The Maximalist Approach December 7, 2007
Posted by Anya in : spontaneous degeneration, smiling is good for you , trackback |
Currently Watching Miracle (Widescreen Edition) By Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Sean McCann, Kenneth Welsh see related |
The Maximalist Approach
I’ve been reading A Tale of Two Cities in school. Dickens has an odd style of writing… he stretches every detail out into a page long description (and that’s if he can’t think of much to say about it). Anyway, I had the lovely assignment of writing a story out of the two sentences which they gave me.
But before I give you that, I’d like to mention that tonight we went to see A Christmas Carol (yes, MORE Dickens), in which Peter L (seat #3 on my quizzing team) played Tiny Tim. They did a lovely job, although a bit too much fun with Marley’s voice… making it echo and echo and… O_o Yep. Then afterwards Peter did what was probably a record change into street clothes and came out to see us…
“Hey!” he hollered to the one girl. “Come meet my –”
“Did you just say my fan club?” I asked.
No no. He said my people.
Thank goodness.
Although he did have a fan club — us, another family from his church (who it turned out that we knew, but neither family knew the other’s last name. Go figure.)
So it was quite a fun night.
And now, the Dickens-type thing. I did write it to tie in (somewhat) with another story. ^_^
Beebo Appleby walked into the room, looked out the window and patted his jacket pocket. He heard his mother’s footsteps approaching and turned to the door to greet her.
Beebo Appleby was a young man, about 23 years old and a bit plump for his short height. He had many times wished to change his name, because it seemed in some odd way to imply plumpness and good-natured laziness, but he could never quite be bothered to take the trouble to have it changed, when it came to that. So his name had remained Beebo Appleby, and it was indeed likely to remain that for the rest of his life.Â
He entered the living room, vaguely wondering where the light switch was, but it wasn’t uncomfortably dark, so he didn’t look for it. He was unaware that he was leaving muddy footprints on the ornate (but somewhat shabby) carpet, just as he was unaware of the girl sitting under the table. She was involved in a game of hide-and-seek, and had selected that table as a good hiding place because of the long tablecloth which brushed the carpet, thus concealing her from view unless the tablecloth was lifted up. But Beebo knew none of this. He sat on the couch for a moment, stood up, and moved over to stare out the window. He did not really notice anything about the landscape, although it was beautiful in the dim evening light. The shadows of hills fell into grassy dips in the land, and a large golden retriever and a young boy were engaged in tugging on opposite ends of a stick. The sinking sun cast a warm glow over the whole scene, but there were some ominously dark clouds on the horizon.Â
Beebo did not observe this. Rather, he was occupied in looking at the smudges on the window and trying to discern if someone had pressed their face up against the glass in a moment of enraptured interest, or if they had breathed on the window and then written letters in the breath-fog, or if there was a third possibility. He had forgotten that last weekend he himself had pushed his hand against the window in an absent-minded motion, and the glass had likely not been cleaned since.Â
He ran his hand along his jacket, feeling proud of how finely he was dressed. To the honest observer, the jacket did not fit him well at all, and its grey tones did not compliment his red face and dark blonde hair, but Beebo was blissfully unaware of these facts. With a feeling of smug satisfaction, he patted his jacket pocket, feeling the shape of the folded papers inside. The papers had been given to him only that morning, as he slid into his seat on bus 137A in the course of his clandestine mission. He believed that they contained predictions for how peanut butter would sell over the course of the next year, but that was bogus.
Woven into the fibers of the parchment was an extremely sophisticated GPS and a recording system. The Gem spy group had reason to believe that his movements, over the next day, would lead them to the location of one of their rogue members. The rogue member was currently sitting under the table in the living room, only a few yards from the oblivious Beebo. She did not know that those looking for her had a GPS in the same room as she herself was hiding in, but she would not have been overly concerned if she had known.Â
Beebo, who knew none of this, heard footsteps coming down the slightly creaky hallway. It was his mother, who doted on him, and was eager to see him again and make sure that her boy was not harmed by another week in the city, nor was he starving.
The rather unstarved Beebo turned to greet her, unconscious of the frustration which the Gem agents would experience the next day when all their recordings told them was what he had eaten over the past week and his mother’s opinion of his diet.
Comments»
Haha. I like the story.
hmmm….that story is…very particularily peculiar.