Perfection

            

Illustration is "Genetics Laboratory" by Casey Fallon.
Check out his website.

            

            Dear Professor Goodhart,

            Out of respect for your scientific insight and our long-standing fellowship, I am writing to explain my recent disappearance. I hope it will please you to know that I did not get murdered during a robbery. Rather, I took what I needed from our laboratory and fled, far beyond the reach of those ignorant plebs who run your so-called ‘government.’

            Don’t bother trying to trace this email, by the way. You know the extent of my technological talents. I don’t want to be found, so of course, I won’t be.

            I wish I could have stayed and pursued this work openly, of course, but our intellectual inferiors meddled one too many times. I would hate for you to think I made this choice out of expedience or, worse, cowardice. Quite the contrary, I left our lab to bravely carve out a piece of the future.

            Don’t worry, I was never fooled by your pretenses about agreeing with the idiots and their ‘morality’ and ‘consent’ nonsense. At your age, you needed to keep up the act even when we appeared to be alone, to ensure that the morons would continue providing you with life-saving—if obviously mediocre—medical care. I know you secretly love the project as much as I do.

            You should know that, as always, I am moving forward in the best possible way. Since the goal is to refine humanity, I started, of course, by cloning my own superior genome.  After some troubleshooting, the cloning process is now producing anatomically correct humans at a rate of 83%. I’ve now moved on to creating clones with genetically engineered improvements. It’s progressing slowly. As you know, it’s always terribly frustrating when one has to incinerate an entire batch of failures and start over again, but I assure you I am persevering.

             

            I will pay any price for perfection.

            Sincerely yours,

            Yuriko

I adore spiders.

Illustration by Allie Brosh.
Check out her original post.

I adore spiders.

I’m not being sarcastic. Not even a little bit. Seriously! I promise.

Everyone else hates spiders. Allie Brosh wrote a whole post about it. There was a long-standing meme about how people would prefer to burn down their own houses rather than live with a spider. Children are bornwith a predisposed tendency to fear spiders.

So why do I adore those eight-legged, exoskeletoned archnids?

Because spiders don’t care. And that's awesome.

I spend most days twisting my thoughts into a pretzel about whom I’ve offended and who judges me, even though I’m a very privileged young woman with an amazingly supportive family, a fantastic group of friends, and a fiancé whom I love to death.

Meanwhile, the most thoroughly loathed creatures on earth are brazenly crawling into my apartment.

You know what thoughts spiders have?

Illustration by Allie Brosh.
Check out her original post.

“So, you want to murder me with shoes that are like 8000 times the size of my body.

Well, you know what, murderous giants?

IMMA INVADE YOUR HOME ANYWAY!!!”

 

Illustration by Allie Brosh.
Check out her original post.

It's okay to be afraid of them, indeed! But since I was born blessed with an indifference to their creepy-crawliness, I'm not afraid of them. I admire them, and their "no-fucks-given-EVER!" attitude. 

I aspire to live like a spider.

Kiss Goodbye

            

Illustration is "Tribal Love" by Amy Kaufman.
You can find more of her work here: http://iamymai.deviantart.com/

            We kiss openly in the village green.

            Beside us, little boys practice on the war-drums. Irregular throbs create an awkward rhythm. 

            Yesterday, when my lover and I asked our parents for permission to kiss in public, we lied and said it would be our first kiss. Our parents gave us their blessings. They pretended they didn’t know what the whole village knew about us; they pretended they didn’t understand why unmarried youths spend so much time ‘hunting’ in the woods.

            That’s what happens, when those big drums roll up from the cellars. Everyone starts pretending, pretending that the world is the way that the soldiers wish it were. The old folks pretend that their daughters are blameless innocents and their sons are immortal warriors. They give all the young couples permission for their ‘first’ kisses.

            And what of us, the young folk, the women those soldiers leave behind?

            My lover and I both know full well this kiss is not our first. But, like my parents and his parents, I must do my part for him.

            I pretend not to know that this kiss is our last.

            When I found him on the green, he was shirtless. Little boys with wet brushes surrounded him. His skin was already half-covered in war-paint, but every little boy all wanted a chance to decorate the fiercest warrior. When he saw me coming, my love pushed all those children away.

            “My love!” He wrapped his arms around me. Some of fresh paint smudged on my dress. “My love, my love.” He took my face in his hands and looked directly into my eyes. “You have always been the beauty of the village. You could have any man you want. This war is my chance to prove that I am worthy of you. I will come back with a mountain of trophies. I will come back and you’ll be a bride,” he said.

            I smiled and nodded.

            Then I leaned into his kiss, before he had a chance to see my tears.

            His words were true, if not his meaning. He will come back, and I will be a bride.

            My groom will be the man who carried the corpses home. 

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