Very Slight Stories | Like short stories, only shorter. |
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Tuesday, March 21, 2006History
They gather in the garden as the sun descends, a deep breath of summer air. "Let's all dance." They dance and drink. "Let's all drink." They drink, and a feeling of deja vu grows.
"I don't really know," Phil says. "I mean... I don't really know, to be honest. They call him Hatter and he goes away." He moves his hands out to indicate the dimensions of something when he says 'goes away'. "And they said something to him about the white -- that there was too much white. He said something he wrote on the wall, and then he said he'd like to recite a poem he wrote or remembered from something. And then he went away. But as I said, I don't really know." He smiles when he stops talking. William swirls the drink around in his glass and says, "I can't help feeling that all this has happened before." "I have a feeling that none of this day happened at all," Laura says. "We were in a cafe in the morning, and the man with the blue briefcase met the woman with the white sunglasses. He gave her the briefcase and she gave him an envelope. We followed her through the city, down streets and through buildings. We lost her for a while because Jimmy has this habit of looking up at things, and we wondered which way to go. We should have asked that Irish Wolfhound. He seemed intelligent. Jimmy didn't see him at all because he was looking up at something. We stood completely still in the park, trying not to be noticed, a breeze bringing movement to our clothes and hair, a hand over our eyes to shield them from the sun. And what do we do then? Where do we go and what do we really have in this life? Nothing more than the walls we built around ourselves and the little dance we do to distract from the grand dance we should have done, and after that you have to just sit down and there's nothing at all, just a feeling that none of this happened. These things have a habit of writing themselves into our history books and when we read through those books at the end of the day we say, 'Did I really do that?' And yes, I did if the book says so. Events happen to us, and we get carried along by them, taken by the wind and deposited in an armchair safe and sound at the end of the day, with a drink in our hands." Nick and Ray try not to laugh. It was actually Ray who wrote all that into her history book. |
The Tree and the Horse Henry Seaward-Shannon A Walk in the Rain The East Cork Patents Office Mizzenwood Words are my favourite noises Archive Links:
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very slight stories |
They Met a Bear They stopped in a small seaside town and they went for a walk. They met a bear. This is one version of the story. In another version, they met a sailor, and in this one they ended up being held at gunpoint on a speedboat and becoming unwilling participants in a diamond robbery while disguised as a cow, and sharing in the proceeds of that crime. So when they tell the story they just say, "We met a bear. He waved at us." The Story of the Fortune Teller and the Alarm Clock A fortune teller threw an alarm clock at me. This story is deliberately lacking in details to mock the predictions of the fortune teller. Although she was right when she said she'd throw an alarm clock at me. Counting One. Two. Three, the study. Four, a candle stick. Five. Six... Seven is missing, presumed dead. One has taken up the case, and two is helping him in his investigations. They both suspect six. Seven was last seen next to six in the garden. But seven isn't really dead. He's consumed half a bottle of whiskey and he's currently in the orchard, talking to a rabbit. "One of us is as boring as a gate post," he says, "and it's not..." He stops to count on his fingers. "No, actually it is me." Eight nine ten. Debbie and his dog Debbie was sick of people mistaking her for a man. "Is your dog my parole officer?" "No." She was sick of people asking her that too. More blogs about Storytelling. |