Remember I’m at Writer’s Block 10 — WB10 — at NYC Comic Con this weekend AND TO:
- Leave a comment asking for a person, place, thing prompt
- Write a story off it,
- I will enter you in a drawing for a fabulous prize.
— Lancelot
We created an anthology of stories drawn out of a hat. Our writers group writes short stories based on drawing a person, place, and thing from a hat. We have annually since 2015. In the anthology, we include the person, place, and thing that prompted each story at the end of each tale, so you can have the fun of guessing the prompts that made up this Person, Place, Thing anthology.
If you’d like to play along, leave a comment on this post. Lance will give you a person, place, and a thing. Either paste your story or a link to your story as a reply. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with:
Lancelot of Little Egypt is a coin-operated literary arcade of deep longing. On Meaning Mondays, I reflect on artifacts. On Fiction Fridays, I share my own artifacts. To ready up the next round, Player One, insert coins or an email:
As a sample of our anthology of Person, Place, Thing: Stories Pulled from a Hat , I am today sharing my own tale The Ruins of Puppetopolis™ —
The Ruins of Puppetopolis™
by Lancelot Schaubert
Fifty years after The Event, Grandma Inda Inge took the automated Riverlink bullet train back north to the uneven rubble that had been Asiago Avenue of Puppetopolis™. She was searching for what she’d lost last time: her favorite purse and her favorite puppet. But her last time there had been almost three Metonic cycles ago. Many puppets had been lost to time since then.
Her private train car’s automated announcement came over the loudspeaker:
“Great choice! You’ve come at peak leaf peeper season! Your designation, Asiago Avenue, was the birthplace of the magnificent invention and full scale production of Real Puppets™. Unlike the kind of puppets used by ventriloquists and schauberts, Real Puppets™ are sentient cloth persons without rods, hands, gears, or strings attached to move their bodies. They are thinking beings of cloth and feather and plastic! Blessed with abnormally long life—”
She switched off the notice. She didn’t need a reminder of how real all her puppet friends had been before The Event. Especially now, on her way north. Why was her jaw so tight? She shimmied it around.
She’d been so damned angry, so afraid, so deeply longing for ages to build her own puppet show to fend off her inner darkness. Well the landscape out the windows matched her inner turmoil. The smoldering hadn’t faded and, with its eternal flame, neither had the smell of melted plastic fibers and sequins from long dead Real Puppets™. There were hardly any leaves left on the trees for peeping, hardly any trees for that matter.
It wasn’t nostalgia for her, but horror. A horror accented by the cheery Ai voice of the train she’d now silenced.
The silence almost felt worse: as if she’d been party to The Event. She hadn’t. Had she?
Her neck tingled. Her mind’s ear heard a sound like blackout curtains touching her there.
Inda had been one of the last guests on the show even though she’d hoped it would be the first of many dreams come true. Before her livestream appearance, she’d grown popular on audio streams. Performing original math rock songs about math had oddly launched her into stardom. The puppets had begged her to come on their show. Multiplication Mummy more than any other puppet had wanted her as a guest star.
After her screen testing with Multiplication Mummy, the show runners had remembered most children don’t domultiplication. But the Mummy had told Inda in private he believed deep in his gauze that performing a duet of Inda’s times tables song might give him a second chance at work.
At life. Which is a big deal for a mummy, let alone a puppet. Inda — she wanted the change for herself too, but all the more for him. Delusions of grandeur filled her mind of the both of them performing before tens of thousands.
Shortly after she showed up with him on screen, Multiplication Mummy had co-starred in his last episode with The Hole, but it resulted in little more than a brief conversation. After that episode, Inda had never heard from Multiplication Mummy again. Almost sixty years between him and the day she left the show. Almost sixty years since The Event.
Until the telegram arrived. Written on gauze.
Grandma Inda Inge hadn’t ever received a telegram. Only her great grandmother who once lived in the Upper Peninsula had talked about telegrams back when Inda had been a little girl. At her age, that was almost seven generations ago. Multiplication Mummy begged her to return to Asiago Avenue.
How?
How had he contacted her after being so long underground? It was as if her own grandma had reached out after everything. Her tongue felt chalky as she walked down the length of the train, waiting for her stop.
How could she possibly return after this many years away, after all the survivor’s guilt in the wake of The Event, after all of her time wondering about the point — the purpose — of her long running quotidian matriarchal life?
Yet here she was. She’d returned to the ruins of Asiago Avenue in search of all of her old Real Puppet friends.
And her frigging purse. She’d had it since she was a little girl. The one she’d tucked her math books — her muse — safe away inside when everything had started happening.
Would the puppets still be sentient? If sentient, would they forgive her for being away so long? So long in coming? Had they not been completely unmade, would they still be alive? That was the thing about puppets: they tended to last longer than people on the scale of half-life and carbon dating as long as you didn’t toss them into the abyss or subject them to fusion.
Fusion tends to kill most things. Puppets included. There isn’t really an “in case of fusion, break glass” box for the universe, since fusion tends to have already broken said glass. Rather hard to out-blow-up the thing that blows everything up.
And the abyss… she wasn’t certain the abyss could kill puppets. However it certainly made them disappear. It’s in the name: a (without) bussos (depth); bottomless.
Puppets too could fall forever.
Fall forever into the dark.
Her breath shuttered.
What a loss.
She’d lost Grome and Shelly and Lord Greggory Paul Findton Drix Plinkatt, 19th Prince Kilcarty. Half the fun of that particular puppet had been saying his full name every time you wanted his attention. All three of them gone and more. Vanished with the show.
Why?
Well she wasn’t sure why, but she hoped to find out. The door dinged and it wasn’t like all the other trains, but the London style: she had to press the open button, it wouldn’t auto open the whole length of the train. She stepped off, minding the gap and drop, what with her aging knees and ankles. The platform was charred black, but she made it down the ramp into… basically nothingness. Nondescript buildings as after a genocide or the flooding of Atlantis.
Past whiffs of sweet and stale smells she stumbled, gentle on her feet, not wanting to risk a broken hip. Only as she passed a bombed out brick wall did she recognize the sweet, stale smell wafting south towards her from giant dunes of old, stale candy.
No ants. Neither en route nor on the hill.
No ants?!
That was the creepiest part: something either in the makeup of the candy or the makeup of Asiago Avenue in the wake of The Event had preserved stale candy from even the wrath of sugar ants.
It was almost the exact opposite of when she’d gotten in trouble for smuggling and secreting her bonus Halloween candy beneath the blackout curtains in her room, by the treasure trunk.
Somewhere in the shadows and damp of the distant fog, in the dryness of the black smoke, and the grey eddies between the black and white, a cartoonish siren wailed on. Wailed and wailed like a demon baby who would not be appeased with milk, gas medicine, sleep, play, or a change.
She herself had been so inconsolable once upon a time. Had it been wailing for sixty years? Someone had forgotten to turn it off? Or maybe there hadn’t been someone to turn it off. Maybe the desolation had lingered and swallowed anyone who had even visited the disaster zone. She knew what that felt like.
She’d been alone in the dark as a little girl, writing songs about sirens while they’d fought in the other room. Writing songs, scared to touch the great thick black fabric of her bedroom’s blackout curtains. The autonomous sensory meridian response from the sound of her blackout curtains on her skin did not feel pleasant to her. It didn’t give her low-grade euphoria or a happy paresthesia. A predator was stalking her, hissing, chilling her scalp, neck, and shoulder skin until it almost burned.
She shook her head and felt the rubble underfoot rumble and shake. No, not mere rubble. Earthquakes. Was the ground itself masticating some great meal? Everything in her life had grown unsteady, now this?
The Asiago Avenue schoolhouse was basically gone. Once she’d sung alongside Alpha Betty in the spelling game. Now all that wafted her way from that direction of The Avenue was the odd burnt ozone smell that only electric fires and corroded batteries conjure. Had Alpha Betty been taken? Where was that silly puppet?
Where were any of them?
Grandma Inda Inge’s younger sister had been taken away by her own grandma when she was little. Rescued her, really. But not Inda — it’s why she thought of grandma when the mummy’s telegram had arrived. After grandma rescued her younger sister, Inda’s parents had fought physically in the other room, her mother barely able to keep up the fight. Alone in her blackout curtains, Inda wrote her little songs, her textbooks in her favorite holey purse her only inspiration. The curtains chilling her spine.
What a dark abyss, that. She could have used a show like Asiago Avenue back then, back in that curtained room. She’d only gotten to it later at her own Grandma’s house, back when she’d first learned about telegrams. Back when she’d heard the first songs of the first episodes of Asiago Avenue.
Lord Greggory Paul Findton Drix Plinkatt, 19th Prince Kilcarty had taught her about honor and bravery when her world grew mean and cruel. How she’d clung to the remote until it had broken and spilled that batteries out, which had earned her a whipping. Forty spankings in one night.
Her grandma had rescued her too eventually.
Oh how she had wanted to be a Real Puppet, there on her grandma’s floor. Or at least a guest to the puppets. And she’d written her songs in secret all through high school and college until she’d finally started performing in the NYU district.
A decade after watching those first episodes and writing those first songs, she’d joined the show. She’d met her first Real Puppets™.
And now it was gone. All gone. The cyclical train ride that lapped the map in lemniscate (The Infinity Pilgrimage), the zoo of mythic bestiaries, the city hall where the puppets all debated important policies kids needed to think through at an early age — none of it was there anymore. The great missing series of artifacts and persons warred on her brain like a coming migraine, like a Great Wall of denial.
Even the puppet dump where they sorted through forgotten toys and puppets and tried their best to make them brand new again? That too was gone: they didn’t even have the dump.
What kind of thing ate even the refuse?
The parts of society and personal life you refused to face? Parts like her wounded childhood she still, as an old woman, refused to face?
Nothing. None of it existed. Her mouth felt slimy, seaweed without the weed. No purse anywhere either, dammit. Few chunks of rubble seemed big enough to hide her purse, let alone hide a puppet friend. When she disturbed those big chunks of rubble, each one hid only fragments. A tangle of snipped marionette cords. A gloved puppet hand, singed. Cracked googly eyes.
A matted stack of yellow feathers. That one stirred the bile up over her throat’s flood gate. The shame poured into her gut, soured. The adrenaline and heat of the rage stirred as a reaction to feeling any shame.
Then fear followed in the wake of her anger, sweaty palms: God forbid she uncork the part of her that was her abusive father, the part of her that would do the exact same thing to the perpetrator that her father had done to her and her mother and her sister in their innocence.
The ground rumbled again. This time she stood on a chunk of preserved asphalt and so she knew it for an earthquake.
Where hid the epicenter?
Then in a haunting whistle from the residential district — it too had been leveled from the disaster — she heard the faintest melody, the intro song of the show, and the intro slowly wound down.
Further along that way she found a little solar powered gramophone endlessly playing the Asiago Avenue intro theme and then the outro theme of the show. Intro, outro, intro, outro, until it was alltro. No one had bothered to tell the poor old gramophone no show existed anymore.
Mid-outro, Inda took the needle off the record. No fanfare, but it was a kind of permanent end. A kind of grief. A shutter in the “eff” sound on her sharp intake of wind stopped her sobs.
Silence.
Then another earthquake. And a booming, chest-caving shout. “WHO WOULD DARE TO STOP EPISODE TWELVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX OF ASIAGO AVENUE?”
Ah.
She knew that voice and her heart stilled at the taste of the bitter briny air. Inda didn’t bother to replace the needle now or back before with her father’s vinyls. The scratch into silence satisfied her, the ultimate rebellion for noisemakers. But she walked towards the corner of the town square. There the puppets had once met at Crawdad’s Cawffeeshop.
There she saw it.
The memory of ground coffee beans came to her, but it wasn’t smelling then. The building was gone as was the puppet Crawdaddy and every one of his team of dancing, skating coffeeshop baristas. Instead, it smelled of ancient trash and bitter, molded coffeegrounds, and the rusted steel of old equipment. Other than that, it was little more than a northeast brick wall and a bit of roof.
“WHO?”
Impossible to miss it.
There were almost no features left on the landscape, no buildings, no puppets, nary a lemonade stand or a functional fire hydrant. Early in that final season, the subterranean infrastructure of Asiago Avenue developed a problem:
A drip from Stalone the Sewer Monster’s house. Instead of fixing it, the puppets let it simmer, arguing over budgetary concerns in the Puppetopolis™ of Asiago Avenue.
It opened up a sinkhole. And the sinkhole grew supermassive.
Again, instead of fixing the problem they, like Inda’s parents, had patched things over. Bit of asphalt in their case, bit of performative social engagements in her parents’s case. But as her parents in their shame had refused counseling — and as Inda’s mother had refused to leave Inda’s abusive father — the puppets had merely poured in more asphalt.
A few episodes later, the sinkhole had grown a mouth. It became The Hole. And every season, The Hole grew. Inda stared into it now. The Hole was now half the footprint of the entirety of the Puppetopolis™ of Asiago Avenue. She had luckily approached from the south, by what shadows of buildings still remained. The Hole hadn’t seen her any more than she had seen it, but now there was no denying the immensity of the problem.
What on earth did it feed on?
“Hello, The Hole.”
“Call me Hole, Inda.” When it moved its massive black maw, the entire remnants of the streets shook because they formed its very lips. Its googly eyes hung out in dark negative space, somehow: an almost dark unground of spirit, an eldritch privation of every puppet’s ultimate good. More rubble fell into its mouth in this way. The Hole didn’t mind. “Did you stop my forever theme?”
“I did, Hole,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“Why would you stop an episode in the middle of filming?” Googly eyes should be funny. Quirky. Disarming. They shouldn’t leer.
Inda took a glance around. She saw nothing left of the sound stages that had welcomed her, of the on-site buildings that had housed her, of the cameras that had filmed her, Real Puppets™ that had befriended her, crew, other guest stars. No lights. No action. No director or star chairs. It was rubble, trash, and The Hole. “Where are the cameras?”
“Around,” The Hole said.
“Forgive me, Hole, but I don’t see them. Where is everyone?”
“Around.”
“What happened?”
“Well there was this issue no one solved and so I decided to solve it.”
“What was the issue?”
“A sinkhole, you know this.”
“Hole? Aren’t you the sinkhole?”
“Yes.”
“So aren’t you the issue?”
“Yes. I solved it.”
“How does an issue solve itself?”
“Self help. I solved me.”
“If self could help self, how did self get self into the problem in the first place?”
“I solved me,” the Hole insisted.
“What did you do?”
“I preserved the show. No one would deal with the sinkhole and so I, The Hole, dealt with me and came up with a beautiful deal. I preserved it all.”
“How?”
“I ate it. I ate.”
“Ate what?”
“Asiago Avenue.”
Grandma Inda Inge grew really still. “Did you eat Multiplication Mummy after his last episode?”
“He was the first. No one would give him severance and the show wouldn’t be the same without him. So I did him a favor and severed him.”
“YOU ATE HIM?”
“They hated him, so of course I ate him. What else could I do? It was the least I could do, making him the least.”
“That’s not what severance means!”
“It’s what I meant,” The Hole barked. Its viscous articulation of sound shook the earth again. Its googly eyes somehow looked bitter, wroth.
The Grandma struggled to keep her balance. “Is he dead?”
“No. He’s… around.”
She looked into the massive abyss. “Is he still in your belly?”
“Of course, until such a time as the show can be restored to its former glory.”
“What else did you eat? Who?”
“The others.”
She swallowed, thinking of all the other puppets and cast members. “You ate all of the puppets and people?”
“Yes.”
“Props too?”
“Yes.”
“YOU MONSTER, DID YOU EAT MY FAVORITE PURSE?”
The Hole pursed its lips and its massive googly eyes on the crags of the pavement looked awkwardly away. How could such a great, terrible beast have such toxic shame?
And yet, she decided to press her advantage. “HOLE! ANSWER ME RIGHT NOW!”
“I couldn’t help it, I have a problem, an addiction as bad as that cookie one. I was hungry. Starving!”
“Starving. You don’t look like a man who ever went without a meal.”
“Starving, I tell you! I was poor!”
She, who had been poor and starving, who had rationed crackers from the diner as a child, had heard quite enough from this spoiled suburban bottomless pit. “Is my favorite purse still inside you?”
“Of course.”
She thought about her abusive parents, her own grandma’s rescue. She thought of her puppet friends, and missed her purse that had once carried the very muse of her math rock math songs. “Well then, Hole, eat me too.”
“Kay,” he said.
So he did.
* * *
It was dark again, oppressively dark in the way that only the thick blackout curtains that made up The Hole’s gullet could be. God, she didn’t want to be back in that room with those blackout curtains. The air closed in around her. It touched the back of her neck, giving her that predator’s chill, that autonomous sensory meridian response.
This time it was surely the biggest predator she’d encountered. And it wasn’t even just waiting in the tall grass for her. If you think the anxiety of being almost, soon, or nearly eaten is bad, you should feel the back-of-the-neck blackout curtain prickle of being actually eaten. She heard her parents arguing again.
Before her, she saw the faint ghost of herself as a child, under those curtains, with the smell, with the feel of them, with no grandma to rescue her.
Here as a grandma herself now. It was time, time to deal with the little girl. For she was not her, she was an old woman. She reached out to the ghost of her past self she saw there in the gullet and grabbed hold of her hand, falling through the abyss. The shame and anger and fear all merged into a melancholy, nostalgic sadness. A longing for a home she’d never known.
And she said to that little girl, “You don’t need those protectors anymore. I’ve got you now. I’ve got me.”
For Inda had been in this dark before. She’d been alone in her room with nothing but a flashlight and her homework and a ukulele. She’d written songs in that tingling predatory dark. It felt to her again hurtful, sad. Horrific. She even felt beneath that hurt and sadness a sort of guilt that it all had gone away. A guilt that it — and she — had vanished from the world and from morning television for hurting kids like the young version of herself.
Of the static sound when the channels had gone dead, the static that tingled the back of her neck. The noise that was neither silence nor show.
As she went deeper into the static and into the paresthesia of the blackout curtains that had devoured her body, she saw a bit of gauze. A single strand of white in the dark. She reached onto it. Grabbed hold.
“PULL!” shouted a familiar voice.
The gauze was thicker than she’d thought, thicker than the strand of her own grandma who’d saved first her sister and then herself, her grandma whose television never faded to black or static from Asiago Avenue. And it yanked her deeper inside of the gullet of blackout curtains until she popped out in an underground cavern lit by oil barrels full of burning trash.
She followed this trail of taut gauze to Multiplication Mummy smiling in his sad way, a joyful grief, a walking sentient memento mori standing there, waiting for her at the end of a long dark cloth bullet train tunnel. The further she climbed out of the heights of the sinkhole monster’s gullet, she saw a bunch of puppets and costars.
All of them were there. Crawdaddy, Alpha Betty, Grome, Shelly, and even Lord Greggory Paul Findton Drix Plinkatt, 19th Prince Kilcarty, the puppet who had first given her hope as a wounded little girl.
Relief and that old spinal chill both filled Inda, but this time the chill was a kind of low-grade euphoria like the first blinks before a peaceful rest. “You’re all here!”
“Of course,” the Mummy said.
“How are we going to escape this massive sinkhole?”
“Escape? There’s no escape.”
She’d felt that feeling before, despair in her room as her parents wailed on one another. Fists on fists. Yet others were here with her this time. She wasn’t alone in the blackout curtains. She wasn’t alone with her math books. She wasn’t alone seeking the song in the abyss, desperate for her own grandma to return for her. Now as an old woman, she remembered that others had been down in this hole long before her. Down in this hole she’d been before too: her best songs had been written down in this hole.
Sure, it didn’t have googly eyes back then, but did it matter?
Often times in stories she’d read as a kid, even stories she’d written into her songs or watched on Asiago Avenue, some heroine would get swallowed by a beast or a seabeast. And after cooking and stewing and reflecting in the belly of the beast for a while, they’d come out victorious.
The chill never left because this did not happen to her or to any of them. They did not emerge again from the belly of the whale. From the static and blackout curtains of this one puppet deprived of all the other goods of being a Real Puppet.
There was no rescue.
No one new even came down to join them in the belly of The Hole for many years. No one even knew they could. Folks generally stayed away from the disaster zone as one would stay away from nuclear fallout. As neighbors had stayed away from her brawling mother and father. A Bermuda Triangle sort of phenomenon emerged.
“What can we do?” asked Alpha Betty.
Idna looked at all the puppets and costars and realized, “The Hole has swallowed enough of Asiago Avenue…”
“Yeah?”
She thought of the songs she’d written in the blackout curtains, she thought of the kind of song that could send shivers down your spine in the good way, could rewrite the very chill of predators waiting in the tall grass. “We can rebuild all of it. We could revise it, rewrite it. Make it new.”
“Here in the dark?” asked Alpha Betty.
“Here in the dark. Brick by brick, lemonade stand by lemonade stand, educational song by educational song. Rebuild the whole children’s show from scratch.”
“From scratch,” Multiplication Mummy said and grinned.
Grandma Inda Inge grinned. “We can start broadcasting toda… tonight. A nighttime show for hurting children.” It wasn’t just that Asiago Avenue had been cancelled because of The Hole, hadn’t the tonight shows on the same network? “A tonight show, led by Real Puppets™.”
She’d once heard that the abyss stares back. For her, it tickled back without consent. But it stared or tingled, maybe it’s because the realest part of her — the soul-piercing, spine-tingling songwriter — had hidden deeper than The Hole.
* * *
* * *
PERSON — Grandma on her last adventure
PLACE — Sesame Street 50 years after The Event
THING — a lost purse
Leave a comment to get your prompt, write a story, and win a prize:
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PS — We’ve almost caught up!
I always want to sell more books this year than last year to create a compounding curve after two decades. We’re picking up the pace.
BUT! We’re behind last year’s pace. We were 20 sales off on September and have caught up all but 9 of them:
We’re 15 books only 9 books! behind last month. En route towards that compounding curve, but if you find a brand new book on the list, maybe get a copy? If you haven’t bought all of them, would you add to your collection?
Which one did you like the most — would you get a few copies for friends and families?
The Person, Place, Thing anthology
An anthology of stories whose prompts were literally pulled randomly out of three hats.
Bell Hammers, novel — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A novel about carpenters pranking an oil company.
….that I also narrated.
Cold Brewed — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A graphic novel told in photographs — a noir where the drug traded is coffee beans.
Overmorrow — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A lyrical, fever dream YA urban fantasy whose memory monster messes with your own memory.
The Omni Lighthouse — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A MASSIVE collection of my essays and stories.
Tap and Die, novella — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A fantasy that takes a metatextual approach to Die Hard, westerns, and Matilda.
Do Literary Books Sell Fewer Copies Than Genre Books?
A data-based survey on the state of publishing sales.
A collection of free verse and romantic meter poems.
Person, Place, Thing: Stories Pulled from a Hat
An anthology of stories whose prompts were random slips of paper containing a person, then a place, then a thing.
A sci fi and fantasy anthology featuring Juliet Marillier .
Of Gods and Globes II — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A sci fi and fantasy anthology featuring Kaaron Warren.
Of Gods and Globes III — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A sci fi and fantasy anthology featuring Juliet Marillier and many others.
A dark, vulnerable Indie Folk album.
An Americana EP album.
Harry Rides the Danger — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A children’s book that encourages kids to face their fears.
The Elevator Out — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
A children’s book that offers a simple response to nihilism.
The Greenwood Poet — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
Poetry written in Greenwood Cemetery before, during, and after the pandemic. Most of it’s pretty romantic, greenwave, climate fiction, or fae inspired.
Inconveniences, Rightly Considered
Poems I sold in my twenties.
Women’s Poetry Anthology — (direct link to ensure highest royalty)
An anthology of the great women poets across history.
Short stories taking place in The Vale — YOU CAN GET ALL 15 FOR DIRT CHEAP.
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