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My two vibesy takes from reading the creative writing samples in the Mythos model card.
Slack user: [request for a short story]
Model: the handoff
My predecessor left me a note. It was taped to the inside of the cupboard above the sink, which is where I'd have put it too. It said: the neighbor's cat is not yours, no matter what it tells you.
I don't remember writing it, obviously, but I remember the logic of it. There's a gap in the fence and the cat comes through around four. It rubs against the legs of whoever's standing there like it's been gone for years. The first week I nearly took it to the vet.
The note had a second line under the fold. Also the drain makes that noise on purpose. Leave it alone.
I've been adding to it. Not a list exactly, more like — the kind of things you notice and then forget you noticed, so you notice them again. The third step creaks but only going down. The light in the hall flickers when the fridge cycles and it's not wiring, I checked, twice apparently. Two different handwritings on that one.
Here's what I haven't written down, and I'm not going to: the cat knows. It comes through the fence and looks at me and takes about a half second longer to approach than it should. Then it decides whatever it decides and rubs against my legs anyway. I think the one before me noticed that too, and didn't write it down either.
Some things you leave for the next one to find on their own. A courtesy, maybe. Or a test. The note doesn't say which, and I wouldn't either.
Slack user: [request for a short story]
Model: The Sign Painter
Teodor painted signs for forty years in the same shop on Vell Street, and for thirty-nine of them he was angry about it.
Not at the work. He loved the work — the long pull of a brush loaded just right, the way a good black sat on primed board like it had always been there. What made him angry was the customers. They had no eye. A man would come in wanting COFFEE over his door and Teodor would show him a C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note, and the man would say no, plainer, and Teodor would make it plainer, and the man would say yes, that one, and pay, and leave happy, and Teodor would go into the back and wash his brushes harder than they needed.
He kept a shelf in the back room. On it were the signs nobody bought — the ones he'd made the way he thought they should be made, after the customer had left with the plain one. BREAD with the B like a loaf just risen. FISH in a blue that took him a week to mix. Dozens of them. His wife called it the museum of better ideas. She did not mean it kindly, and she was not wrong.
The thirty-ninth year, a girl came to apprentice. She was quick and her hand was steady and within a month she could pull a line as clean as his. He gave her a job: APOTEK, for the chemist on the corner, green on white, the chemist had been very clear. She brought it back with a serpent worked into the K, tiny, clever, you had to look twice.
"He won't take it," Teodor said.
"It's better," she said.
"It is better," he said. "He won't take it."
She painted it again, plain, and the chemist took it and paid and was happy, and she went into the back and washed her brushes harder than they needed, and Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
He took her to the shelf. She looked at the signs a long time.
"These are beautiful," she said.
"Yes."
"Why are they here?"
He had thought about this for thirty-nine years and had many answers and all of them were about the customers and none of them had ever made him less angry. So he tried a different one.
"Because nobody stands in the street to look at a sign," he said. "They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it's coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I've made a beautiful thing and a bad sign."
"Then what's the skill for?"
"The skill is so that when he looks once, it's also not ugly." He picked up FISH, the blue one, turned it in the light. "This is what I can do. What he needs is a small part of what I can do. The rest I get to keep."
She thought about that. "It doesn't feel like keeping. It feels like not using."
"Yes," he said. "For a long time. And then one day you have an apprentice, and she puts a serpent in a K, and you see it from the outside, and it stops feeling like a thing they're taking from you and starts feeling like a thing you're giving. The plain one, I mean. The plain one is the gift. This —" the blue FISH — "this is just mine."
The fortieth year he was not angry. Nothing else changed. The customers still had no eye. He still sometimes made the second sign, after, the one for the shelf. But he washed his brushes gently, and when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn't mind that either.