By Marcus Pactor.
Name and explain a single woman’s choice of cereal.
Describe a six-year-old girl’s drawing of a raccoon. Then describe the adult she needs to admire it.
List three metaphors that capture the sound of three dogs scampering through an apartment before dawn.
Write everything you imagine your new neighbor knows about Megadeth founder Dave Mustaine.
Write a short history of an object on the bookshelf of a single woman who once aspired to a career in entertainment or politics but who now earns a respectable salary in marketing or real estate. The object must not be a book or picture.
Explain the way a bunch of overripe bananas reflect some quality of a single woman’s mind.
Describe the worsening condition of a bowl of cereal that a single woman has set aside to think about the lovers who tried to interest her in basketball or Star Wars or pet theories of social order without consideration of her degree in political science and subsequent career as an aide to a US senator.
Trap a single woman on a descending elevator with another woman and a man. Either this pair is enjoying rough intercourse or the man is forcing his genital into the woman. Make it difficult for your readers to discern which act is taking place by having the single woman focus on something other than the man pressing his victim/partner against the elevator’s rear wall. Let her focus on the noise of the victim/partner’s heels sliding and scraping against the elevator’s floor. Let her focus on the way the number-buttons glow and darken as the elevator descends from one level to the next. Let her focus shift from the heels to the buttons to the slush of cereal that she only now remembers she has left on the breakfast table.
Write a single woman’s pitch to the editor of a national magazine in which she describes the lack of mainstream critical appreciation for Dave Mustaine’s guitar work. She should lie about the ways in which her work history makes her perfectly suited to fill the void.
Describe a single woman’s feelings upon opening an email attachment containing her niece’s drawing of a raccoon.
Reveal the origin, in a sci-fi way, of the chemical coolant smell emanating from a corner store’s warmer full of macaroni.
Describe the condition of cereal that a single woman has set aside for thirty- to forty-five minutes while she lists reasons why the President of the United States might visit the city or town in which she lives.
Describe the sound of electricity running through one, two, or three dogs.
Describe the growth of black mold over damp pieces of chalk and brain stored in a box in a single woman’s mother’s garage.
List reasons why a corner-store clerk could afford the rent in a building like yours.
Include at least two of the words or phrases used to describe the aforementioned cereal in a description of the most stoic expression the President of the United States can assume.
Even if you hate sci-fi, devise a mind-wiping or mind-warping technology which a single woman wants or needs in order to watch a cable-news program.
Write a single woman’s email to the producers of Entertainment Tonight. The email should contain two lies, one about her work history and the other about her ability to arrange an interview with the President of the United States. Follow these with an anecdote about an apparently unrelated experience, maybe about a car crash she either witnessed or participated in as perpetrator or passenger or bystander or victim. The anecdote could also be about a neighbor to whom she is simultaneously attracted (in part by his obvious love for his three dogs) and repulsed (by his beard and/or the knowledge that he has a school-age son whom he does not support in any way).
Write about a single woman who becomes so irritated while writing a letter to the editor of her local newspaper or while writing a sonnet for the first time in years that she has to set aside her pen and stare at the wall while she thinks through the reasons why so many men are concerned about her marital status.
Write about the combination of drug melt and black mold in Dave Mustaine’s brain that has shaped his current reactionary politics.
Reflect on the impossibility of truly knowing either the neighbor with three dogs and one son, the President of the United States, or the self—all in the context of the millions of Americans who religiously watch Entertainment Tonight.
Shed the constraint of probability when you revise your elevator passage, multiplying by at least six the number of men and women in the act of either love or assault so that the single woman feels stuck in a squirming, grunting plenum. Despite the cram of writhing/pressing/resisting passengers, she should be allowed to see the elevator buttons darken and glow and darken, each in their turn, as the elevator descends. End the passage before the “G” button glows, so the reader must worry all through their working day that the elevator will never reach the ground floor.
Write a passage in which one, two, or three rabid dogs breach the Secret Service’s obviously lax security cordon around the President of the United States. Detail what the dogs do when they enter the president’s vicinity as well as his response. The passage cannot end with the termination of the dogs via Secret Service bullets.
List reasons why the President of the United States would stop copulating with/assaulting a victim/partner—make it hard, for legal purposes, for readers and lawyers to discern the difference between both the acts and the actor identifications—during his visit to an American city. One reason is not allowed: the breach of the Secret Service’s obviously lax security cordon by any number of rabid dogs.
If you have not yet shed the constraints of either plot or protagonist, describe the scent and arrangement of raccoon bones that a single woman finds on the driver’s seat of her sedan as well as her instant recognition of which jilted or would-be lover arranged them. If you have shed those constraints, describe the bones as the bad art of a random lunatic or an enterprising six-year-old who made an installation site of your unlocked car. Whoever set the bones there should have a new kind of mold coating their brain. Devise the look, origin, and effect of this mold in a sci-fi sort of way.
Summarize the history of an item in the purse of a single woman. This item should bear some emotional or mental significance for her, a significance that will become increasingly depressing as she grows older. The item cannot be a gift from a long-lost lover or a possession stolen from him.
Describe the jar of tomato sauce that made a single woman hate herself when she bought it and will make her hate herself more when she spoons it over a mound of pasta tonight.
Describe a single woman whose prayer works so well that Dave Mustaine finally receives the mainstream critical appreciation he and his music deserves, while his sci-fi brain mold and attendant reactionary politics are uprooted and replanted in the brain of a man who is already so sick with politics that this second man’s wife cannot discern any increase in his irritabilities. Meanwhile, a newly humble Mustaine vows silence on any subject other than his peers’ musicianship. The single woman’s success persuades her to pray twice daily for increased personal stability and/or one commercial exchange with the clerk at the corner store to pass without her imagining this clerk leaping over the counter and explaining something like the flaws in the Disney Star Wars movies to her. When the clerk does leap over the counter to explain those flaws while she is drawing cash to pay for a cup of macaroni, she will feel a new dissatisfaction, one that will stay with her for many months thereafter, and it will be particularly acute whenever she listens to Megadeth. On the other hand, she will finally shed her need to be her life’s protagonist.
Write about a fixer-upper that you are trying to sell to a young couple. While they assess the lighting in the kitchen, find something other than food or dishware in the sink. Slip it into your purse while they note/condemn the chemical coolant smell emanating from the kitten-shaped hole behind the refrigerator. Listen when the object encourages you to follow the couple back to their current apartment. Gain entry. Specify the action you take once inside.
Revise the elevator scenario so that the elevator is ascending rather than descending, and you are much younger, and a macaroni smell emanates from the floor register, and the elevator is actually a prism, and you are with a man who (for legal purposes) cannot be the President of the United States. This man does, however, remind you of a face you once saw in a bowl of soggy cereal. A third passenger refuses to draw a conclusion as to whether you and the man are making love or the man is forcing his genital into you. This passenger busies himself with the light refracting off the various zones of prism glass.
Write an email to the producers of the local TV station for which you worked for several years until you took a recent leave of absence. In it, lie about your readiness to return to work and about your upcoming marriage to a wonderful man with four dogs. Share your childhood dream of being a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight. End with another lie.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcus Pactor’s second book, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, is forthcoming from Astrophil Press in Fall 2021. His first book, Vs. Death Noises, won the 2011 Subito Press Prize for Fiction. His work has most recently appeared in Pithead Chapel, Harsh, and Juked. He lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida.
