Three Words One Story – TWOS Journal

They say you can never go home again. I don’t know who “they” are, and it seems like that phrase wouldn’t make sense unless it’s followed by a threat of arson. Or maybe that’s what you say when you maroon someone on a deserted island. Unfortunately, we have no experience with that. I once deliberately left the CAO at a Walmart after he told me he preferred Daphne over Velma. Neanderthal. But he was within walking distance of home, so he did, in fact, go home again.

All of this was just an unnecessarily circuitous way to remind you that you can’t use previous prompt words … ever again.* We now return you to your regularly scheduled Friday Prompt.

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Get out your tachyon beam emitters and prepare for mass coronal ejections directly into your deflector dish because the random word generator is begging for an epic(ly short) science fiction yarn. When else are you going to get “planetary” and “alliance” in the same prompt? It’s like Isaac Asimov himself haunts the very ones and zeros of the generator’s ineffable wordsmithery. Throw in a laser cannon or two, add a dash of aliens with blue skin, and a dab of androids (bet you didn’t know the official name for a group of androids is a “dab”) and you’ve got yourself a rollicking good Saturday night, not to mention a TWOS story.

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Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, and you know what that means. I hope you do, anyway, because I need someone to explain it to me. After we’ve taken care of that, why don’t you go ahead and write something festive! We’d love to hear about your objectionable pinatas and patterned horchata. Oooh, or maybe a gripping tale of the Cinco de Mayo Bungler, the inept would-be serial murderer who almost suspends someone from a tree branch and beats them with a stick each year, but perpetually forgets the rope and goes home in a huff to plan for next year.

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Do you ever feel like a word is laughing at you? That’s the feeling I get from “garrulous.” Like it can’t help but chuckle at me for being, well, me. And then there’s “abrogate.” I mean, just look at it, sitting there, smugly regarding you with perfect confidence that it is, in fact, better than you in some way. Oh, and don’t forget “panegyric.” That one is a complete basketcase. Sure it’s all nice, if a little eccentric at first, but as soon as you turn the page you just know that one is snickering to its friend “prevaricate” about what your face looked like when you tried to pronounce it.

Speaking of which, don’t get me started on the word prompts for this week. “Discriminate” turned its nose up at me the second it came out of the generator. “Expedite” rushed off with “heedless” without so much as a hello. And “romantic” is just hovering nearby looking at me funny and asking questions such as, “Do you like smooth jazz,” or “Do you like the feel of sand between your toes?”

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