Day 84: If there's a day where I don't make my thousand...

              It'd be today! 

             
              Congratulations to me for it.  Day eighty-four and we're still going.  Deep breaths, guys.  I need to recognize myself daily as an accomplisher of tasks!  I should give myself a fake award.  This is all slightly sarcastic.  But not sardonic.  Surreptitious.
              Here's the part where I write about the cathartic elements of writing and how doing this helps me keep my identity that I've forged of being a writer.  It's all true.  I should have had that identity at Day 28.  In development.
              Oh, one other thing.  "Show, don't tell" works in real life just as well as it works in bullshit fiction.  I reread yesterdays and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.  There was atleast some sort of strand holding it together.
              I lost a day, I know I did.  I was doing other things.  Things that I think are more importance than this, even though this is something I'm investing all of my free time daily in.  I wonder what that thing was.  I am kind of upset I lost a day though, so I'll just pretend it never happened and publish this one as Day 84.  Next week on Day 91, it will have been forgotten by history entirely.

             Letter from my future self to current me:
            You're at the point where reading is more important than writing.  Get the writing done every day, but read more.  You're bridging the gap between your writing and their writing by reading.

             Jim beckoned Roger to follow him into the shack.  Roger turned to see Otto falling right onto him, his arms wide and long like an unscrewed vicegrip.  The boarded gate to the entrance snapped as he pushed it open, giving him a severe red scratch on his abdomen

            The chickens stood around in the yard, officiously wandering and poking their beaks into the desert.  They skidded around on the outside of the shack like worshippers.  Jim pushed one behind him and Otto ran into it, stuck on the wrong side of a cattle drive.

            Inside the shack there was a machine that looked like a silver egg.  It had a thick plate window on the outside and power chords connected to it like I.Vs, running into an underground passageway.  The steal grates of the floor allowed gusts of wind to emanate upwards with the sound of an industrial fan chopping at the air below.  An incubation chamber sat on the far side of the room that looked like a tanning bed with hothouse lights over it.

            Jim pulled the squeeky shitty door behind him after Roger ducked inside, it sliding acutely on its upper hinges.  Otto pried it open with ease, but it was too late, they had jumped in his machine.  It disappeared in a fracured black blip, like the invisible blackhole behind the backstage curtain of the world.

            Jim found himself in a funnel.  He looked at his hands, they stretched backwards like strands of white light.  Roger was at the end of the tunnel, struggling like a kid who couldn’t swim against the time current that was pulling him headfirst into an icefishing hole.  The light refracted off of the prisms that contracted it, continuing on endlessly in streams of light at first and then snapping abruptly into focus.

            “Time elevator.”  Jim said.  His words echoed off the walls like tennis balls, each sylabble traveling in a line of bumpy air.  The sound of his voice sounded like it did when it was recorded.  It immediately reminded him of a failed invention he had spent years attempting to visualize that had the intended use of calling his future self.  However, when the phone was answered in the future, his future self was sucked into the past, and the only way he knew this was conjecture.  A machine he used to intercept transmissions from the past had recorded an image of a version of himself who appeared older, that seemed to be unhappy with his self of the future.  Since then, he was careful not to screw with time in the way he was presently doing.

Otto stood at the top of the time vortex, looking like the Brawny paper towel guy.  He was soon overtaken with duplications of himself, spawning enormously into a squadrant that dissolved into its own omnipotence.  Then, the outside world was just a checkered pattern.

            Jim righted himself to his feet when his mind finally adjusted to the time tunnel.  The chaotic wavy tunnel developed boundaries as his eyes adjusted, although he knew it hadn’t been his eyes but his entire brain.  Roger struggled at the far end of the tunnel, gurgling the pockets of oxygen that had found their way in between dimensions. 

            Jim walked past Roger at first, his feet feeling like they may collapse back into the time river at the drop of a hat.  He felt like a water bug sitting on top of a lifeless pond.

            Overhead lights cracked on and Roger sat up, no longer constricted.  They were inside what appeared to be a giant translucent slug, its distinction from a snail being the lack of a shell.  Another set of overhead lights powered up soundlessly, and they could see a second thin membrane on the outside of the slug.  A crowd of spectacled men in white coats watched in silent awe.  Turning back toward the tail of the thing, Jim saw that the creature they were in seemed to be mounted on the hand of a man in black pants and a white wife beater.

            A long drum roll sounded and the audience gasped in anticipation.  The slug seemed to come to life, its feelers unraveling and twisting like a Peep in a microwave.  Blue fluorescent lights snapped on, bathing the slug in a dreamlike hue.  Its head stretched upward and took the shape of an avian creature, the globulous middle section stretching into two gracile wings.

            “Mr. Grey, Mr. Grey, Mr, Grey.”  A monotone chorus started from the audience.  An invisible TV monitor urged them to become more excited, a disembodied white gloved hand floating and gesturing enthusiastically.  A man with a white paper hat sold hot dogs out of a tube that looked like a hot dog. 

            A spotlight shone on the mans face.  His sweaty brow and shiny face were exacerbated beyond exertion, he looked like he could collapse at any moment.  A group of paramedics waited anxiously behind a blue hospital curtain, the leader of the group looking focused and intense as they crouched in a semicircle.

            The slug had transformed into a swan, and the swan was now melting into a larva of sorts.  Roger struggled with a swimming motion against the inside wall of the sculpture like a cat in a plastic bag.  The whole thing smelled like hand sanitizer, and felt wetter than watter.  It soaked right into Roger’s skin, the whole arm feeling limp and satiated.

            “Presto!”  The magic man said, and his face turned from a grimace into a davinare smirk.  Jim and Roger felt their bodies slowly becoming warm, and the insides of their eyes filled with light.  The slug disappeared, and they were standing in a bright white room, fully redressed in hospital garbs.

            A doctor instructed two orderlies to seat them in wheelchairs, and they insisted it be so.  Roger immediately sat down and his head lolled to one side, drool gathering on his shoulder. 

            Jim straightened out the curled sleeves of his hospital gown.