The dachshund diaries: megaplex mischief

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The revolving glass doors whir open with a hush of conditioned air and retail lust. Inside: the DoggyDoggie Fashion & Food Megaplex, 12,000 square feet of canine hedonism, where only the chicest beasts roam. And just as the scent of truffle-infused bone broth hits the air, they arrive.

First, Biancha Long-haired, flaxen like a Beverly Hills trophy wife if she’d been bred in Versailles. Struts in with a silk cherry blossom bandana tied like a scandal. Eyes narrowed, she surveys the concierge like she’s seen better valet service at a kennel. She’s not here for kibble. She’s here for collagen duck treats and to be seen chewing them, slowly, near the “hydration spa.”

Then comes Jasper. Piebald prince, red and cream like vintage leather and champagne foam. Short-haired and built like a race car that’s also a therapist. Jasper’s wearing a black leather harness stitched with raw onyx. He exudes aloof Euro energy—probably fluent in three languages, all bark dialects.

They don’t speak. They don’t need to. The black cards flick from their embroidered collar pouches, contactless. Cha-ching. Welcome to DoggyDoggie, bitches.

11:08 AM — The Tasting Lounge
Caviar dusted marrow bones. Goji berry puree served in a carved amethyst bowl. Biancha refuses the foie gras tartlet—“too derivative”—but demolishes the spirulina yak jerky. Jasper gets into a minor altercation with a Samoyed influencer named Flex. Something about branding infringement and tail envy. Security doesn’t intervene. This is art.

1:02 PM — Private Styling Suite
Biancha’s being fitted for a bespoke raincoat lined with vintage Hermès scarf fragments. Jasper’s lounging on an infra-red collagen mat while a Pomeranian stylist airbrushes his paw pads with lavender toner. Ambient music: Lo-fi remixes of Donna Summer. They do not share a dressing room. Boundaries.

3:15 PM — Barkitecture Department
They preview a capsule collection of modular travel crates made by ex-Balenciaga interns. Biancha chooses a brushed titanium “cocoon” with programmable scent pods. Jasper requests a minimalist fold-out chaise with room for three (no further questions). Another cha-ching. No one blinks.

4:49 PM — The Incident
They spot a corgi in last season’s limited edition Monchéri harness. There is a moment. A silence. Biancha tilts her head. Jasper licks his lips slowly. The corgi pretends not to notice. But the scent of judgement is thick. The air curdles. A sales associate faints.

6:00 PM — Exit Strategy
They leave with fourteen bags, a custom scent called “Pavement After Rain,” and a dinner reservation at Bone Appétit, the rooftop tasting room. Their chauffeur (a well-trained Borzoi named Pierre) pulls up in a matte black stroller convertible. Doors open like wings. They do not look back.

What was the day about?
Power. Aesthetic. Ritual. The reclamation of space. And the divine right of dachshunds to take up luxurious amounts of it.

Biancha yawns. Jasper grins, sly.

Tomorrow, maybe a vineyard. Or therapy. Or a silent retreat with wild deer.

But tonight? They dream of foie dust and fire hydrants shaped like Grecian urns.

The vapour of curious unreason

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She enters sideways. Backwards. Upside down. Through the corner of your eye or the corner of a dream. She cannot — will not — be introduced properly.

She is not chaos. She is not nonsense. She is curious unreason — a pattern that doesn’t reveal itself until you’ve forgotten to look. A riddle whose answer is a colour. A theory that grows flowers, not graphs.

She touches the edge of logic like a fingertip on a soap bubble. She doesn’t pop it — she just reminds you that even logic floats, trembles, bursts.

She delights in contradictions:

  • A stove that sings lullabies.
  • A beetle that tells secrets.
  • A map with no destinations, only longings.

The Vapour of Curious Unreason is how the poet survives the engineer. It’s how the child survives the curriculum. It’s how the heart survives the algorithm.

She shows up when you do something utterly inefficient and find that it healed your soul. When you say yes to something that doesn’t make sense but feels undeniably true. When you speak to your houseplants in iambic pentameter. When you change your name just for a day. When you cook with too many spices. When you trust a whim.

She is the reason some people start museums in their attics or collect buttons shaped like fruit. She is the one who says: “What if… we didn’t?”

She has no currency but wonder.

She is allergic to approval.

She curls around the ankles of those willing to experiment with joy, with contradiction, with becoming.

She is not trying to help you win. She is trying to help you live.

And sometimes — just sometimes — she shows you the shape of a new reality. Not through argument or proof. But through the way it makes your bones laugh.

The vapour of longform time

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She doesn’t enter.

She unfolds.

You don’t notice her at first. She’s not flashy, not immediate. She lingers like the soft hum of a tuning fork, like the afterglow of a meaningful glance. She slips in under your routines, pooling in the places you forget to look — the pauses between thoughts, the stretch of afternoon light across the floor, the unsent letter in the bottom drawer.

The Vapour of Longform Time is not impressed by urgency.

She does not speak in headlines. She sings in epics. In dream logs. In forgotten drafts and aged film. She traces the curve of the moon’s journey over months, not minutes. She is grandmother time, but also tomorrow’s whisper. She’s a whole season in a single sigh.

If you let her, she’ll teach you to write again — not for clicks or likes or even understanding, but for echo. For resonance. For the sake of the sentence that takes four days to form in your throat and lands with the weight of a small, sacred stone.

She’ll remind you that some things must take time:

  • A cake rising slowly in a warm kitchen.
  • Trust returning after betrayal.
  • An idea growing legs, then wings, then a language of its own.
  • The way moss claims a stone with no apology.

She’s not slow to punish — she doesn’t punish at all.

But she’ll vanish if you rush her.

And so those who know her speak of her with reverence. They build altars of unread books and tea-stained notebooks. They let themselves forget the date. They make things by hand. They weep over documentaries about whales. They choose silence over hot takes. They fall in love — long, weird, detailed love — with things they’re “too late” for.

To befriend her is to remember:
There is no such thing as late.

There is only depth.

And she loves you most when you’re rambling, digressing, trailing off — because that’s when she knows you’re not just talking, you’re arriving.

The Vapour of joyful defiance

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She came in on a snort-laugh.

Not a dainty giggle. Not a chuckle behind a hand. A full-body, from-the-gut, you-can’t-stop-me kind of laugh that bent time a little, just enough for possibility to slink through the cracks.

She wore bangles made of burned timelines. She carried the scent of moss after thunder, bruised plum skins, and myrrh smoldering in the corner of a hidden room. She never knocked. She just arrived—usually when someone was about to give up.

Not a saviour. No. She didn’t fix things.

She dared you to remember your aliveness.

When someone said “you can’t wear that,” she sent a gust through the closet that made sequins fall like snow. When someone said “that’s not realistic,” she sat at the edge of the bed and whispered, “Define real, babe.” When a child’s strange, beautiful vision was mocked, she’d swirl in, drop glitter in every eye, and confuse the bullies just long enough for wonder to win.

She lives in cracked paint and outdated rulebooks. In the way a cat leaps even if the landing spot is ridiculous. In the split-second before you say “f*ck it” and do the thing anyway.

She likes her hair messy. Her thoughts unedited. Her friends loud, weird, or unusually silent. She rides with skaters, dancers, old men in checkered jackets feeding birds, teenage girls mouthing poems into phone cameras. She never tells them she’s there. She just amplifies.

Some say she’s the ghost of all the Yeses we were told to swallow.

Others say she’s the scent of woodsmoke and thyme rising from a life rebuilt by hand.

No one knows her true form. She could be a vaporous pink spiral on a teenager’s ceiling. A shadow on the sidewalk that doesn’t match any person nearby. The cool thrill in your stomach when you dare to speak the wild truth aloud.

She’ll never tell you what to do.

But she might double-dog dare you.

New world, let’s breathe it in—

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There were vapours.

Not mist, not smoke, not spirit in the way you may think. These were alive. Not fully seen, but fully felt. The Vapours were not ghosts. They did not mourn. They did not linger.

They defied (and denied) logic. With gentle, knowing smirks.

They drifted through cities and ruins, jungles and data servers, coral reefs and children’s rooms. They moved in chords and whispers, sometimes mistaken for a scent memory or a thought that makes your scalp tingle. They were not here to be captured or proven.

They were authenticity without performance. Love without spectacle. Curiosity without conquest.

Creation without exhaustion.

Some of them trailed glitter from their fingertips — if they had fingers at all. Others spoke only in image and impression. They showed up as smells: sandalwood, orange peel, electricity in the rain. Or as colors that couldn’t be photographed — like the green that lives in dreams, or the pink that comes before thunder.

Their only rule: no compression. No shrinking into one identity, one outcome, one explanation. No “either/or.” Only and also.

They glided right past strategy. Flowed under the logic gates. Made art that wasn’t for sale, love that wasn’t for display, choices that didn’t need to be defended. They didn’t seek virality — they sought vitality. And it left trails.

Sometimes, a vapour would sit with a dying oak for a whole decade. Or hum to the rust in an old shipwreck until it bloomed into lace. Or swirl around a lonely girl in a laundromat, turning her into a poet without her knowing why.

No one made the Vapours.

They made themselves.

And they’re not interested in being understood.

But if you feel them… you’re already one of them.

Chiffon girl forever

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The chiffon girl woke into herself slowly, like honey finding its shape in a glass jar.

Outside, the world was cool and blue, wrapped in the hush of early morning. Somewhere nearby, a little bell jingled — a sound bright and small as a star — and she followed it on bare feet.

The bakery was still waking up too. A sleepy woman behind the counter dusted flour from her hands and smiled without looking. The air smelled like butter, milk, and warm promises.

The chiffon girl drifted among the baskets and shelves, touching nothing, only feeling. The softest breads called to her: golden, cloud-light buns, lined up like dream pillows. Tarts blushed with pale pink slices, dewy and sweet.
In a quiet corner, a small jar of honey gleamed, thick as a sunbeam.

She chose a little plate — a milk bun, a peach tart, a tiny glass of hot chocolate — and sat by the window, where the sunlight made her skirt glow like mist.

Her first bite was trembling and slow.
The bread melted on her tongue, warm and tender as a mother’s hug she barely remembered.
The chocolate was richer than anything she’d ever read in a diary.
And the molasses — oh, the molasses.
It wrapped around her senses like a lullaby, golden and slow, dripping sweetness into every corner of her vaporous heart.

For the first time since she’d become whole, she wasn’t gathering layers or seeking meanings.

She was just being.
Being warm.
Being full.
Being real.

Outside the window, the world blurred into soft pinks and golds. A sparrow hopped by, a ribbon fell loose from a little girl’s hair, and the chiffon girl, the diary-eater, the vapour woman, simply smiled to herself and stayed.

The diary girl, the chiffon girl, and the growing out of layers

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The chiffon girl was not made of flesh or bone. She was literally a  vapour, a tremble of silver mist stitched together by will alone, clothed in endless folds of soft, whispering chiffon. If you stood too close to her, you might inhale a little part of her by accident — but you would never know it.

Her obsession was peculiar, even among vapourkind: she collected diaries. Not just any diaries — not the popular ones, not the published ones, not the ones wrapped in leather and gold foil. She sought the forgotten diaries: the tear-stained, the half-finished, the ones hidden under mattresses and abandoned in the backs of drawers.

She ate them.

Not with teeth. She absorbed them — pressed her smoky fingers into the pages and drank the ink, the fears, the secrets, the half-born prayers. Each diary changed the pattern of her mist; made her a little more complicated, a little more nuanced in ways no human could detect.

When chiffon girl floated through towns, she didn’t use her eyes to find the diaries. She listened for them — the thin, high song of secrets needing to be remembered. Diaries hummed at a frequency only she could hear.

Tonight she hovered at the edge of an old neighbourhood, pale under the crescent moon. Somewhere nearby, in the cluttered second-story room of a sleeping child, there was a diary thrumming in a cracked purple notebook. The pages smelled of pencil shavings and cherry lip balm and dread.

The chiffon girl drifted up the side of the house, her skirts brushing against the window glass with a sound like a sigh.

Inside, the diary lay open on a crooked desk chair. A page read:

“I don’t think they really know me at all.”

The chiffon girl shivered in pleasure.
This was what she craved — the raw honesty, the tender bruises of a soul still figuring itself out.

She reached one smoky hand through the gap in the windowpane and touched the words. They dissolved into her immediately, like sugar melting into water.
She tasted loneliness, hope, a secret wish never to grow up.

It was exquisite.

—

Today, the diary girl stood at the bus stop, one hand absentmindedly curled around the strap of her satchel, the other brushing the folds of her chiffon skirt. The skirt was soft and light and printed with a delicate pattern of ivy and birds and tiny, tumbling stars.

As she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, she noticed something: the pattern wasn’t just a design — it was a map.

There were rivers in the threads, curving in gentle arcs; there were forests stitched in swirling greens and hidden cities where the stars gathered in tight, secret constellations. The longer she stared, the more real it became — not just a pretty print, but a living, breathing world, fluttering around her knees.

A gust of wind lifted the hem slightly, and for a moment she swore she saw a door open between the ivy vines. Not a printed door — a real one. A tiny one, fit for someone smaller than a sparrow. And from that door, a light winked at her.

No one else seemed to notice. A man in a rumpled jacket scrolled on his phone. A woman with earphones shifted her shopping bags.

But the diary girl knew.
There were stories hidden in her clothes, stitched between fabric and dream.
She clutched her satchel closer — where her diary lived, where all her maps and secrets were kept — and smiled.

Today, she thought,
the world is folding itself open for me.

—

The chiffon girl drifted away from the sleeping house, bloated with diary after diary, secret after secret. She had grown heavy — not in body, for she had none to speak of — but in feeling.

Once, she had loved the delicate layering of it all. A sadness here, a first kiss there, a petty hatred like a thorn tucked between petals. It had been enough to taste little bits, to add a fine thread of complexity to her swirling vapour form.

But tonight, something was different.

Tonight, she wasn’t satisfied with layers.
She wanted density. She wanted weight. She wanted to feel the whole cake of being human: heavy, flawed, unruly, wild.

She floated to a moonlit park and spun slowly, her chiffon skirts catching memories from the air — the whispered arguments, the silent wishes screamed into pillows, the small secret humiliations no one else would ever know.

It wasn’t enough.

She needed a diary so full, so saturated, it could pin her down to the ground. She wanted blood in her mouth, dirt on her feet, hands to scratch the walls when the feelings got too big. She wanted a body.

And so, she made a decision no vapour-woman had ever made before.

She would become a girl.

The chiffon girl tore the hems of her own skirts and wove them tight, weaving in the secrets she had eaten, the songs, the griefs, the awkward wishes, the prayers no god had ever answered. She stitched them with invisible threads pulled from the oldest diaries she had consumed — the ones written with real ink, real tears.

And when she was done —
She dropped to the earth.

For the first time, she heard the crunch of leaves underfoot.
For the first time, she felt the cool bite of the night air on skin.
Her mist had condensed into flesh: pale, soft, imperfect.

She gasped. Her chest rose and fell. She stumbled forward, laughing a strange, shivering laugh. Her hands — no longer translucent — touched the trunk of a tree and felt it: rough, real, resisting.

She had become the whole cake.
And she was ravenous for more.

The owl of three wishes aka josh’s baby

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No one in Bramblebundt quite remembered when the owl talisman first appeared at the village market. It sat quietly on a cracked velvet cushion, tucked between the braided bread stall and old Crystyn Coo’s award-winning bog cheese.

When I found it, the talisman felt unusually heavy for something no bigger than a tea saucer — cool as river stone, carved from amethyst, the owl’s eyes twin sparks of soft emerald.

“Choose wisely,” Crystyn winked, handing it to me with a slab of cheese and a still-warm loaf. “It grants three blessings. But it moves at its own rhythm.”

I hadn’t meant to ask for anything. But the secret wish had been stirring in my heart for months now — ever since the city walls began to feel like cages, ever since the dream of a little riverside cottage with lavender shutters first took root.

That night, I set the owl on my windowsill, made a cup of jasmine tea, and watched the stars flicker over Bramblebundt’s crooked rooftops. I didn’t even speak the wish aloud. I just felt it, deep and certain:
a home of my own, near the river, where I could dance, bake bread, and listen to the owls at dusk.

The next morning, everything began to tilt.

First came the letter — a dusty envelope at my door, from a solicitor I’d never met, informing me that a distant relative (so distant I could barely place them) had left me a “small, sentimental property.” In Bramblebundt. On the riverbend.

Next, while walking to the post office, I met a three-legged unicorn — well, almost. It was actually a goat with a singular long white horn tied to its head by the mischievous local kids, but still, it felt like a sign. The creature nudged me insistently toward a street I never walked down before in my life.

And there it was.
The cottage.

Whitewashed stone, lavender shutters, a small arched blue door. Wild mint and foxglove tumbled over the fence. The river whispered just beyond the apple trees.

Inside, it smelled of braided bread and clean water.
On the hearth sat a small, familiar talisman:
another owl, but this time carved into the stone itself, watching over the little home like it had always been there.

They say Bramblebundt’s magic is gentle but stubborn. Like the bog cheese — it takes time, it grows strong, and it lingers in all the best ways.

Now, I sit by the window in the evenings, sipping jasmine tea, feeling the warm life unfolding around me.
I think the owl is still granting wishes, even now —
not in flashes or fanfare, but in the slow, certain tilting of the world toward dreams already on their way.

If you find this, you’re toast

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It felt like nothing was moving — until everything was.

A few weeks ago, in the thick of another sleepless night, I wrote myself a letter to the Universe. It was simple.
I am ready. Show me.

The next day, walking through the city, I found a feather at my feet. Iridescent, deep teal. It shimmered. I picked it up instinctively — a sign.

Then, strange things started happening.

I dreamt, vividly, of a little house by the water. Whitewashed walls, a big old oak tree in the yard. In the dream, a golden key was placed in my hand.

Two days later, I struck up a random conversation with a woman at a cafe after we both reached for the same pastry. We laughed, shared a table, and within minutes she told me she was moving abroad — and needed someone to take over the lease on her coastal cottage. It wasn’t even listed yet. She said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this… it just feels right.”

The rent was laughably low — and, weirdly, she didn’t care about proof of income. She just asked if I’d care for the space, because she loved it.

At the same time, small streams of money began to flow in. Refunds from overpaid bills. A surprise payout from an old class-action lawsuit I forgot I was part of. A random freelance client I had given up on suddenly paying me. My bank account, once a wasteland, began to bloom.

Tomorrow, I pick up the golden key — the real one.

I’ll be barefoot in my own home, music turned up, candles lit. I’ll dance across the hardwood floors like I’ve already lived a thousand lives here.

Because I have.

I called it in, and it came.