Of the millions of people across the world:
"Daggum!"
"Indeed I'd say so, Susie."
"Mister, why, I oughtta..." she begins with phony affect; for a moment or two she trails off incoherently.
"Exactly."
Somehow, she thinks, it would be more pleasant would he never forgive me.
"I'm not really running away anyway," she says. She grabs his hand with both of hers and is fascinated by the evidence of a wristwatch's prior residency--the pale circle of skin in its absence.
"Reproached not for nothin' about goin' over flowerbeds and grass plats..." he laughs a little at himself for saying it. "Lord, I won't give the world such a free spirit."
Which reminds him: When I was five or six I saw a stag in the forest out of the window in my room... He had been sitting on a book on the marble countertop later that day telling the story of what he had seen to the people gathered around him--mostly relatives now dead--when his mother told him from the living room to get down from there this (or that) instant and he replied defiantly but I don't got a kitchen chair. For some reason he still remembered that. He fell off the countertop flat on his face, immediately wailing as only children can, prompting the nearer house-guests to exchange looks suggesting of both sympathy and an acute aural discomfort as his mother hustled to lift him in her arms and relocate him to a couch, chiding but soothing his newly goose-egged head.
He had not realized the extent to which the event had made an impression on him, not thought that a little one could maneuver a dagger into the heart of an armor-encased gentleman himself just an overgrown child...
He chokes up like the last droplets of a boyhood reserve finally being lifted from a well with no discernible end--having never dried up, his wails had pooled instead into dark circles underneath his eyes in their disuse
...
I don't really think of it as indicative of my writing style necessarily. I mean, yeah, I wrote it, but I was working with pre-existing elements, giving a story to the randomly-generated nonsense verse.
1 comment:
As long as you do the same!
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