Your new prompt word is
PET
Many of us have pets. I have two cats who I adore and who act as my muses while I work. We also pet our animals. But, this word has many other meanings. We can use it to refer to someone we like – ‘Isn’t she lovely? A real pet.’ We also talk about a pet theory, pet peeve or pet project. PET is a type of plastic or it can refer to a PET scan. What does this week’s prompt word mean to you?
Fact or fiction, prose or poetry, I would love to read your thoughts on this week’s prompt, but there’s no obligation to share your writing. Here is the work you shared on the last prompt TABLET.
When Anxiety Calls
Anxiety arrives before the day has decided what it is. It slips beneath the ribs and settles there, a restless tenant rearranging the furniture of thought. I have learned its weather: the tightening chest, the rehearsed disasters, the pulse counting exits before entrances. Some mornings it speaks loudly enough to drown the kettle.
I do not bargain with it anymore. I open the drawer.
The antianxiety tablets wait in their silver sleeves, ordinary as teaspoons. Valium softens the sharpest corners when the storm climbs too high, not as surrender but as shelter. Around the medicine, I build smaller bridges—counting passing cars, tracing patterns in curtains, folding myself into distractions that keep my mind from feeding its own fire. A film half-watched, music humming through headphones, hands busy with harmless tasks. These are not cures, only lanterns, and sometimes lanterns are enough.
Anxiety still follows me, but it no longer holds the map.
evening tablet—
the rain taps softer now
against the glass
Old-fashioned Flair
She was in repose in her parlor on her divan jotting in her tablet and was accused of sitting in her living room on her couch writing in a notebook. How rude!
With Tablet and Pen
I have a tablet and a pen.
I had some words to write, but then
I thought I better think again.
I’ll save the ink for later.
We’ve come a very long way from Moses’ image holding a stone tablet that was supposed to state worldly rules for society. A lonnnnggg way.
Susan Batten:
Pop Another One
The old apothecary stares,
abashed in dumb surprise
to see the ranging panoply
of remedies we prize.
No longer odd-shaped lozenges
compounded of strange drugs,
our tablets come in blister packs
which calm us more than hugs.
This industry depends on faith,
turns cachets into gold,
churns out the silver regiments
in millions which are sold
to keep us healthy, never sick,
to help us stay alive,
to pep us up or calm us down –
whichever way, to thrive.
The world of supplements is keen
to feed us what we need
or what we think we ought to take,
we pay it slavish heed.
Like wildflowers in the field of life
we bow and sway and dance
to take the latest supplements –
we can’t leave life to chance.
Keep Taking the Tablets
One phrase immediately comes to mind on encountering this prompt, but I worry, these days, when using an old catchphrase. Will the younger members of my audience have heard of it?
I recently used ‘Just Like That’ as title for one of my verses, then wondered if the younger generation would even know who Tommy Cooper was, never mind recognise his catch phrase. Not that I was ever a fan of Tommy Cooper. His style was too slapstick for my taste.
I do remember though, dashing home on Sundays from wherever I was to watch the Rowan and Martin Laugh-in (‘sock it to me’, ‘Here come de judge…’) in the days before you could record things from the TV. I watched a re-run of an episode recently, and I wondered what I’d thought so funny. It was almost as random as some of the things my grandchildren watch on YouTube.
Certain catchphrases seem timeless (remember Del Boy’s, ‘Lovely Jubbly’? or Baldrick’s, ‘I have a cunning plan’?) but would today’s teens recognise them if I used them in my writing?
I’d always believed certain humorous programmes were timeless (The Two Ronnies, Morecombe and Wise…) but recently, I sat down to watch an old episode of Morecombe and Wise with my grandsons who were staying for the weekend.
‘We used to look forward to the Christmas specials every year,’ I told the eldest. ‘If we couldn’t watch them for any reason, we’d make sure to record them.’
‘So, you could record them back then?’
‘Cheeky! It wasn’t that long ago.’
But it was. The filming was fuzzy and the jokes were… a little lame. They didn’t make me laugh out loud like I remembered.
‘I wonder if our sense of humour changes as we get older?’ I mused out loud.
‘Never mind, Nan.’ He patted my shoulder as he got up to refresh his soft drink. ‘Keep taking the tablets.’
Once Holy, Now Sticky with Fingerprints
Long before it became a glowing rectangle with 3% battery and seventeen unanswered notifications, a tablet was something entirely different.
A tablet was authority. Not wisdom – authority. There’s a difference.
Ancient kings didn’t climb mountains carrying motivational journals. They marched down with stone tablets heavy enough to kill a goat and emotionally damage a village.
Nobody questioned a man holding commandments carved into granite. If someone today walked into a café carrying a two hundred pound slab etched with “THOU SHALT NOT REPLY ALL,” society would immediately promote him to management.
The funniest thing about tablets is that humanity has spent thousands of years trying to make them smaller while somehow making people more dramatic around them.
The stone tablet said: “Here are ten rules.”
The modern tablet says:
“Would you like to update now?”
“Storage almost full.”
“Face not recognized.”
“Your child has accidentally purchased twelve invisible bananas in a game.”
Progress.
The first tablets survived floods, wars, and collapsing empires.
Today’s tablets fall face down once from a sofa and behave like Victorian aristocrats with fragile lungs.
One crack across the screen and suddenly everyone whispers around it:
“Oh no…”
“It was so young…”
And yet tablets have become modern confession booths.
People don’t talk to family members for six months but will tell a search engine:
“Why do I suddenly hate everyone after 4 PM?”
“Can a headache be caused by looking at another headache?”
“Is it normal to cry at supermarket lighting?”
Somewhere in the future, archaeologists will discover our tablets and assume humanity worshipped fingerprints.
They’ll dust them carefully and uncover sacred inscriptions like:
“Skip Ad in 5 Seconds.”
Entire museums will be built around screenshots of recipes nobody cooked. And honestly, the word itself is beautiful.
Tablet.
It sounds halfway between medicine and prophecy.
“Take one tablet after meals.”
“Bring down the tablet from the mountain.”
Same energy. Different pharmacy.
Maybe that’s what makes the word fascinating.
A tablet has always carried instructions for survival.
Once it told people how to behave. Now, it reminds them their password must contain one uppercase letter, one symbol, one ancient rune, and the blood of a disappointed ancestor.
Civilization evolves magnificently.
Tablet is a word caught between worlds.
Once, a tablet was carved in stone —messages meant to last,truth pressed into something solid enoughto survive time.
Now, it glows softly in our hands.
A window.
A notebook.
A library small enough to carry from room to room.
I use one often. Reading. Writing. Searching for answers that somehow lead to more questions.
A tablet can connect us to voices oceans away, stories never told, music that finds old wounds and somehow helps them breathe.
But there is another meaning too.
Medicine. A tablet swallowed with hope. Something meant to ease pain, restore balance, carry us through difficult days.
Funny, isn’t it —how one word can hold both healing and information. Ancient wisdom and modern convenience.
Stone and screen. Body and mind.
Maybe that’s what language does best. It reminds us that meaning is never fixed.
A tablet can hold stories. It can hold medicine.
And sometimes —if we are lucky —it can hold the pieces of ourselves we are still trying to understand.
I hate taking pills.
I have always called them pills, but my MIL insisted on calling hers ‘tablets’.
She had a variety in the cupboard, many over the counter vitamins and supplements, but quite a cocktail nonetheless.
Years previously I’d had more than her, but they were all prescribed.
Each was a different colour, and each had its own specific role in my day.
Tablets to help me sleep, others to keep me awake. Pills to calm me down, pills to stop me shaking, pills to get me through the day. The heavy stuff was also available, but I only had to take those two or three times when my mindset was in a really dark place.
It was a hard time, and yeah, I guess I rattled, but I got through it.
I remember the day Hubby and I flushed all my tablets down the toilet.
There were so many, we stained the bottom of the toilet bowl. We couldn’t get it out so used a ‘loo blo’ in the cistern which coloured the water every flush. That was an excellent day!
My tablet is confused.
“Vintage.” they call it.
“No longer supported,” is the brand as if it were a cow in the stockyard.
“End of life,” is the prognosis.
“Order new,” is the solution.
“It was my first,” I respond.
“Won’t be your last,” they chide.
“Not so sure,” I whisper.
Do You Have Reservations?
Stone
Cuneiform tablet
Thousands of years
Old – an ancient shopping
List
The Tablet
Professor Edgar Voss brushed centuries of dust from the stone tablet with trembling fingers. The artifact had been buried beneath the ruins of a forgotten chamber twenty feet below the Egyptian desert, sealed behind a slab inscribed with symbols no one on his team recognized. Even before the translation, he knew the discovery was wrong in the most dangerous way possible. History, he had learned, resisted correction.
The tablet was black basalt, polished smooth, etched with a hybrid language combining ancient Greek, hieratic Egyptian, and something older. His graduate assistant called it impossible. Edgar silently agreed.
Three nights later, inside the dim archive room of the museum in Cairo, he deciphered the final line.
We came before the flood. We taught the builders of kingdoms.
His pulse quickened.
Civilization, according to accepted history, began roughly five to six thousand years ago. But the tablet referenced astronomical events dating back nearly twelve thousand years, aligning perfectly with star positions impossible for ancient Egyptians to have recorded. Worse still, the inscription described a network of cities swallowed by rising seas at the end of the last Ice Age.
Edgar leaned back, stunned. If authentic, the tablet proved an advanced civilization existed thousands of years before Mesopotamia.
A knock interrupted his thoughts.
Two armed men in dark suits stood beyond the glass door.
“We need the tablet, Professor,” the taller one said calmly. “Before the world misinterprets what it means.”
Edgar glanced at the translation on his screen and felt the terrifying weight of knowledge settle onto his shoulders.
History had not been lost.
It had been erased.
Big Chief Tablet – that’s what I always think of with this word. When in first grade of school, we all had these paper tablets to practice our printing letters on. It was a little longer than it was wide, and had a red cover with an American Indian Chief on the front. The paper was just cheaply made, and had lines for our practice letters.
I know now that some people use what they call a tablet like a computer. At least I think that’s what it is? I get them all confused between tablet, ipad, kindle. I do know what a laptop is and a PC personal computer with a big monitor. That’s what I use all the time.
Either We Never Met
a bitter pill to swallow;
the tablet of betrayal you pressed into my hands.
one gulp, and everything ended;
my world spun wildly out of place.
the castles of hope i built for us
collapsed like ash beneath the rain,
and from the ruins where I stand now,
i see life through different eyes.
so if one day our paths should cross again,
and i look at you like a stranger,
understand this:
i’ve mastered the art of erasing
those who betray me on purpose.
and if you ask me then,
“do you still remember me?”
i’ll smile faintly and reply:
“either you betrayed me…
or we never met at all.
which one are you?”
I’m taking these potions
To deal with my notions
They say I’m as mad as a hat
They say that I’m crazy
My brains kinda hazy
But I’m taking a tablet for that
Wax Tablet
The wax tablet waits,
Mystery notes, or a poem,
Or writing practice?
Elixirs
East Winds sigh in sirens’ invisible screams
the ancient past a poultice knocking, seems.
Boarded forgotten doors, passersby ignore.
A once revered fired-brick Alchemist store,
now a blank slate; a stone tablet wiped clean.
Centered high, a mortar and pestle inlay sign
lost, the ‘Rod of Asclepius’ emblazoned there
an image of its staff, a ghost outline laid bare.
Gone are the facade’s verses, rhymes elixirs,
boarded doors, dwindle to mixed-metaphors—
of Gaia taking back at will arboreal splendors.
What say you still standing strong closed doors
where are those potions and pressed powders,
centered with care ‘tween a slip of wax paper,
poured into vials of hand blown etched amber?
‘Pharmacopeia’ did you write for us with posterity’s pen
what you practiced inside those walls in secret back then?
Is it because you heard the songs of the siren?
***
Image credit: Pinterest
Esther Chilton 
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