“Pressure”: Inktober Day #9: Writer Edition

I’m using Inktober prompts to generate daily writing

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

I’m always jealous of my visual artist friends, especially my sister, when Inktober rolls around. Then this year I realized that even though I don’t draw, I do write, and it might be fun to take the same prompts and see what twenty minutes of writing on the given topic elicits. So I thought I’d just play and see where things take me (knowing that a lot of what I write will be dreck), and maybe you’d like to join too. Here are this year’s prompts.

The kids are obsessed with this YouTube channel of this hydraulic press squishing things. That’s it. That’s the whole channel — a matchbox car, or a tower of legos, a stack of slime in clear plastic containers. The hydraulic press moves down, steadily, easily, onto its given target and the poor thing dissolves. Every time. Except for the sponges, which bounce right back as soon as they’re given the chance. I guess we should all try to be more like sponges.

But you can’t say things like that to kids anymore because they’re cynical and as soon as they smell a pep talk they escape. They can’t stand the thought of anyone turning YouTube into a place to learn about humanity. They loathe me and they scatter, and I find myself watching the hydraulic press alone, working on a Thomas the Tank Engine ride-on toy, and a headlight, and a soccer ball. I’ve got plenty to do, of course, but it’s soothing, and soon enough, if I keep watching and keep my mouth shut, the children will return to join me.