"The siren climbs like a thief through the windows calling her back to the moon"

[larryhammer]

The shorthand premise repeated by some episodic manga at the start of serial installments can be amusing:

• "Ever since I was a child, I've seen strange things. Since it doesn't seem anyone else can see them, they're most likely ... what you'd call spirits."
  
  
• "My guardian angel possesses, it's true, white wings like those of angels, but it's a dinosaur plushie."
  
  
• "I'm a high school girl who loves to bake pastries. However, I'm not your average high school student. I can summon up devils and make them work for me. I'm an apprentice witch." *
  
  
• "To all the dead people out there, this is Ghost Only, a restaurant exclusively for ghosts. Will you please stop by before you go to the underworld or on a journey?" **

From Natsume Yuujinchou, Angel Manual, Akuma to Dolce, and Ghost Only, respectively. The first of which I particularly recommend, though they're all at least decent.

What are some of your favorites?

Meanwhile, following up on the weekend sonnet, I've revised the second stanza to address wonky rhymage and what matociquala calls the line of direction.

As when a goldsmith draws a pliers pinch
of reddish metal through an iron plate,
but his gold's gone too cold for pulling straight
and so he strains for every wire inch;

and as a rower a length behind the leader
pulls hard, but with her muscles all but dead
she doesn't have enough to pull ahead,
and arms legs lungs burn with strokes that don't speed her;

so do I stare at this white screen, this row
of black letters as meaningless as the dead,
and for all I try to make this story go,

each word is drawn from under fingernails
as if by pincers, till I drop my head
onto the keyboard where my writing fails.

Still no title has appeared. This may not be a problem.


* The pastries being important because demons have sweet-tooths and will make bargins for them.

** That one gets more variation in wording than the others, but this is the most appealing one. The narrator is an otherwise ordinary high school student who's a waitress there because she happens to see ghosts -- much to her dismay.

---L.