It’s Tax Day in the U.S. so we decided what better way to celebrate than by picking some random sentences from the tax code and using them to write stories.
…before you ask, yes, we’re complete masochists.
During the last stream, we picked some random sentences from the Form 1040 Instructions, and then chat voted for one of them that we’d use to write a story.
It’s, uh, kind of a yearly tradition on the stream.
Watch the video here to see the process, my dramatic reading,
and some GREAT alternative stories from chat!
The sentence that chat voted we use was this one: Your daughter doesn’t meet the conditions to be a qualifying child of any other person, including her other parent.
Here’s the story that we came up with:
Your daughter doesn’t meet the conditions to be a qualifying child of any other person, including her other parent. Unfortunately, based on the results of her Kindergarten Kare Exam, she will have to be terminated immediately.
She scored in the lower tenth-percentile for spatial reasoning, due to her inability to traverse the rainbow beads across the twisted plastic lines, and she scored in the lowest one-percentile for listening comprehension, due to her choosing to run away and play on the hover-swings instead of listening to the simple forty-eight minute safety speech given beforehand.
Please choose your method of Daughter Disposal: one, incineration. Two, a quick hug followed by incineration. Three, a final day spent with the two of you together, including ice cream cones, pony rides, and homemade pizza with a movie. All of which will be followed by incineration.
You have chosen option four: attempt to run away and save your daughter, a futile endeavor that will result in temporary feelings of nausea, hope, determination and—eventually—incineration.
Be sure to check out the video for other versions of the story that chat wrote!
After that, chat voted that we write this prompt: Write about a very fragile or delicate object. We decided to go with “a person’s mind.”
Here’s what we came up with:
Our minds don’t start off as fragile. They’re born as malleable and excited to explore the world as the rest of us, same as our wriggling fingers and toes. We reach out to touch new things with our minds, new sights, smells and languages, and giggle as they bobble around in our heads.
And then, at some point, our minds latch onto something. Whether it’s art, science, business, or simply loving another, that’s when they begin to harden. They start to take a certain shape—stars, circles, trapezoids for some—and aren’t quite as supple as before.
That’s when they can begin to crack.
Once our minds harden into a thick shell, it becomes harder for them to accept new things. New experiences, which may have just bounced off a softer mind, or even melded with it, now crash into it. They leave behind microfractures, most of which can be ignored, but some of which grow and grow. And some hit harder than others.
The rejections are baseball bats to the brain. All it takes is one to send the whole shebang shivering. Little bits sprinkle off, never to rejoin again. If it happens over and over, whole chunks can break away, leaving the mind jagged and jaded.
And yet we persevere. We polish over the splintered chasms in our minds and keep going despite, reciting stories to ourselves about those who endured similar hardships and came out on the other side. Writers who turned from nobodies to celebrities overnight, engineers who came up with a bright idea that changed the world, lovers who started off hating each other’s guts but then celebrated their 81st wedding anniversary together.
But the failures keep coming. Pelting the mind like hailstones. Wooden beams. Bowling balls. No one cares about your paintings. No one reads your research. No one returns your messages asking hey do you want to get coffee sometime.
What once only had a few fractures in it is now slowly becoming a junkyard of shattered glass.
You try to tell yourself the stories of success that you’d heard before, but then your crumbling mind makes a discovery. You’ve only heard those stories of success precisely because they were successful. For every one of those people who persevered and it paid off for in the end, there’s a hundred thousand others who didn’t make it. Whose stories don’t get told and who live with their mangled minds until they die in obscurity.
And now, you’re one of them.
That’s what hurts the most. When even you stop caring. When you can’t care anymore. Your mind, your dreams, in too many shambled pieces for it to be worth it anymore.
The final blow to the fragile mind, it doesn’t come from a bat or bowling ball. It comes from your own fingers, slowly and painfully picking up the sharp pieces, tossing them away into the black void of your mind.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso