art is a lie

2. That time some friends and I went camping and we found a pile of bones wrapped in a garbage bag buried under a log, but the adult supervisor told us it was nothing, so we just put it back and didn’t talk about it again.

3. The time I was getting chased through the woods at night and I realized “wait it’s dark as fuck” so I just held still until the guy gave up and left.

4. The time this dude said he was in love with me and so he was going to cut my head off and dump my body in a lake, so I told him to grow the hell up, but then he got caught stealing girl’s underwear a day later and I never saw him again

5. That one time in college where I was taking a shortcut on my home at night and a car followed me into a dark alley, so I stared directly into the driver’s side of the window and walked towards it to psych them out

6. The night I was out on a walk and this old guy told me he’d locked his keys in his truck and that he needed someone my size to crawl in through the back window for him, so I told him “you know that sounds super suspicious right” and told him where to find a pay phone for a tow truck instead

7. The one time this random guy on the street said he was in love with me and so he was going to follow me home on my bus, so I clapped him on the shoulder and told him that if he got that close to my bus then I was going to throw him under the wheels, but then this really nice homeless man from Nigeria told the guy to fuck off and then checked to make sure he didn’t follow me onboard

8. That big cat with yellow eyes who I found in a well and brought home who used to put rotting meat in my closet and wake me up by chewing on my face, until I put him back outside and never saw him again.

9. My one cousin who used to come over for the summer who kept calling me ‘piñata’ and hitting me with sticks, until he went back home and was sent to juvie cause he finally got caught torturing animals

10. The time I got lost on the way to a meeting and wound up at a circus tent instead, and got followed by a full-out clown for three vacant street blocks

11. The pet hamster I had when I was seven who would scream all night and eventually escaped by ripping a bar out of its cage and wiggling through the hole. My mom caught it and put it back but it lived another year and a half until one night the screaming just stopped

12. The time I was whistling in the woods and something started whistling back, so I went home

13. That one night at summer camp where a group of girls got together to play ‘bloody mary’ in the lavatory and invited me to come with them so I said “no thanks” and stayed with the camp councillors and drank soup instead.

14. The old abandoned house I just moved into with the door that leads into a big empty room full of dirt and empty cooking pots that I just sort of… locked up forever and never go near

15. Once when I was at an ihop I saw a coffee mug do a full 360º spin with nobody touching it, so I said ‘that was neat’ and never ate there again

all of us:

hamlet: oh ABSOLUTELY

hamlet for the next four and a half acts: