Monday, August 30, 2010

Why Can’t You Be This Good?

The Banquet Room of the Mansion is next to the kitchen.

Honored guests dine together and toast each other’s accomplishments.  As you personally congratulate each one for their deeds, their kind words turn to daggers of shame mid-flight from lips to ears, marring your face.  Your voice turns to incoherent babbling the longer you stay in the room.

Friday, August 27, 2010

You’ve Done It Now

In order to enter the Workshop of the Mansion, you must swipe your identification into the access box outside of the door.  Once you’re logged in, the door will open.

The Workshop contains workbenches devoted to several projects, both beautiful and practical.  Paintings.  Sculptures.  Furniture.  Engines.  Electronics.  Each one stands between concept and completion, their unfinished state pointing to their eventual perfection and the great labor given to put them that much closer to it.

Drawing nigh to any of these projects causes them to tip over and fall to pieces, at no touch from you.  The ruins leave unmistakable signs of your identity and responsibility.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

While You’re Out

A scrap of paper sticks to the refrigerator in the pantry of the Mansion.  It bears a shopping list in wiggling ink:

  • 2 boxes of boomshine
  • 23 ounces of glass (don't get the chunky kind)
  • 16 volts of contraceptives (asbestos-coated)

Monday, August 23, 2010

Says So Much About the Music Industry

You find a box in the attic.

This box contains a large hand-held microphone of the kind used in stage performances.  When plugged in and sung into, this microphone gives the person singing into it a superb singing voice.  After singing into it, relinquishing this microphone causes the person doing so to have an atrocious voice.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Pressed From the Skin of 12-Year-Old Girls

You find a box in the attic.

This box contains bottles of skin cream.  Applying this cream will make one more attractive, guaranteed.  It also induces self-hatred.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Intimidation

The Mansion’s dining room spans more than a hundred paces in length.  Its width is enough for an aisle between two rows of tables against the walls.  Elegantly dressed patrons dine and converse at the tables.  A pedestal stands at the far end of the dining room, a useful item barely visible atop it.

As you walk past the tables, everyone looks at you with disgust at your faux pas.  Their glances pierce harder with your every step.  Their eyes scream shame the more you advance.  A single step backward will take you out of the room.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Critic

You find a box in the attic

A ball of tears lies in this box.  It is larger than your head.  The tears are rank and tangled; they bite your skin as you hold the ball.  A voice in the center of the ball speaks with malice that draws more tears from your eyes, adding to the tangle.

You must untangle the tears to get at the voice.  As you unwind the ball, the voice gets louder and your strength to endure its malice grows greater.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Sub-Basement

The sub-basement of the Estate is dark and seedy, with many blind corners and rooms which cannot be traversed without exposing your back.  In this level hide criminals, torturers, those who inflict harm on others and have joy of it.  They are stronger than you, faster than you, more skillful at fighting than you.  They wait for you.

When they ambush you, throngs of eyes appear above you, laughing at you, blaming you, saying that you started it, you deserve it.  The eyes and the enemies extort confessions from you that they use to hurt you further.

They laugh.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Finish What You Start

This room is on the ground level of the Mansion.  It is an addition to the main building, jutting out like a shoot from the trunk.  The roof is tarp over a skeleton of buttresses.  The walls are but beams skinned with plastic sheeting instead of drywall.  Every corner has piles of tools.

Cupboards and desks, cobbled from motley boards, stand at odd angles to the walls.  Plans lie in their nooks, as uncompleted as the room itself.  Projects never carried through.  Homework assignments never finished.  Promises never kept.  Ambitions never followed.

The unfinished state of this room menaces you.  The unmoored items fly at you to take vengeance for their frustrated becoming.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Regret

This door is next to the bathroom in second floor of the Mansion.  The plaque on the door has one word on it: REGRET.

Everything in this room is made out to you.

The trophies have your name on them.  The pictures in the photo album show you as a child prodigy, smarter than anyone else, by far.  Your lovers are the most desirable members of the opposite sex.  The newspaper clippings show you to be the best at whatever you did.  You never backed down, you never lost, you always made your loved ones proud.

Everything in this room crumbles soon after being touched.  The smell of the dust makes you gag.