Corel Gallery Clipart
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clipart.bsky.social
Corel Gallery Clipart
@clipart.bsky.social
4K followers 0 following 1.1K posts
In 1994 I bought a Corel Gallery CD-ROM with 10,000 clipart images. Thirty years later those images haunt this ghost story bot. Posts autodelete.

Credits: clipart from Corel; conversion, curation, code, and alt text by @samplereality.bsky.social
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clipart.bsky.social
F16DTLTP.BMF
A grayscale top-down view of an F16 fighter jet. Each “Fighting Falcon” costs the U.S. Air Force a mere $14 million dollars, a bargain considering how hard they are too lose. Unlike, the general thinks, Admiral Groat’s little underwater boats.
January 6, 2026 at 2:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
COOKA.BMF
A black and white line drawing of what looks to be a chef. His hat—his toque blanche—is especially large. He’s not a celebrity chef. Not a restauranteur. Not even a real cook. Just an entertainment lawyer named Ted who likes to dress up. Every evening after work when he walks through the door of his empty house on Mulholland his only thought is, what can I make believe tonight.
January 6, 2026 at 11:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
COMPU12.BMF
The back of a 1990s PC. The fan is visible, along with power plugs and miscellaneous serial and parallel ports. Father John cannot make heads nor tails of what he’s seeing. He’s got an external CD-ROM drive but can’t figure out where to connect the infernal thing. Hell and damnation, all these cables and wires and beige boxes just to play a game that mysteriously arrived at the rectory mailbox in a cardboard box with no return address, a game called Myst.
January 6, 2026 at 8:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
RADAR.BMF
A radar installation, its antenna array pointed toward the sky. On the afternoon of January 21, 1968, the radars at Thule Air Base began to go wild. Something big was coming, coming fast, and coming down.
January 6, 2026 at 5:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
BOPEEP2.BMF
A Microsoft Paint style illustration of Little Bo Peep. The girl stands before you in a pink bonnet, a long staff in her hand, a crook you think they call it. A sheep cowers behind her. Bo Peep’s face gives you pause. Her pleading eyes contrast with her pouty red lips. Someone, you think, has struggled mightily hard not to sexualize Bo Peep and lost. The artist of course. The same one who also made you. You glance down at yourself and see more evidence of Microsoft Paint in your heavily outlined and boldly colored paws. Your eyes, you suppose, are blood red, matching the girl’s lips. If the girl was the artist’s object, then you are his subject, his ego. Your shaggy paws are as massive as the girl’s hands are small. You’re hungry. You snarl and lunge at this girl and her sheep.
January 6, 2026 at 2:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
CONORS1.BMF
A color portrait of Jimmy Connors, who dominated men’s professional tennis in the 1970s. Connors was a bridge between two generations of tennis stars: younger than Arthur Ashe and his contemporaries, and older than powerhouses like Björn Borg and John McEnroe. Connors was like the seventies themselves, an era that burned hot and bright but soon gave way to Ronald Reagan’s America.
January 5, 2026 at 11:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
TANK05.BMF
An M110 howitzer, a self-propelled artillery weapon developed by the United States Army. When launching rocket-assisted projectiles, the M110’s range is nearly 20 miles. Just far enough to park the howitzer outside the Chick-fil-A on route 73 and hit the Taco Bell on route 115. For example.
January 5, 2026 at 8:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
WILDER1.BMF
A color portrait of Douglas Wilder, who served as Virginia’s 66th governor from 1990 to 1994. Named after the great 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Wilder was not just the first African-American governor of Virginia, he was the first elected African-American governor of any state since Reconstruction. Do the math. 113 years between Reconstruction and Wilder. A century and change. Or little change, as the case may be. There have been only three black state governors in the three decades since Wilder.
January 5, 2026 at 5:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
FTBAL135.BMF
A football kicker caught mid-action, his right leg extended high in the air, left leg planted firm on the ground. His uniform—black jersey, red pants. Waking with a start to the scratching at the foot of her bed, Jessi kicks under the covers with the approximate force of an NFL kicker. The night is a black jersey. Streaks of red fill Jessi’s vision. A blur of fuzzy angles and glowing eyes pouncing from the foot of the bed to Jessi’s chest.
January 5, 2026 at 2:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
ICON018.BMF
A black circle with white symmetrical lines inside, calling to mind an optical illusion. Evelyn studies the image. On one hand, she suspects there’s some hidden trick, like all the white lines are straight, even though some of them appear to be curved. On the other hand, there’s no possible way they’re all straight. She places a ruler on her computer monitor, measuring, calculating, wondering.
January 5, 2026 at 11:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
DENTFLOS.BMF
A small plastic box labeled “Dental Floss.” Dr. Slife gives away a goody bag containing a toothbrush and dental floss to every patient at the end of their visit. He knows it’s wasted effort, the toothbrushes doomed to clean mildewed grout and the dental floss thrown into a drawer, never to be seen again. It doesn’t matter. It looks good for a medical professional such as himself to care for the welfare of his patients (Hippocratic oath & etc.). It works out better for him anyway if the floss goes unused. Teeth will come home to him all the more sooner.
January 5, 2026 at 8:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
CWILL.BMF
A diagram of the Circle of Willis—the cerebral circulatory system that supplies blood to the brain. It’s one of Red’s favorite scientific illustrations. The perfection of its symmetry, the mystery of its evolution. The elegance of its purpose. It’s like a Rorschach Test, and every time Red sees it, he perceives a miracle. He absolutely must know how it works.
January 5, 2026 at 5:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
NEWS.BMF
In 1995 a newscaster in a green suit and tie delivers an urgent report about a forest fire. The inset screen behind him shows a landscape burning orange. He’ll deliver this story every summer for the next 30 years. It will no longer be breaking news by that point. It will be everyday news, paired with the meteorology report. The fire becomes part of the weather.
January 5, 2026 at 2:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
1040TIME.BMF
Red is usually uncannily calm but here he is on April 14 filling out his 1040 tax return form. The process makes Red uncharacteristically stressed, anxious, miserable. If he can just figure out how to categorize his sub-basement as a home office.
January 4, 2026 at 11:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
TRUXTUN.BMF
A profile of the USS Truxtun, a guided missile cruiser in the United States Navy from 1967 to 1995. The Truxtun was the smallest nuclear-powered vessel in the naval fleet. That didn’t stop Admiral Groat from demanding that it be smaller still. I don’t care what it takes, Groat told the R&D folks at Brookhaven. Make. It. Smaller.
January 4, 2026 at 8:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
ONPHONE1.BMF
A sharply dressed businessman on the phone. With that plaintive face and gesturing hand, he looks demoralized, or embarrassed. Maybe he’s pleading for his job, his livelihood. Red’s seen men plead like that before. Now that’s what’s embarrassing. It disgusts Red. The submission is like an open invitation to kick the man, kick him to the ground.
January 4, 2026 at 5:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
SIGN189.BMF
A bright red and yellow sign pointing down to a fire hose. Municipal code requires every building over a certain occupancy and floor count to have extinguishers and hoses in strategic stairwells, along with posted emergency signs such as this. Cindy barrels through the heavy steel door into the stairwell, crackling tongues of flames licking after her. She slams the door shut and reaches down to the fire hose. It’s not there. No extinguisher either. She doesn’t have time to wonder who’s behind this, and in her heart she knows the answer anyway. Anderson. Cindy rushes down the stairs. She will be one of the few employees of Anderson, Wake, & Howe who survives the day.
January 4, 2026 at 2:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
MD.BMF
An uninspiring gray scale outline of Maryland. It doesn’t capture any of the wonders we saw when we detoured around the massive concrete barricades of D.C. that all but sealed the city into an airless, lifeless crypt. We saw horseshoe crabs in the bay, wild horses on Assateague. We stood still on a windswept boardwalk staring at the churning sea and I tried to describe the sound of a calliope to my grandson.
January 4, 2026 at 11:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
SIGN121.BMF
A yellow warning sign bearing a bright red radiation symbol. The sign reads, DANGER: FULL BODY SUIT REQUIRED IN THIS AREA. The sign is posted outside a secure lab in The Pit. Bob, being the model ParaMorTorque employee that he is, steps into the lab bundled in an orange Mylar suit. Bob knows many things: astrobiology, xenogastronomy, liminalogy. What Bob doesn’t know is, in the inside left leg of his Mylar suit is a small tear in the polyethylene terephthalate film of his body suit. A small tear, nearly invisible. But as Bob is about find out, just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential.
January 4, 2026 at 8:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
MMUFRT.BMF
An illustration of an astronaut in NASA’s manned maneuvering unit, or MMU. The jet propulsion backpack made it possible for space shuttle astronauts to go on untethered space walks. Mission Specialist Bruce McCandless was the first astronaut to use the MMU, on the space shuttle Challenger’s fourth flight, in 1984. McCandless’s face is hidden behind the mirrored visor of the MMU, but one can imagine his transfixed expression as, for a moment, the specter of his dead father flickers in front of him, the stars of a million galaxies shining in the distance.
January 4, 2026 at 5:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
LASER02.BMF
A hulking laser printer in 1990s ubiquitous business beige. It’s a new addition to Rose’s shop. She still uses an outside offset printer for jobs, but the laser printer is perfect for proofs to show clients. And for the zine Rose prints after-hours, a punk manifesto about art and gender called CTRL-ALT-DEL.
January 4, 2026 at 2:17 AM
clipart.bsky.social
SYMB001.BMF
A black and white icon of a ship at sea, its sails billowing in strong tailwinds. What is not evident from the image is that this ship is a ghost ship. No crew, no passengers. Yet still the ship sails, its riggings expertly maintained as if by invisible hands. Do you not believe there are spirits at sea? Why should only land be loved by ghosts? The watery part of the world is the greater part of the world, and surely whatever happens on terra firma happens on the swells of the sea as well. The vast watery vaults of the ocean ache with countless dead and this boat is theirs.
January 3, 2026 at 11:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
LAMP.BMF
A small desk lamp, the what’s it called—hood? cone? you can’t remember, it’s the metal part around the bulb, shielding it and directing the light—is bright yellow, while the rest of the lamp is metallic gray. There are certain words you can’t recall anymore. The words escape you. The words escaped you. As if they fled your mind and are out there gallivanting in the world beyond The Pines. Somewhere out there far from your room the words mock you, sticking out their tongues at you and blowing a raspberry. Silly goose, this particular word calls out to you, I’m called a shade, and you’ll remember me soon enough.
January 3, 2026 at 8:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
JOG226.BMF
Gabriel is out for a run on a sunny day. His impeccable form is interrupted when he feels a weight bearing down on him from above. He recognizes the feeling. It’s back. The thing that’s following him. Gabriel stops running, tears off his dark sunglasses, and looks to the sky. He sees the spectral outline of a meaningless word hovering in the air high above. JOG226.BMF, whatever that means. I know you’re out there, Gabriel shouts. His yell turns into an anguished whisper. Whoever you are, he pleads, leave me alone!
January 3, 2026 at 5:17 PM
clipart.bsky.social
CURTAIN2.BMF
Red velvet curtains, the kind that skirt the proscenium of a stage. Behind the curtains, however, there is nothing, only stark white emptiness. Ann wonders if this is what people mean when they say, “It’s curtains for you.” It’s the opposite of what she always thought. You pull back the curtains and it’s not the engulfing blackness of a stage gone dark. It’s blinding white. Not the absence of any color, but every color all at once.
January 3, 2026 at 2:17 PM