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JohnT
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Capitalist
Mar 1999
time: 00:28
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The joy of a man who rediscovered something that he thought was lost to him forever...
quote:
Half an hour later he was sitting in front of the blank screen, thinking he had to be a glutton for punishment. He had taken the aspirin instead of the drink, but that didn't change what was going to happen now; he was going to sit here for fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour, looking at nothing but a cursor flashing in darkness, then he was going to turn the machine off and have that drink.
Except...
Except he had seen something funny on the way home from lunch with Charlie, and it had given him an idea. Not a big one, just a small one. After all, it had only been a small incident. Just a kid pushing a shopping cart up 48th Street, that was all, but there had been a cage in the cart, and in it had been a rather large furry animal which Paul at first thought was a cat. A closer look had shown him a wide, white stripe up the cat's back.
"Sonny," he said, "is that a skunk?"
"Yeah," the kid said, and pushed the shopping cart along a little faster. You didn't stop for long conversations with people in the city, especially weird-looking guys with bgs the size of Samsonite two-suiters under their eyes who were lurching along on metal walking sticks. The kid turned the corner and was gone.
Paul went on, wanting to take a cab, but he was supposed to walk at least a mile every day and this was his mile and it hurt like hell and to take his mind off the mile he started wondering where that kid had come from, where the shopping cart had come from, and most of all where the skunk had come from.
He heard a noise behind him and turned from the blank screen to see Annie coming out of the kitchen dressed in jeans and a red flannel logger's shirt, the chainsaw in her hands.
He closed his eyes, opened them, saw the same old nothing and was suddenly angry. He turned back to the word processor and wrote fast, almost bludgeoning the keys:
The kid heard a sound in the back of the building and although the thought of rats crossed his mind, he turned the corner anyway -- it was too early to go home because school didn't let out for another hour and a half and he had gone truant at lunch
What he saw crouched back against the wall in a dusty shaft of sunlight was not a rat but a great big black cat with the bushiest tail he had ever seen.
He stopped, heart suddenly pounding.
Paulie, Can You?
This was a question which he did not dare answer. He bent over the keyboard again, and after a moment began to hit the keys... but more gently now.
It wasn't a cat. Eddie Desmond had lived in New York City all his life, but he had been to the Bronx Zoo, and Christ, there were picture-books, weren't there? He knew what that thing was, although he hadn't the slightest idea how such a thing could have gotten into this deserted East 105th Street tenement, but the long white stripe down its back was a dead give-away. It was a skunk.
Eddie started slowly toward it, feet gritting in the plaster dust.
He could. He could.
So, in gratitude and in terror, he did. The hole opened and Paul stared through at what was there, unaware that his fingers were picking up speed, unaware that his aching legs were in the same city but fifty blocks away, unaware that he was weeping as he wrote. |
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Kassiopeia
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Jyväskylä, Finland
Jul 2001
time: 07:28
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quote:
Not every novel is supposed to have a suprise or twist ending. You've been seeing too many Hollywood movies. |
Yeah, but when the punch just comes behind the corner and *wham* strikes you, and you realise that it's completely possible but you never thought about it, and it isn't a lame "it was all a dream" sort of deus ex machina either.... Like in Dan Simmons's Fall of Hyperion, though this isn't the ending:
spoiler(highlight to read):
When we find out that the Ousters weren't the attackers after all. Damn, it was so obvious, but the text just kept me so occupied with itself that I didn't have the time to figure it out. I was absolutely... I can't really name the emotion. Exhilirated, maybe.
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Last edited by Kassiopeia on 22-06-2003 at 07:01
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Guynemer
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He loved Big Brother.
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Ecthy
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Zhonghuà Rénmín Gònghéguó
Mar 2000
time: 06:28
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interesting question... maybe he just hasn't been reading enough in his youth, thus too small a vocabulary
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Apolyton Time is 00:28. |
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21-06-2003 06:21
).
.
)
went off and I went "Oh!"
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