{"id":3892,"date":"2020-03-11T19:18:35","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T02:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/?p=3892"},"modified":"2020-03-11T19:18:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T02:18:35","slug":"this-message-cannot-be-delivered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/2020\/03\/11\/this-message-cannot-be-delivered\/","title":{"rendered":"This Message Cannot Be Delivered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Old friends\u2019 emails become inactive, enveloped by electronic monsters. My message cannot be delivered, electronic gatekeepers proclaim.<\/p>\n<p>I can\u2019t tell them of being alone. I can\u2019t hear their off-color jokes about paraplegics and suicide, youth at its most delightfully stupid. Tell them of empty, sterile walls. I can\u2019t confess I absorbed their stories of family, an electronic voyeur.<\/p>\n<p>I keep trying. Messages come back.<\/p>\n<p>I drive to distant homes. But staring through lit windows, I feel like a magazine, an obnoxious knickknack among order and precision. I imagine them discarding jokes, smiles replaced by starched replicas.<\/p>\n<p>This message isn\u2019t delivered.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>From Guest Contributor Yash Seyedbagheri <\/p>\n<p>Yash is a graduate of Colorado State University&#8217;s MFA program in fiction. His story, &#8220;Soon,&#8221; was nominated for a Pushcart.  Yash\u2019s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Caf\u00e9 Lit, 50 Word Stories, (mac)ro (mic), and Ariel Chart.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Old friends\u2019 emails become inactive, enveloped by electronic monsters. My message cannot be delivered, electronic gatekeepers proclaim. I can\u2019t tell them of being alone. I can\u2019t hear their off-color jokes about paraplegics and suicide, youth at its most delightfully stupid. Tell them of empty, sterile walls. I can\u2019t confess I absorbed their stories of family, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[8726,614,116,8727,41,7344,2068,8730,4849,3910,5563,5170,8728,8731,8732,4229,2096,564,8729,4396,2754,8327,266],"class_list":["post-3892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-100words","tag-emails","tag-family","tag-friends","tag-gatekeepers","tag-guest-contributor","tag-homes","tag-jokes","tag-knickknack","tag-magazine","tag-message","tag-monsters","tag-order","tag-paraplegics","tag-precision","tag-replicas","tag-smiles","tag-stories","tag-suicide","tag-voyeur","tag-walls","tag-windows","tag-yash-seyedbagheri","tag-youth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3893,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions\/3893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/entropy2.com\/blogs\/100words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}