Multiple Choice Questions Written as the National Emergency Alert [Repeats] Everyone Must Comply by Staying in Their Homes, or a Place of Safety, and Not Going Out Except for Extreme Necessity Until the Danger Has Passed | While the Birds on My Balcony Continue to Coo to One Another, Swiftly Eating the Seed I Have Laid Out for Them, Two of Them Entering My Open Doorway to Peck at Stray Seed That Has Fallen on the Sill | As I Sit, Listening for the Distant Sound of Drones and Interceptor Missiles ~ Measuring Causality the Way One Measures Thunder After a Flash of Lightning

1. Please ___ the instructions issued by the official authorities in the State.
a) inhabit
b) internalize 
c) interrogate

2. Memory is a ___; it sneaks up on you.
a) temporal construct in a sentient being with evolved cognitive abilities
b) lithe creature with padded feet and a nocturnal disposition for hunting
c) cynical ninja with crushing student loans from a private ninja college

3. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, X was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to ___.
a) the McDonald’s parking lot where X’s parents met to exchange him in-between custody visits
b) the quarry to shoot his BB gun at empty beer cans that had been full the night before
c) the spot where X’s grandfather was shot, where X’s father would be shot, and where X was soon to be shot

4. My mom was ___.
a) a recently divorced woman who got a job waitressing and decided to enroll in college 
b) a woman who was never able to realize all her dreams and regularly reminded me of it
c) the prototype for the woman whom I would fall in love with and exhaust with my attempts to fix

5. Asking meaningful questions helps learners to be more ___.
a) poverty-stricken because they spent too much time in school and less time in the workforce
b) informed with their alibis for future trials in their adult life should they stay or move abroad
c) crestfallen, watching history crush and repeat like a millstone never absolving the mortal grain

6. He had not been a ___ man—so why had ___ things happened to him?
a) faithless and reckless / ill-starred  
b) blessed and righteous / Jobian 
c) fame mogging / chopped 

7. Many people may seem ___.
But sometimes ___ can provide 
different ways of seeing
over and around ___.
a) content / adversity / the opiates of the masses
b) secure / a missile strike / the façade of international law
c) unrealized / a writing prompt / the picket fences of creativity

8. Thus, steal like a(n) ___.
a) ex you ghosted who haunts until you give them back the time they spent with you
b) patient sleep paralysis demon waiting to harvest your flickering waking matter 
c) grunting capitalist pig slurping and usurping the labor of hardworking proletariats

9. And they lived ___ ever after.
a) vestigially 
b) ephemerally
c) apotropaically 

10. The ____ ends here. It is a work utterly complete in itself, and its eloquence requires no further comment.
a) writing experiment
b) cooing of the birds 
c) anticipation of the missiles

February 28, 2026

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Photo by Renan Florindo on Unsplash