#gothic meme

class will end in 10 minutes. 10 minutes pass, and class will end in 10 minutes. you arrive home and do your assignments, and suddenly, you're back in class. it ends in 10 minutes

the writing on the chalkboard is always different whenever you look up. no one seems to notice. you just keep copying it into your notebook

one of your classmates asks for a pen. you gave them a pen yesterday. it's back in your pencil case. you don't see them again, but the pen is back in your pencil case

it's tuesday. you have 3 days left. 3 days pass, and it's tuesday again. you have 3 days left

class just started. there are students in the halls for break time. you can hear them screaming. where are they going?

you take a test based on a book you never read. you pass the test. you don't remember answering those questions. the book never existed

you run in PE. the bell rings, and you are still running. what do you need to run from?

It’s four in the morning just outside the fast food joint you work at, the full moon glowing a bit too brightly in the sky. A few metres away a garbage truck lifts the metal bin. You see nothing but a few stray napkins fall, yet you hear shattering glass. The bin is set down with aching slowness. A loud crunch echoes, all four wheels bent unnaturally. That’s the second time this week. The manager’s going to be pissed. Something slow and glinting a suspicious red oozes out from under the bin. The driver waves when he notices you.

The last parents have herded their children away from the slide and the jungle gym. You are alone on the playground as the sun sets, swinging gently and ignoring the marks the chains holding you up are branding into your skin. Underfoot, the sand turns to glass. The rubber of your shoes starts to melt, and you pretend not to notice the scent of charred meat, or the figure now swinging beside you. The fire pit across the park is now a well, bucket and crank and all, overflowing and cooling the glass with long hisses and rising steam. Your companion giggles. You do not look over.

All the lights inside the city bus are working fine, but the shadows are missing. The very back is hoarding them, entrenched in darkness so thick it’s impossible to know if there’s really a wall or if it leads somewhere else. Thorny vines wind their way out of the dark, twining around passengers’ ankles. A man grimaces when one digs into his shiny dress shoes. The smell of rotten apples is overpowering. Someone stands to exit and the vines let them go, but not alone.

A small, cramped bookstore has a mirror along one wall. The shelves are so close together that two people can barely stand back to back between them without touching. Thin purple smoke escapes from the pages as you flick through your selection. Two to the left, black sludge drips from the binding of another. You happen to look up, glancing through the gap where the book in your hand used to be, and catch the eye of your reflection. It winks. You did not. There is breath on the back of your neck.

You walk circles around a mall bigger than it has any right to be. Mid afternoon on a weeknight means that most people are still at work, but that says nothing about the ones that aren’t people. By now it’s as easy as pie to avoid their eyes. The stores rearrange themselves around you, and the third time you pass the underwater exhibit you decide to take the hint. An electric eel nearly as long as you are tall swims beside you in the waist deep water and you step politely aside to let it pass.

Modeled after the Texas gothic, graduate school gothic and similar memes.

* * *

The new release is deployed. You reload the application in your browser, and your screen fills up with lorem ipsum data. This is what all your customers are seeing now. Your conference bridge lights up with a flurry of panicked messages. "The devs forgot to replace the mock API calls with the real ones," says a manager.

An emergency fix is quickly rolled out. You refresh your browser. You still see Lorem ipsum, and so does everyone else. Where is it being cached? Everybody clears their browser cache; the mock data is still there. Your teammates dig deeply into their AWS management consoles, going through every setting that controls the caching. You know it's futile; the mock data has killed the real data and is doomed to be there forever.

* * *

The disaster recovery test is on Saturday night, but the manager's email says it's on Friday. No one reacts, no one asks questions. You are afraid to ask; you don't want to find out what would happen if you broke the silence.

Just to be safe, you join the conference line on Friday night: you can't sleep anyway. The conference line is silent. There is not even static. Then you hear a beep, as if someone has joined the line, but no one speaks. Another beep, then another. After listening to those beeps for ten minutes, you are afraid you are starting to discern a pattern. You hang up before you can hear the next one. You can't let them complete the pattern.

* * *