A Portrait of Aging with Grace.

 

There is an older person, sometimes known as a winsome exemplar of false comradery, who showed up, even though we'd been cooped up for what seemed like minutes, to lead us through the second-to-last scene. If you're wondering, you can probably find it on page 35 or 36. If you are one of the few who still has access to the older, more fructified, version, it may be hard to find at all. That's because before any older version was destroyed, it was made to appear that any nearly stolen artifact would be folded in one fell swoop inside a single verb.

At length the older person was observed to cough three times in a timorous whimple, signaling for the guards to search our outer things, without so much as asking permission from the Training Associate on site. She had it coming anyway. It's why we pretended to laught while dying. Of boredom, that is. So when the older person removed a piece of revolving paper from inside its special place, guaranteed to appeal mainly to people dedicated to gradualism in all things, it seemed surprising only in a doomed retrospect. Why I say this is for the same reason that I've been lying to myself from the first sign. If some find this hard to believe, their personal cleanliness will come under serious question.

So, as we move into position for the last time, I can taste my reluctance like a bitter product in the pit of my throat. And even though no one is likely to notice, the older person, with an abundance of caution, relives a scene from a youth dedicated to the installation of ecliptic bitelines into a flagrant minority of timorous wingnuts. It's just the way things have started to roll, out of our control, beneath our contempt and always, already, settled.  We've known the older person to be loquacious, but never like this. I have to admit that we've usually been reluctant to commit to participating in a 'secret plot'. If any of us had known that an invasive insect would be released into a novel environment at the conclusion, it would have struck us as a bit odd. That's because the weather had failed to become inclement, despite all forecasts to the contrary.

When I held my pinking tool inside a purity box for the required thirty-one seconds, I got the shock of my life. It seems that unknown to either me, my sister or our grandmother, all the wires had been removed, rendering the mechanism ineffective, if not appropriately dangerous. I'm now skipping down the last half of page 41. If you find when looking at it that there's a small (about 1 cm) defect near the lower right corner, you'll need to submit a blood sample within thirty-six minutes or there's a good chance that someone may die or possibly face a major inconvenience. Action is our only priority, results be damned.

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A dish, a dream and a dearly deft drip.

 

Zobar jams his elbow right in the center of the dish. The dish is mounted securely to the fourth inner wall so it's in no danger of breaking. It's a ceremonial dish and was discovered in Italy during the inter-War period by someone who knew Zobar's estranged governess. She had a long-term agreement with the family about an apartment over the garage. After the fire, as she pawed her way through the ashes of what remained of her life, she recalled a dream in which Zobar, dressed as a scarecrow, had a vision of how people would live in the distant future. It was a miracle they could still breathe because life was lived almost entirely under the waters of Lake Michigan. The Indian immigrants who opened news stands on the shore during the Summer vacation had a reason to be worried. They could see it coming from a thousand miles aways. So they decided not to make that mistake again. It would cost them dearly if they failed to make the required adustment. It served them right.

In the end no one was fooled. Not Zobar, not his governess, not even some of the kids in town who raked leaves for pocket change. It appeared even they lacked the room to make a quick turn-around. So they just proceeded as if nothing was wrong. And you know what? Nothing was. Wrong, that is. As long as you looked at it with one eye half-closed. What you'd do is, you'd start your line from a point that was a fair piece away. As you moved closer you'd get shorter by the second, until within a day or so only your squirming would arouse suspicion among the disgraced ballplayers who liked to lounge around under trees that always seemed to be looming. This could get someone injured, or even killed God forbid. Why hasn't anyone told you this yet?

It was when the governess first pretended to be addicted to invisible pills that she and her boyfriend, a hanging 'chad' named Miles Whitcomb, decided to break into Alderwave Veterinary Studios Inc. to look for a key to a stolen ivory box. The box was said to contain the remnants of a photocopy of a newspaper article which could prove moderately embarrassing, especially where the deployment of strategic miscalculation is concerned. At the time some said this sounded like the 'perfect plan'. How wrong they were, though. Because this so-called 'boyfriend' character was soon revealed to lack any kind of innate delicacy. He made all the kids pay him a dollar to swim in the lake even though he was known to be allergic to water. And when the Holiday Season rolled around the next year everyone could clearly see that his wig was made of plastic hair. Someone should really do something. No one is sure exactly what as far as I know. Please stay well. Get plenty of rest. Make of it something to lurk for . . ....

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