I seem to have adhered to a bag-related theme for the last two Friday posts. Maybe because people’s bags are full of their most personal effects. What speaks more volumes about a person than what they choose to carry on their person? Like any other sartorial cue, a person’s bag tells us about themselves. A bag overflowing with muddy wrenches makes us think plumber. You follow fashion if you’ve got the latest couture purse. Artists have to carry those huge, flat bags.

Each trinket, whether it’s a wrench, a tube of lipstick, or a crusty vial of paint is a verb. It tells us what that person does. Nothing in a bag, even if they’re an artist, is meant to be held up and admired as a piece unto itself. Each object is functional.

Bags are often full of mysterious lint or awesome trinkets as well. Here’s a cell phone with a picture of the owner standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Now you know that they traveled to France, assbag. But what contains the cell phone can say even more about the owner.

Bags say a lot about who we are and aren’t just important for what’s inside of them. They’ve destroyed shambling entities from dimensions most foul and eaten people on the metro.

They also hit me in the nuts because of a height mismatch between myself and my wife.

And that, my friends, is the story of why Coach bags can all go to hell.

Sophie stood on the metro platform, her eyes darting to the other commuters who stood near her.

Too near. It was dangerous for them to stand too near.

She held herself into as tight a package as she could, her arms crossed and hunched together, her chin burrowed into the neck of her sweater, and the soles of her shoes touching. A woman with an oversize purse wandered towards her, lost in the book that she was reading, and Sophie tripped as she hustled out of the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

It had taken Tobias six years and countless pairs of ruined shoes, but he’d finally finished collecting two of every animal. He was an account executive and not a zoologist, so his taxonomy could fit on the back of a cereal box. It had taken him two years and every favor owed to him by his clients to finish retrofitting his boat and to gather the animals. It had taken him three years to convince his wife that her pudgy, weekend-warrior husband was god’s modern Noah.

Lorraine wasn’t thrilled with the amount of boat-talk that she had to hear, but she humored Tobias because it got him out of the house while she played video games.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jules sat up with a start. Cold water soaked through his velvet cape and he realized that his coffin had taken on water. Grimacing, he lit his coffinside candleabra and saw water glimmering.

Keeps! What a pain in the ass!

Read the rest of this entry »

Eleanor sat by candlelight in the dim library, memorizing the spells that she would be tested on the following morning. Despite being a wizard apprentice in a wizard library, her candle was in no way magical. While the other apprentices read by the light of floating jars of glowing plasma or studied by the light of embers scraped from the back of their Brimstone Tortoises, she had to keep a pack of matches and a candle in her satchel. The head librarian had forbid her from attempting any methods of magical illumination because she had once burnt down half of the Thick and Dusty Tomes wing. She would’ve been in more trouble if the library didn’t keep a duplicate in a pocket dimension.

Read the rest of this entry »

The crocodile gained sentience.

“What?” he growled, staring at the other crocodiles lounging around him in the dark. An avalanche of tiny red scorpions spilled out of his mouth as he spoke.

“Hunh?” he growled. More scorpions. He coughed and hacked and swung his head too and fro like he had just caught a snack. Scorpions scattered from between his teeth. Then a beam of light fell from the slit of blue sky visible above the crocodiles. The light illuminated the muck that the crocodiles wallowed in. Scorpions climbed in and out of the mouths of the other crocodiles.

Read the rest of this entry »