Poll?

Discordant

You were the chief architect of the Tacoma Narrow's Bridge project.

You had a lot of freetime in 1941 as nobody really wanted to hire an architect whose bridge fell down so spectacularly.

You spent ten years going over the calculations, trying to find what you had done wrong. None of the theories you found ever added up to you.

Everyone else had moved on long ago, having accepted the half-baked "wind-speed matching the bridge's natural harmonics" theory.

Eventually you came to the conclusion that there was no rational explanation left for the collapse of the bridge, which left only, magic!

You spent the next 25 years training in Akido and trying to track down those who had magically wronged you. In 1976, when you had bested every swordsmen in your dojo, you take out the address given to you by your source. It contained the name of agency in downtown L.A. which he said contained the coven of witches you were after.

You conceal your wooden bokken sword in an architectural tube, sling it across your back and point your bike towards vengeance.

"Calamor Designs" was on the third floor of a five story office building. You take the elevator up, and are greeted by a young secretary with a dark bowl cut, she apologetically tells you that everyone is in a meeting right now, and gestures towards a set of 4 seats and some magazines. She asks if she can get you anything.

"Yes, the last 30 years of my career back!"

You unsheathe your bokken from your back and strike her across the face before she can react, she crumples out of sight behind the desk.

You burst into the conference room. There are 5 middle-aged woman all dressed in long flowing dresses. One of them is standing by an easel, frozen in the act of flipping a page. The other 4 are seated around a round wooden table. They turn towards you.

"Before I finish you, tell me one thing, why did you do it?"

One woman rises from her chair slowly, but unafraid. She has long curly black hair and a darker dress than the others. You are struck by her eyes, and all that is implied by them.

"We have done nothing to you."

Your knuckles whiten and your hands redden as you clutch your sword tighter.

"You have ruined me!" you scream.

"You ruined yourself," she replies calmly. She gestures to the woman at the easel, who flips the large pages back to the beginning of the presentation entitled "Transverse Vibrational forces of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge".

She then goes about explaining how the support plate design and poorly tethered suspension cables went about to force the bridge to act as it did, and how it was inevitable that the environmental variables would eventually be perfect to cause in a resonant event which could only end in the bridge's collapse.

At the end you nod, the understanding washing over you.

It was your fault.

You look around sheepishly, sheathe your sword, and get up to leave. At the door to the conference room you look back to say something, but words fail you.

In the lobby, you see the secretary has pieces of blood-soaked kleenex in her nose, and is holding a sweating Tab can to one side of it.

You manage to stutter out a vague apology, on your way towards the elevator.

"Buzz off Geek!", she snarls.

You avoid her gaze as the elevator doors close.

Disappointing Spider

You are a spider on a park bench, and you are going to die.

The park bench seemed like a good idea at the time. Plenty of right angled structures for webs, and the strewn human crumbs guarantee some sort of insect activity.

But in practice, it didn't work so well. Shoes, bookbag straps, dropped napkins were always f-ing up your web. On top of that, the park bench is behind a big flat wall of a building, that really seemed to scoop a lot of strong winds half the time. So you waste a majority of your day just clinging with dear life to the wood, trying not to be blown away like a newborn.

In fact, if it hadn't been for a lost ant who just up and died nearby, you would be dead already.

You start making excuses. Bad genes. Inclimate weather conditions resulting in slow local insect maturation. But that's all a bunch of BS. You are the result of 2 billion iterations of successful spiders before you. You were born alongside hundreds of other nearly genetically identical brothers and sisters plenty of who are squatting over their own blossoming egg sacks already.

You just have to face up to it. You have only yourself to blame. You just didn't want it bad enough. You don't deserve to be consumed by the living glory of the next generation. You picked the park bench since you pretty much landed on it, and were too lazy to look for better wares. You half expected the flies to impale themselves, pre-wrapped onto your fangs.

In the end, you just weren't very good at being a spider, and it's probably a good thing that you won't be one for very much longer.

Revolution Revolution

Our hero is sitting in a row of interlocked chairs at the DMV, awaiting his number to be called. You might mistake him for a math professor, with his patched tweed suit, and his habit of holding a fist underneath his chin for head support.

He moves deliberately, head turning to examine the piles of magazines, pausing to judge the relative distance of both stacks near him, as if weighing the joint pain against the opportunity to reading a 3 month old issue of Time.

Presumably he decides against it, as instead he grips his cane with two hands, setting it squarely in front of him. He squints to make out the clock on the far wall, tilting his head up to attain the last bit of needed clarity. It is 1 minute to 9 o'clock. With an effort, he extends his left arm in front of him, comparing the dials on his wrist to those of the wall. He gives a snuff of approval and returns his grip to his cane.

---

He tried joining an existing group, but they wanted nothing to do with him. "Kids these days", as true as it ever was. It was unclear from their leader's rude rebuff whether they thought he was a government narc or just not capable of helping. In either case, within the next few weeks he'd disprove both.

---

Gladis is at the corner of Jackson and State. She is mounted atop a cherry red mobile assistance device. Half scooter, half wheelchair she ordered it late one night amongst promises that Medicare would cover it. This was mostly correct, save for the taxes and shipping and handling, which with something as heavy as this, rivaled the purchase price. In a way, she's happy that they swindled her, as it was the anger of that which drove her to seek out, something, anyway, to respond.

---

Nobody saw this coming, and there is no reason they should. It has never happened before. Historically, the concept of mass retirement is relatively new. Humans just are not meant to be purposeless. Sticking the wisest of us into a building with some of the only people who cannot appreciate our perspectives just piles on the misery.

"Even so, why hasn't his happened sooner?", you ask.

A fair question, the difference in our generation, was that we grew up knowing how to use the latest communication tools. We were not regulated to bitter political discussion over pinochle, but had already spent our lifetimes establishing connections with communities and groups, and so when we began being put out to pasture, either by ourselves or by our children, something started crystallizing. Something which fit perfectly into the gnawing desire for purpose building in the pit of our stomaches.

We had spent so many hours angrily talking about how things should be. How we disliked the status quo. How the system was broken, but at the time we were also busy. Some of us had kids, others had mortgage payments. Almost all of us were a little queasy about the idea of how an arrest record for even a civil disobedience charge might affect our future employability.

The young have too many concerns about their future to be able to act freely, there are simply to many logistical concerns which hinder their ability to express their conscience without hesitation.

---

Harvey is sitting in a late "Oughts" Outback, in a gas station parking lot overlooking a freeway. Some of the others in the group are driving the stereotypical gigantic Pontiacs, but he never threw in for those. He sips the sub par gas station coffee, his face pre-winced. He starts poking buttons on the car radio, trying to get it to show the time. He swear a couple times before succeeding. Nothing is ever easy.

---

At 10:02, our hero is being helped out of the door of the building by two good samaritans who seem to be holding their breath. People with sick expressions are rushing out of the building, they take dramatic breaths of relief when they reach the outdoors.

"Um, are you going to be okay, do you know how to get home?", one of the samaritans asks.

Our hero nods, still playing the dottering fool. He absently pulls at the back of his pants, which is beginning to feel cold and uncomfortably squishy. He'll walk across the parking lots towards a nearby McDonald's where he can change and hop on a bus before anyone realizes that this was not an isolated incident, but a warning shot...

---

"Oh thank you young men", Gladis purrs, "I don't know what happened!". A police officer and a college student are attempting to push her "vehicle" out of the middle of the crosswalk of State street. This has been going on for minutes now. They tried to push it, but she had set the brakes. They then asked her to get out, and she went dead weight on the college student, bringing both crashing to the ground.

That feigned "Oh my" as she fell, she will replay many a time later back amongst her cohorts.

The officer, at that point, had to stop what he was doing, and help her back into her saddle.

Eventually, someone with an elderly parent comes along and points out that the break is on, finally clearing the intersection. Three minutes total for Gladis, Doris, up on Lower Wacker will brag that she went a full five.

---

The young's greatest asset, is also one of their greatest weaknesses. The population has grown callouses to images of college-age kids being hauled away from doorways and roadways. Most 40 year olds just assume the kid is a pot-smoking good for nothing anyway. Moreover, the police can man-handle the kids with relatively little chance of permanent harm or likelihood of public sympathy.

We, on the other hand, our bones are made of glass. After our first sit in, we nearly bankrupted the local police force with just the civil suits from broken hips alone, and that picture of a police officer holding his baton menacingly at a phalanx of old ladies proffering a tray of cookies gave us more positive press than any ad campaign out of Madison Ave could ever have achieved.

---

Blank asphalt and empty asphalt stretches off into the distance in front of Harvey. It's an eerie sight on a Monday morning in California's I-10. He glances back in the mirror at the solid mass of cars, driving in formation to his left and behind him. They've even extended onto the shoulder, and he can see angry drivers behind them getting stuck as they try to pass them in the ditch. This only compounds the issue of course.

Harvey cranks up the radio, rolls down the window, and takes another sip of terrible coffee.

Release

You are a monk in one of those monasteries on a mountain.

You never really thought you'd end up at a place like this, but your best friend joined up, and you thought you'd give it a try.

It's not too bad a gig, the monks are mostly good people, and you get to spend a lot of time with your best friend.

You spend a lot of the day trying to achieve a vision through constant meditation, or at least that's what you're supposed to be doing. In all honesty you spend most of the time dozing off and trying really hard not to fart.

And that was how it went, until the day you received the vision.

You were in the meditation room, surrounded by the monks and the master. As a matter of routine, you found yourself having to clench yourself to avoid passing gas... However, this time, you think it might be more than that. After a few minutes of that you're confident it's more than that, and fear you might have some sort of stomach illness.

Now this puts you in a quandary, since the room with the pot for such things is just down the hall a short ways, with no separating walls or doors to speak of. You've always been kind of prudish about bodily functions, so you decide you have to soldier on.

The discomfort quickly turns to pain, but you hold strong. Each second is agonizing, and you are sure at any moment you are going to lose it. Small bright shapes begin to appear before your eyes as you squeeze them shut in solidarity with your gastronomical plumbing. It seems like years pass.

Until finally you see only white, and a voice that is not your speaks to you, "You're just going to hurt yourself if you keep that up much longer. Go drink a tea of mint and lavender, and goto sleep."

You wake immediately, spring to your feet into a run, and make it to the bathroom mostly in time.

Minutes pass, and after you are done, you hear the master's voice outside, he asks if he can get you anything. "A tea of lavender and mint would be lovely", you reply.

There is a silence, and the master asks you to repeat yourself. Worried that you may have overstepped your bounds, you obediently repeat your exact phrase.

To which the master replies, "Ahh, many feel sick after experiencing a vision, I pray you'll tell me more of it when you are better."

Young Apocolyptic Love

You hold the hand of your new wife, looking up through the haze trying to catch a glimpse of the stars.

You gave her a ring you found on a corpse half covered with debris. It is far too large for her finger, and she makes a fist to keep it from falling off.

Most newlyweds around the world spend this first night differently, but not the orphans of the siege. Both of you lost your parents in the shelling and bombing of the city several years back. Carnal matters are far from the minds of both of you, as they are the luxury of those who do not sleep in rubble, skin pocked with signs of malnutrition and plagued by deep and damp coughs.

Besides both of you know the stories, taking your clothes off is the first step towards your clothes being stolen.

So you both gaze up into the night, wondering if tonight will be the night a shell will fall on the building where you sleep, and both of you take solace in the fact that if it does, you won't be leaving this world alone and unnoticed, but as husband and wife.

As the dawn creeps over the fractured skyline, you both still lie awake, wondering who will be the first to free their hand from the other. Luckily a nearby blast breaks the tension and the hands fly apart from each other, as if exploding themselves.

The morning is awkward. The union, whose purpose seemed so clear in the night time now seems positively embarrassing. There is a moment of horror as it seems as if she might be taking off the ring to give back to you. But instead she slips it off her finger and into her pocket.

"I better go", she says.

"Yeah", you say.

She walks slowly away, picking her way through the uneven ground.

"Seeya tonight?", you blurt, the naked desperation of it already reddening your ears.

"Yeah", she says with a small smile, before leaping down and out of sight.

The Greatest Singer in the World

You are the world's greatest singer.

Your voice can make wise men weep, calm a candle flame or give any man or woman's heavenly spirit a rock hard boner.

Sadly, you've become too attached to the idea of being the World's Greatest Singer. So much of your identity is wrapped up in it, that you've stopped performing, lest there might come a day when, amongst the crowds writhing with the ecstasy from your song, but one person might opine "I've heard better".

So you vowed to sing no more.

But The Greatest Singer in the World cannot simply stop singing and be at peace.

So every few months you've spend an entire day taking short, commercial airline flights around New England. You use a pseudonym and a disguise, and alway book seats near the back of the plane where the engine's din is the loudest.

And when the plane lurches forward, turbines humming, the sound of churned air clawing at the metal rivets of the plane nearly deafening, you sing.

You sing like The World's Greatest Singer, because you are.

No one is ever the wiser. Due to a mix of social pressure and G-forces no one has ever looked you in the face during those first frightening two minutes and discovered your secret.

Sure some of the people nearby you think they can hear the hint of the most beautiful music possible, but they always believe it to be an imagined artifact of the roar.

Sandwich Lord

You have won a lifetime of free sandwiches from a local sandwich shop! They give you a neat little engraved card so they can identify you.

Having free sandwiches is great, you start each day standing impatiently outside for them to open so you can start your day off with a breakfast sandwich. You drive over during lunch, despite the fact that your work is on the other side of town for your mid-day sandwich, and you will usually stop in once, or twice during the night depending what's on TV.

After several months of this your fondness for sandwiches transcends others, and you begin to feel a strange sort of kinship with them. They speak to you. (That or you have discovered the necessary dosage of cold cut preservatives to act as neuro-toxins)

The more you hear from them, the more they seem disappointed with your use of your station. "You could be doing so much more!" they implore! Give sandwiches to the hungry!

So you start spending your weekends distributing sandwiches to homeless people. Until eventually they start referring to you affectionately as "sandwich guy".

Soon you get another message from the sandwiches "Use your sandwich trust-bond to lure them into dark alleys, and then finish them!"

"What? No!" You respond.

But they persist, "It is your right and duty as Sandwich Lord!"

So you do it, and enjoy it. The "free sandwiches" card in your pocket grows colder and hums contentedly with each kill.

You become very good at feigning surprise and horror when other hobos tell you that someone has gone missing while you hand them sandwiches.

Were you a stronger man you might resist at this point, in a last ditch effort to claw yourself back up out of the abyss before it is too late.

But you aren't that man.

News

You are the only journalist at a major news outlet who does serious news anymore, and are unsure how much longer you will be able to go before you are discovered.

You started out small, injecting news facts via metaphors "the starlet's hair appeared on the runway with the sort of smooth sheen akin to that on the lake near Decatur, AL where a tanker load of benzene was overturned off a bridge".

You went straight for a few months after that, wary of any blowback, but soon the thrill of doing actual forbidden journalism so excited you that you had to try it again and again. The second you went down this path, you knew how it would end, but you didn't care.

Especially now, you seem to be embracing the end. Last week you interjected an entire non-sequitor fact filled paragraph into a story, planning on blaming it on some corruption from an older file in the system.

This has prompted a full review of all your other stories, and the men with lab coats who just walked past your cube avoiding eye contact can mean only one thing. That this season's fall fashions are more revealing than ever.

Fittest

You are a balding, single, investment banker in his 50's.

You have been exchanging emails with a biotech engineer with a seemingly grand plan.

He is offering to engineer a virus that will kill every non-inoculated man on earth, he only needs a couple Million in funding.

The amount of money you donate to him directly determines the zone of women that will be set aside for you.

You had some qualms about it at first, but you figure that something like this is an eventuality that you might as well survive.

And if this man can make it so you never have to go on another blind date again, it will be worth every cent.

A sentiment you hope your legions of similarly unscrupulous children will agree with.

As you eye your stockpiles of food, you make a mental note to add a "minimum caloric intake" field to your concubine pre-screening form.

Happy I'm Still Stealing Your Premise Day!

Today you came out of the grocery store to find a shopping list under the windshield of your car.

Closer examination reveals it to be the shopping list of a crazy person, as it is a seemingly random collection of products and brands, with lines and arrows circling in an incestuous web.

You let it go, allowing the wind to snatch it, and the list, which comprises the life work of the ex-Secretary of Health, who had discovered a plot by the nation's richest to slowly poison the rest of the populace lest they become immortal like them.

He was being chased by government agents after he escaped the shuttered CIA house where they had been keeping him so that he might be sacrificed in a grand and ceremonial manner as an enduring example to all. Placing the list of tainted items on your car was his last hope of getting the information out.

You close the car door, and consider whether it's safe to drive while eating Pringles.