Category: Writing Playground

Write a story about an experience with Uber/Lyft.

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Her car was mostly well kept. I took off my earbuds to be polite and stepped in.

She turned to greet me. Her hair was a deep red. She looked not much older than me, but definitely older.

“Hi, how are ya doing tonight?”

“Pretty good! You know, I actually just dyed my hair back to black.” I said.

Her eyes brightened and she smiled. “Ooh, what color was it before?”

“See, I’d been swimming for a while, so it was turning like a weird orange-brown, then I decided to make it black again today.”

“Like the Amy Winehouse song: Back to blaaaaack.” she sang.

“Ha. Yeah.”

“Mine’s dyed too actually. My natural hair is like a super duper light blonde.”

I looked over again guiltily to confirm I hadn’t seen her hair wrong this whole time. “No kidding?”

“Yup. In high school I did pink, green, purple, whatever.” She smiled and stopped speaking to focus on backing out of the driveway. “Your color too! I was actually black haired most of senior year.”

“Oh wow.” I paused for a moment to decide if I should to tell her my other story involving hair dye. “Ya know, I was actually blue haired for a bit — on accident.”

She laughed. “On accident?! What do you mean?”

“Okay, so a few months ago I wanted to go light brown, but I didn’t bleach it enough so it ended up like, half-baked.”

She gave me an expression that seemed like it couldn’t decide between pity and excitement. “Uh huh.”

“Then a few weeks later my friend was like ‘Why don’t we try again?’ So we picked up a new bottle of bleach and dye and she suggested we mix it with the leftover dye from before… and then something crazy happened, I guess.”

“Oh my god!”

“Yeah, I don’t know what, like, insane chemistry was going on in my hair then,” I waved my hands wildly around my head for added effect. “…but I guess brown plus slightly darker brown makes blue!”

“That’s wicked! You know in my workplace, they don’t let you have weird hair colors. They’d never let me get away with blue.”

“But your hair is dyed. It’s red. I mean, what’s the cutoff for too risque hair?”

“Right?! Who knows. But tattoos, piercings, and jeans are allowed.” She said, raising a finger as she listed each item.

I considered what to say next. The tires started to grind against rougher pavement; we were leaving West Haven. I asked, “Do you have any tattoos?”

“Yeah, actually! My entire back is done.”

“Whoa, really? I thought about it once but I don’t really have anything like, worth tattooing.”

“Yep. I got five different tattoos from when I was 18 to 23. One for the most important event of each year.”

“Whoa.” That’s crazy, I thought. Crazy but awesome. “What would you say was the best one? You know, like the best best event?”

She turned to me and let out a kind of practiced laugh. “Ha, well I’d have to go with 23, my divorce.”

“Yeah? What does that one look like?”

“Well, it’s a bird.” Her mouth formed what resembled a smile, but it was one of those expressions you could tell was stowing emotion between the lines of her face. She continued, “And right next to that bird are the words:

This
might
make
sense
later.”

I wondered about the significance of those words for a moment.

“That’s clever. I really like that.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you have any idea what it could’ve meant back then?”

“Nope, and I still don’t.”

I chuckled. “Wow.”

Of course I wondered about it. And I wondered some more for the rest of the ride until our conversation became noise.

I didn’t ask to see how it looked, but I wondered what kind of bird it was.

I wondered about all the different possible meanings of her tattoo, of how the bird on her back could represent her future love, maybe a pearly white dove, so the words indicate how her divorce is validated once she finds somebody better for herself.

Or maybe it was like Maya Angelou’s poem about the caged bird, the one that sings of freedom, personifying the breadth of new possibility divorce from a failed marriage could bring.

Maybe still, it was to demonstrate how life plans are often winding and unpredictable (like, say, the decision to get a permanent tattoo that means nothing yet), so the words serve as a constant, bodily reminder that one day she’ll make sense of it all, or not.

I wondered about why she picked a bird, instead of a butterfly, since a butterfly would better symbolize the consequence of choice. I thought it was possible she was holding out for that tiniest chance, the right miracle where coincidentally, a bird of some form (be it figurative or literal) would eventually come to represent a significant moment in her life.

And from there, she could assume all the ensuing profundity of getting it tattooed back when she was 23.

Or maybe, I’d thought, maybe she just felt like birds that day.

And for some reason, what seemed like the most mundane answer was just as compelling as the wild others I’d dreamt up.

I thought hard about it, about how those five words might fit together so well, about how even the most polar interpretations worked in tandem, not against each another.

I thought about how a meaningless tattoo could seem to make more and more sense the more I thought about it, and then I lost myself in that spiral of thinking.

“Well, here we are. I hope you have a nice night.”

“Yeah, you too. Take care.” I opened the door and stepped out. We exchanged a glance for another moment before we both turned away.

I stood outside her car, awestruck and shaking from the cold Fair Haven air. I thought for a moment that this was all just my late night musings running wild, that there wasn’t any extra meaning to be uncovered with her spur-of-the-moment bird tattoo.

But whatever—I mean, this might make sense later.

Write a short story based on those four keywords. Seriously (prompt suggested by a friend).

It had been exactly 26 hours, 4 minutes, and 53 seconds since Liam Prescott had last gotten out of bed, and it would be another half-day or so before he would even think about climbing back in.

A time-release caffeine dose, dosage carefully determined over a fortnight before, along with a life-shortening concoction of fatigue and anxiety reducing chemistry—had been self-administered from the moment he woke up, all in the effort to accelerate the completion of an absurd scientific goal: what was now the ninth in a series of failed attempts to bridge the lifeless reality of his underground laboratory to another distant location in the universe.

Well, Liam himself would describe the vibrant, verdant, meticulously constructed and lair as “lifeless,” but any outsider (if any outsider were able find it, that is) would probably jump to tell you that the advanced facility, with its metal and glass interior, dense flora, bright interfaces and alien-looking technology, had to be literally anything but.

Still Liam would now consider it lifeless, as he has for every day for the last twelve years.

Liam swiveled circularly about in his chair and promptly flipped a series of switches whose positions had long been committed to muscle memory. One was labeled “U POWER,” another “LP INTERFACE,” and the last, flashing, red one “IGNITION”.

He opened his day-pack to retrieve two objects in a single motion. The first was a small device, deceptively simple in its controls, and the other was a sort of keychain brooch attached to the device on a loop that looked hastily machined to the top.

Liam slowly folded open the circular, brushed silver brooch to find the last remaining physical memory of his lost soul mate, as he had done all eight attempts before.

“Jane, this is for you.”

The recently appointed Dr. Liam Prescott had never gone shopping for home decor before, but then again, neither had his newly-wedded wife.

Jane Prescott spoke with a voice that was soft but sure, “Liam, I really like all these pretty, modern designs we’ve got, but we could really do with some plants too.”

Liam was not in the business of disagreeing with his beautiful wife, a genius plant biologist in her own right, and likely a much better manager of home Décor.

“What kind were you thinking?”

Jane’s eyes lit up the same way a child’s might when told their curfew has been abolished for New Year’s Eve. “Well, we have plenty of extra space down there. I was thinking of maybe starting a tree garden.”

And so, like clockwork, the couple immediately set off to acquire 50 dozen peach tree cuttings, 51 dozen ceramic pots (in case some broke in transit), 2 metric tons of soil, a lifetime’s supply of fertilizer, and all the necessary components that they would  modify and augment into the cutting-edge system behind the first self-watering, self-picking, self-sustaining superfarm of the Prescott Family Advanced Underground Research and Design Facility.

…

“Wow.”

“It’s gorgeous, right?” Liam glanced at his wife with bright eyes and then back at their recent accomplishment. “And the trees are pretty neat too, I suppose.”

Jane giggled. “God damn it, Liam.”

Betraying her previous statement, Jane took her new husband by the hand and turned to face the endless rows of peach saplings.

“It’s still missing the final touch.”

Jane opened her bag and started towards the nearest tree. She began to lay a set of meticulously embroidered doilies, each surrounding a single sprout in the superfarm. The widths of their openings were much greater than the trunks they now encircled, but the idea was that they would all eventually grow to fill out their embroidery.

Liam let out one final protest of the strange idea, mostly in jest, “They look like towels, Jane.”

“Oh shut up.”

Each set was meant to detail a significant event in their lives, from early childhood to college to their marriage; it was all carefully recorded in the cloth of the trees. She had hoped, perhaps naively so, that they would eventually get to see all the trees grow in due time, filling out the tapestry of encoded history in homage to their life together. Jane left a few dozen unclothed trees for future special moments to be embroidered.

She placed the final doily; its winding, clumsily sewed threads depicted the scene of the first time the pair had met: two bright, young minds colliding in the MIT Jameson Biophysics Computation Laboratory. They sat on a bench outside the building, sharing the exhaustive list of things they’d hope to accomplish one day.

Jane finished and walked back, and Liam embraced his wife in his arms for the last time.

He closed the brooch, which was filled with a cutting of her face from the lovingly embroidered scene of that fateful encounter, rather unable to handle the raw emotion of the first and last day they had spent together as a wedded couple.

“I’m so sorry, it was my fault.” Liam said aloud, unaware that he had even done so.

The “towels” of the trees had since been mostly filled, and a few had even stretched until they’d snapped. The first broken memory corresponded (not coincidentally) with the first time Liam decided he would attempt the impossible: to retrieve the woman he lost in what could only be described as a bizarre collision of unfortunate circumstance and insane coincidence during a breakthrough-of-the-century scientific experiment—one whose theoretical formalism was only just beginning to be developed by a select body of fourteen appallingly intelligent applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists the world over.

Still, one decade-and-two-years ago, Dr. Liam Prescott had alone managed to uncover the secret to generating negative energy densities, produced the sufficient quantities of exotic matter to contain them, and constructed the necessary bounding apparatus that (he had thought) would be enough to safely assemble and maintain an actual, miniature wormhole for study in the underground depths of the Prescott laboratory. He was almost correct.

But that miscalculation, slight as it was in nature, would go on to haunt his memory forever.

Soon after the elusive Einstein-Rosen bridge had successfully taken shape, Liam at once found himself utterly unable to—for lack of a better term with any remotely understandable analogy—”close” it, before the growing vacuum had already swallowed his better half, along with much of the peach tree farm they’d built together and the facility’s advanced machinery, through its forceful, relentless pull.

Their destination, he had worked out, was a planet orbiting the habitable zone of the red dwarf star system Kepler-186, a distant 151 parsecs from Earth. Despite this astronomically lucky terminus for a living and breathing human being, the survival of his wife after all this time appeared, at best, a distant pipe dream, and one that continued to dwindle by day.

Eight times already he had tried; eight attempts at reproducing the exact conditions to reopen the portal and find Jane. All had failed.

On two or three occasions he even succeeded at the first task, but the automated tools and apparatus of retrieval proved inadequate each time. The personal ticking time-bombs of the remaining embroidery, which continued to stretch and fall apart with the growth of the now unmaintained garden, along with Liam’s own aging body and mind, forced him into a very difficult decision:

He would go into the void himself, body thoroughly covered in a composite protective suit, and attached by intangible forces to his most advanced and powerful iteration of radial servo motor, designed to pull them straight out of the volatile gateway when the deed was done. Liam was going to attempt to save Jane himself.

If he failed, after all, at least they would be together.

Device in hand, keychain brooch dangling, and thoroughly suited head-to-toe, Liam began a series of operations he had mentally ran through countless times already.

The main interface read “ASSEMBLY and CONTAINMENT: T-30 seconds,” and the entire underground laboratory—what was left of it by then, at least—shook about in protest of its final experiment. The three arms of the silicon carbide containment unit emitted exotic forces yet unknown to the greater scientific community, and in an instant, a perfectly targeted wormhole had taken shape in the now trembling apparatus, something he made absolutely sure of this time through months of intense deliberation and calculation.

Liam took one last look at the home they had built and once hoped to spend the rest of their lives together in, before descending into the abyss.

“Jane, I’m coming for you.”

What is your favorite quote of all time? What gives it that status?

Being satisfied with my response, I decided to ask her, “So what’s your favorite quote?”

Harper wasted no time in considering her answer. “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

“Huh. What’s that from?”

“The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s about an infinite library of hexes that contains every possible combination of letters on 410-page books.”

“It wouldn’t be infinite, then.”

“Practically it would be.” Harper looked down at the ground for a moment and I reacted by facing my side, indifferently. We turned back at around the same time.

“It’s a wonderful idea, Max.” Her eyes grew wider. “Imagine a collection of literally every possible book. That library would have to contain all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Feynman lectures, Beethoven’s unfinished symphony encoded into alphabetic characters, long-form solutions to the Riemann hypothesis, P equals NP, and the twin prime conjecture—every book ever written, and every book that could be written, just waiting to be discovered.”

I paused a brief moment to take that all in. “Most of it would be nonsense, wouldn’t it?” I said, “Pretty much all of it, actually.”

“Yeah and the book explores that. But the nonsense isn’t the point, Max. Everything takes up the same amount of space; there’s nothing to privilege the ‘meaningful’ from the ‘meaningless.’ English isn’t the only way to encode 26 latin characters into words.”

Harper continued nonchalantly, thoroughly ignoring my bewildered expression indicating that this was just about the most interesting rant I’ve ever listened to, “To speak is to fall into tautology. That’s another Borges quote. Words can only ever mean whatever meaning you decide to give them.”

“…So, they’re like life?” I blurted out, “Each word is an infinity of possible interpretations.”

“If you want to be platitudinal, sure.”

I frowned.

“I’m kidding.” said Harper, smiling, “And yes, each word is like an infinity, which makes the Library an infinity of infinities. It’s a tool to show just how absurd the ideas of semantics and meaning are.” Harper looked back at me with a pair of brilliant, amber eyes, presumably finished with her speech.

I carefully matched her eye contact. “It’s beautiful—er… like, the idea… I mean.”

She laughed. “Why thank you.”