man stood, and went over to Mr. Tice, who was rolling around on the dirt and moaning something terrible, and did something that I could not see, and then Mr. Tice was still and silent.

The young man thought for a very long time, and then he began to dig. He dug two deep holes and he buried Mr. Tice and Mr. Friend at the base of my roots, and he cursed my roots in his digging but I did not mind. He put dirt back on top of them, and got into the Studebaker, and drove it some where, and then returned hours later, and spat on the ground where he had buried Mr. Tice and Mr. Friend, twice, and then patted his hands on his bare and wounded thighs, and began to walk back towards the road.

I have not seen anyone since. I no longer see nor hear. I am happy. The seasons or years I have seen since have been good. I am well watered by the rain. I am safe. I am well fed by the bodies of Mr. Tice and Mr. Friend.