I Never Saw It Coming

No, I’m not talking about the last of Lost. Sure, I may have been caught completely off-guard when Walt turned up with his army of fire-breathing polar bears to take back the island, or when Rose pointed to Not-Locke’s ruby slippers and told him that he’d had the power to leave all along. But there’s already enough Lost conjecture clogging the internets, and I don’t want any part of that.

Besides, I’m still harping about ninja haiku.

Not only have none of the three winners contacted me to claim their free Japanese dinner, but I still don’t even know who one of them (Billypete) is. My father, in his haste to print out his Dishonorable Mention, didn’t even see that his own daughter had won. And, of the many people I called out for not submitting a haiku at all, only one took the time to mollify me with an excuse...

It turns out that she did submit a haiku. However, it wasn’t a ninja-related haiku; the haiku itself was a ninja. That’s why I hadn’t seen it.

Upon learning this, I involuntarily shivered. How many other ninja haiku had skulked across the rooftops of the blogosphere, climbed surreptitiously in through an open-source window, and perhaps sliced the throats of other, innocent haiku with small daggers^† before stealing away into the night with unclaimed Japanese dinners I didn’t even know were missing? How many? Five? Seven?*

I felt sick, thinking about the horrors I had unleashed upon the literary world. I knew in that moment that I would never again hold a ninja haiku contest. And I’m a man of my word: Next time, I’ll be sure to choose a kinder, gentler haiku subject. You know, like babies. Or puppies. Or smoke monsters.


^† Or other cutting-edge technology.
* Five, probably.