/lit/ - Literature

>getting tagged and tracked in the coming cyber war
No thanks m8

>>7290948
knowing too much about upcoming cyber wars and our uprising just got you a preemptive taggin

I remember in college, when I was living in the house of a friend. For the most part, he was almost painfully ordinary, and I remember admittedly little of him all these years later, but there was one thing that aways struck me about him.
In the early mornings (usually around seven, but sometimes later), he would abruptly wake up, and giddily grab his pillboxes from the cabinet in the bathroom. Having grabbed every pill he needed, he would plop down in front of the door, looking upwards at the knob with what seemed to me a sense of eager reverence.
Then, inevitably, a knock would come to the door. With a single swift movement, he would rise to his feet, and would hurriedly undo all of the locks, his hands trembling with unbridled excitement. When he opened the door, he was greeted by his girlfriend, who would walk in with a sauntering, lustful stride, casting back a stray gaze towards him.
He would pick up his pillbox, and sit down at the table, facing her with an unadulterated adoration. Out of her jacket, she too would pull out a medicine bottle, and then give him a knowing nod and smile. In unison, they would open the bottles in their hands, and each grasp a hold of a single, sizable pill. With a hushed sense of care, they would exchange the pills, briefly meeting with their gaze. As they each grasped a hold of the capsule in their hand, they would once again look into one another's eyes, with a stoic intent. Slowly, with inhuman precision, they would extend their hands forward, moving towards the other until the pill finally reached their mouth. And after a fleeting, cautious pause, they would slip the pills into each other's mouths.
Although this was a daily ritual, I was only the bystander of this eccentric ritual only once or twice in my time there; I never felt comfortable observing, as if I was trespassing upon some sacred spectacle, a delicate moment to be undisturbed by the uncomprehending, prying eyes of the world without.

>>7291014

Please don't shoot up a school anon.

>>7291029
I won't bb

Hopefully

>>7291014
Interesting

>>7291014

Unbelievable. Trite. Over-written.

Even twins in the womb drift apart from the earliest seconds of their life. One lives on the right side of the womb, the other on the left. One is born a second later than the other, or a second earlier. And throughout the rest of their lives the gulf will only widen; though sharing a fraternal bond, neither can say to completely understand or be the other. Such si the lonely tragedy of our world. Nature has brought about a series of interconnected, yet isolated vessels of life. One bacteria is itself and another bacteria is itself. While we can think of many bacteria as one culture of bacteria, in teh same way we might think of a herd of gazelle as one herd or a nation of people as one nation, each bacteria has a life cycle of its own. It has distinct and seperable needs. A baby in the womb needs food and support from its mother, and can be said to have the same needs but as soon aas it is born becomes independant. It must eat independently to the mother, breathe independently and ultimately survive independently.
Conflict is born from the cellular wall rather than the city wall. It is in our biology to be separate beings with separate needs, and conflict is born immediately out of the conflicting needs of each biological entity.

'JUST GO TO THERAPY YOU SACK OF AIDS'

>>7291728
Yeah, I pretty much agree
Then again, it was a completely impromptu passage (not part of a larger work). Oh well, here's to improving!

>>7291811

There is potential. Cut away all that is superfluous.

>>7291840
Will do, anon
Thanks so much for the feedback. I write a little bit everyday, and any chance at getting better is invaluable

>>7291736
I like it, reminds me of Aldous Huxleys quote "every indivudual human consciousness is an island"

Considering how strong technology has become, and how capitalism further propogates the development of escape mechanisms for the masses, it is not a reach to claim that the most lucrative industries will be those that provide refuge from the insecurities, toiling and micro-inconveniences of the human experience. The human race will have evolved into a being that has already mastered survival. We exchange primitivity for complacency, in our endeavor to master survival we forget to live. If neccesity is the mother of mother of invention, mastery is akin to stagnation.

Pls no bully

Comfort, only comfort, by placental warmth and sustaining pulse: comfort by the link between that transcends flesh, runs deeper than physical forms. In themselves, they are nothing--in one another, they are as two pearls in the infinite black, shining on from only the other’s light. And she loves him, in her embrace, in her heart, as he feeds from her soul, for now and forever. Love, true love, is pain--lovers but masochists. His pain is dying, the self is defining. He struggles, crying out for the oblivion. It doesn't matter--the comfort is gone.
Light through lids, steel screams, the blurred image of a room in the early morn. His eyes watered as they stared out the window: nothing: fog erased the world beyond, leaving only a white void, the border between it and room but a confluence of glass. He sat there for a time, lost in antemeridian stupor: forms recognized, not understood; thoughts reduced to impressions--vague, evanescent feelings that fade without consequence; his own body foreign, alien, separate. He considered his hands with fascination, contemplating the lines in his palms, tracing them with his fingers. Firing synapses, connecting neurons, proprioceptors whirring to life: he grasped the folds of his blanket, pulling it off, waves propagating across the surface while it fell, dying when it landed--still. He rose, walked to the wardrobe, tottering from side to side along the way, and dressed: suit, loafers, watch: what was expected.
The swish of his trousers followed him through the hall, into the kitchen, where sodium light painted shadows and the faint scent of coffee hung in the air, resurging as it poured to pot like liquid earth. He lifted a cup of it, more by reflex than conscious thought, to his mouth. A deep inhale, a sip: heat--too much of it: the coffee seared the roof of his mouth, and for a week dead cells will hang from his palate like skin streamers, celebrating their upcoming exodus from the homeland--from the One that had for so long harbored them--until they finally slide down his throat, giving waves and good-byes and see-you-later-alligators to their friends before passing into the stomach of their God, where they will burn and disappear, all of them screaming one last prayer as they pass into oblivion and fade to black--wish me luck….
Outside, trees shivered in the wind, their boughs outstretched arms waiting for the embrace of something lost, not knowing what that something was, only that it was once there, that they now hurt, and that they must wait, maybe for It, maybe for death...but they will never know for certain: they will live until the end, never understanding why or for what they suffer, telling themselves this is how things are supposed to be, this is how things are supposed to be, this is how things are supposed to be--this numb and this atrophy, this growing cold and cancer, these tears that flow for nothing--this is how things are supposed to be….

>>7290938
He understood, he thought. He understood why we do these things, feet trapped in the wrappings of cool bedsheets. Why every college boyfriend and young husband works toward the direct contact, the real thing. I am right with the world, with nature, with this idea of God, he thought. Out of all these things he knew, he knew most of all that the biggest mistake of his life was his fiancee, who, he suspects, is infertile. So many times he has written the death wish and quietly submitted it, slipping it under fate’s door. Everyone wants to come inside, it’s ingrained...otherwise we wouldn’t, humans too lazy, too distracted by art and language and beauty and endless pages and holy incantations to actually do the thing. We have to have some itch to scratch, to want it and to like it more than anything else.

>>7291907
Give me your fucking lunch money kid

>>7291907
Very nice, but you need to proofread.

I didn’t like the video. I found it weird and inappropriate and anything but informative. Initially I thought it was some kind of caricature of what a program parodying internet culture to instruct a Ritalin heavy demographic would look like. Turns out it was just stupid. It’s pretty ambitious to combine levity and education, but to bombard people with (forced) humor and seconds later depict the holocaust was quite outré.


I bet some people here might even guess what I'm talking about.

>>7292176
Very blocky, uninspired.
>>7291975
This is one of the best in thread so far. There aren't any suggestions I have that aren't already obvious.

>>7291975
Grisha here; thanks.

This is part of something that I consider my most serious effort at fiction. I started it this summer and have just got back into working on it. Very rough 9 pages, but I think if I can work it into this larger idea I have over the next year, I'll use an excerpt of it as MFA app. material.

>>7291728

Ur mom was overwritten by my penis lmfao.

>>7292271
You're mean.

What did I do wrong?
You were born, son, with the added misfortune of surviving it. You were new and helpless and you trusted, my how you trusted. You never learned the lessons of withholding that trust, of relying upon your judgments, of mastering healthy scepticism. Your gods took you in hand and led you into Hell. Regular folk, the kind that hosted parties, backyard barbecues, but to you they were gods, and like God Himself they laid a judgment upon you, that you should suffer, that you should know the anguish of a guilt you never earned. They gave you life, and you lived their definition of it.
Its a parable, in its own way. Analogous to the horror visited upon the sons and daughters by the fathers and mothers. They give you life: a world poisoned, its earth blasted and ripped open and breeding deadly diseases, its waters turgid and tossed with dead creatures, its air foul with invisible gases and holed like gauze letting the rays burn down the holy message of cancer and blindness.
We needed those cars, son, to speed up our pursuit of unachievable and unworthy dreams. We needed those forests stripped away, to plant food to feed our weeping multitudes. We needed that plastic that gave you tits and made you infertile. We needed those antibiotics, those televisions and their vital programming, those bloodless cameras that never blinked nor turned away. We needed all those wars to feed our technocratic utopia. We needed those prisonships, we needed segregation, calling in those bank loans, national lotteries, millionaire athletes, movie stars, white hoods and burning crosses, doctors gunned down outside abortion clinics, walled neighbourhoods with private armies, paedophiles, serial killers, terrorists, fundamentalists - we needed all those things, son, and you will, too. They're our gift to you, given out of love because we tried to better your lives. At least, that's what we kept telling each other. Can't you see how much better we've made your lives?

>>7292331
Very well crafted. It's a little repetitive, but overall it's excellent.

>>7290938
The first 4 sentences for you.

Foggy desolation is thundering silently across the bay. Smothering it under a blanket of damp cotton. A rhythmic ray of amber slashes through the cloth. Pulsating and illuminating the cloudy broth that does Sostratus proud.

>>7292425
Very purple, not well structured. You have some potential--don't waste it like this.

>>7292462
I appreciate the input.
But that's also kind of the point of it.
I don't want it to be perfectly coherent.
I'm not trying to emulate Pynchon.
I am however trying to grab a hold of that feeling to his writing where reading it doesn't make perfect sense. A lot like you're high and can't completely understand everything going on, and it's ok to be that way.
The story itself is somewhat deraritive of Stephen king themes.

>>7292475
>I am however trying to grab a hold of that feeling to his writing where reading it doesn't make perfect sense.
I recommend not doing that. Doing it well is hard--very hard. And you'll never do it like he can. It's better to make sense and sound beautiful than to not and sound highfalutin.

>>7292533
That's a fair point but I wouldn't want to do it like him either.
I don't ever plan on sending it for publication anyway so I'm mostly writing it for myself

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma
would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted
for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which
I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden
dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw,
rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the
keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the
stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong
the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared.
Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to
call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again," but I knew that
then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made
to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of
peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and
she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom
of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting
the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was
already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed
all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she
bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host,
for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of
her real presence, and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on
which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared
to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come
at all.

thoughts?

>>7291014
As other anons have mentioned, it is a little superfluous.
>>7291736
Nice. It's a little disjointed--maybe a little purple, too--though.
>>7292559
Very good. Almost a little too concise and a few places don't flow, though.

Reminder that everyone who posts something to be critiqued should, in turn, critique others: it's the only way these threads can survive.

>>7292627
What would you advise I cut out, just to be able to use it later on?

>>7292559
I just got deja vu
This is so much like the beginning of Swann's Way it's kind of scary
Good prose, though

>>7292425
It needs some honing, but I feel like the terse tension and release of the first two sentences is executed very well

>>7292559
Pretty good writing. You have a good flow but. Towards the end it feels a little disinviting.
Like I already know what you're writing about and could skip ahead without missing a beat.
So perhaps a bit repetitive.

That being said I like it. Definitely invokes the feelings described and the narrator doesn't feel "false". Feels genuine

>The Database Key... this, this D-ey... It's the crux on which everything hangs. Take it, guard it with your life. You... you have to find my daughter. Find her, protect her, and give her the D-ey... She'll know what to do with it.

>>7292632
Thanks. That's kind of my goal. I don't necessarily want to write in poetic form but I want there to be an ebb and tide flow to the writing.
I just re-did the last two sentences to read.
Slashing through the cloth is an amber rhythmic ray. Pulsating and illuminating the cloudy broth that does Sostratus proud.
Doesn't change the meaning but I feel it flows from the second to third sentence in a more connected manner (cotton and cloth are closer).

>>7291014
I like this the more I read it but it does feel a little clunky.
I feel like the past tense you used (she would walk in the door, etc) fits the second half of it very well. It lends itself to the ritual part of the scene well.
However the first half which is a bit more "personal" (relating to the narrator) less would be more.
I feel like with describing third person events the writing style suits you but when you switch back to a first person passage a more simplified style would be better.
Overall though I enjoyed it

…I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.

Thoughts?

I wrote this piece o' shit months ago.
Being a native speaker I find it hard to write in a 'natural English', thus everything ends awkward sounding and with more than a few grammatical mistakes.

The curse of the nurse is those of whom they treat, of which they care and took care every day and every night. Molly Molly was a nurse, a young nurse I should add, twenty-years and there she was, in the ward, near the field.
It was a time of worries, a time in which the ward was filled with nothing but sorrow and most people hardly had a tomorrow. Every laying man and dying one had eyes fixed on the door, the small wooden door of the entrance (cracked, broken), through which a few men come and go every day. Pain for the patients and a hope for the injured, too many people with not enough care. It was not secret even if not spoken out loud, every person did not want more to come and wished they'd rather die on they field that come to their side. They were selfish and more than they should be, but not intentionally much more less than they tried, for lying with the sick in the war ward was not as healthy as it should be and those diseases you did not have you would share with your ward-mates now or later on.
Now Molly didn't have any training, didn't have even will. She was there, at the ward, merely because she was already there before. All of it just happened around her, without her knowing at first, without her wanting at last. On the day of the cupid is that she broke, suddenly, without warning at all. No training nor knowledge she had so she couldn't do much, and she didn't she knew well enough but it was a matter of time, to grow up just like she did. Not the best for sure, but the only she had.
They call it maturing, they call it puberty, they call it whatever. A progress, like a line, in which every one take part. Now it doesn't happen that way where she was, maybe it was rejection for self-protection or maybe it was conscious and self-deception. She was there, in the smoke, in the flash of the day and the wake of the night; knowing who you are may not be the best there, may not be the best to ask and to pray and to wonder and ponder what to-be and who-am-I. So she didn't run the line and stayed instead, like a cheap bloom which didn't grow much but filled just as well. The day of the cupid it happen'd, not like a ha but like a snap, like a bomb in the head that blow'd up like a bam. Shaking hands and crying eyes she had that night as fire run through her nerves, night that if she were to be taking care of her duty she'd have been sent to the yard, light a smoke and return, something she learned at the very late age of thirteen just there at the ward.

>>7291975
>>7292202
>>7292252
Grisha here

More from later in 'that thing'


He liked it when he could shut the lights off in the church and work alone. He waited twenty minutes before walking into the open lobby, whose twin glasses panels separated the office hallway from the narthex, one quadrant of the cross. He did this every Monday afternoon. He thought it so...so unnatural, that members of the church staff would work so unprotected from the elements of the modern world. There was a jungle out there, and an empty church on a weekday was a camp without fire; it had the same visual attraction of fire in the waning daylight, minus the threat of heat. He removed the keyring from his pocket and held it by the foam gorilla head, something his mother had given him before leaving home for good. It read ‘H.D. Zoo!’ He shut the lights off at the head of the church and locked the doors. The church was shadows, except for a lamp in the heart of the sanctuary and his office lamp.

He thought now of how slow that ladybug must be...to still be searching for some stimulus in the white disk on his desk. But his killing of it was a step forward, not for the ladybug, but for the Ladybug; Coccinellidae. His killing of it was a sharpening of the pool, a choice by nature to destroy itself for some greater dispensation, the body ridding itself of cells too unloved to prosper, as payment for a higher existence. And if he was God, this was his plan: redirecting—as everyone does without thought—the course of other natures, other insignificant non-cognates, species more blunt and primal than we could ever wish to be if we were to pursue such an epic collective summation, a single project of living and dying.

>>7292677
As someone once said to me: This is so good that I think you stole it from somewhere else. Would like to see more anon.

>to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be

god that's great, really fucks with me.

A few days ago I picked up a forty-something African man from the airport. He slumped into the car carrying only a grocery bag full of clothes.
I was probably the first American he talked to for more than a sentence or two. He spoke a broken kind of English, but something I've learned to decipher over the years.
We made the usual driver/rider banter until we stopped a red light. Then he frantically tried opening the auto-locked door to get out and started shouting.
"Sir! You must let me out! This woman I have seen, she runs with terror. Do Americans not help one another in trouble?"
I looked around and nothing stood out.
"What are you talking about? I don't see anyone in trouble."
The man pointed out of the rear window.
"Look down behind us, sir! The woman in the bright clothes with string in ear. Do you not see?"
I glanced in my rearview and saw a woman jogging a block away. The "string" was a pair of earbuds.
"You mean that jogger?"
He stared at me, confused.
"Sir, what is this 'jogger' you mean of?"
"She's just running to stay in shape," I said.
"In shape, you say," he said, saying the words to hear them again.

>>7292776
cont.

He looked back, concentrating harder on her. The light had turned green and he continued studying her as she shrank into the distance.
"I do not know this meaning, sir. A jogger runs to stay in shape, yes? But what does this mean?"
I could tell he didn't just want it defined. He wanted an explanation.
"It means she's exercising. To stay healthy."
He nodded slowly and thought some more.
"I have never heard of this thing. In Africa to, how you say, exorcise, we go to church. Here you exorcise to 'stay healthy," sir?"
"Most people go to gyms."
"Jim, he is a man like priest?"
"No, that's not what I mean," I was maybe as confused as him at this point. "Uh, a gym is a building where people go to... they use machines to get rid of fat and build muscle."
"So Jim is like a church and workshop? In my county this would be unheard of, and to exorcise a demon there would be bad. I know of men whipping themselves for gods years ago, sir, but not in America."
I didn't know what to say at this point and changed the subject.
"You don't need to worry about that woman back there. She's not in any danger."
"How can you be sure, sir? She runs like a beast is behind her when it is clear there is nothing. She has many demons, it is clear."
"You might be right. It's not really my thing so I can't say."
"You are not a religious man, sir? In my country they say in America you can worship as you please, yet you worship nothing?"
"I'm too busy to think about it."
"This is indeed a strange thing for me to think of."
We rode in silence for a while after that.

>>7292690
Very nice ideas, but it doesn't translate well.

>>7291014
You use too many adjectives and adverbs in places where they're not necessarily needed. It feels like eating a meal with too many sauces.

>>7292776
>>7292788
This stinks of American ignorance tbh, do you think the entire continent of Africa is full of zulu tribes lel?

>>7292776
Very repetitive sentence structure makes it kind of bland.

Ok /lit/, here I go. It's a paragraph from my fantasy novel, set in a post-apocalyptic Germany. This scene shows how the new inhabitants of the land use legends to explain how the human settlements were created:


The city of Bogenstadt lay north and east of the Enark mountains, on the banks of a large river that the humans had cleverly called Blauwasser. Legend said that many ages ago, before the world had ceased moving, there was a small village not far from it. And in that village lived a man who went by the name of Trinken Jan. No one had ever bothered to spare much word of praise about him, mostly because he was often drunk, and also because he had little to atone for. But Jan knew that, when he did not happen to be drunk, he was the best archer in the land. So one morning he woke up with a great sense of purpose and decided that he would build a city dedicated to his bow. And with a gaggle of bemused villagers behind him, he climbed the small hill that lay just outside the village, and there he declared that wherever his arrow would hit was where the city would be built. In the old days, humans were not too skilled in the art of deciding on the location of settlements, so this was quite a common practice. And as the story went, Jan reached in his quiver and, grabbing a handful of arrows, he nocked and aimed them towards the sky. Three of them he dropped from his hand, one snapped in half and another hit his wife in the eye. Now, clearly they could not build a city on his poor wife’s head so, reeking of beer and stumbling in his boots, Jan shot another arrow in the air. This one hit a mighty oak at the foot of the hill, and with great cheering, the villagers agreed that was where the city was to be built. They did not cut the oak down, and instead decided to build a cathedral around it. And when Trinken Jan himself had finally died, they had nailed him to the door of the cathedral, for all to remember and pay homage to.
The story was met with a sceptical cackle by Kaelyn, but Khan assured her it was true. He had refrained from telling it within the demons’ earshot for, he explained, their sense of humour and appreciation of legends had been discarded along with their bodies.

Jaundice, jesters jut joyously-- jarring jovial jeopardies? Over, out, open others occasionally (or offensively). Heaven heaves homes haphazardly, he hasn't heard? Never needed, north negated, nebulously negligent nevertheless. "C'est commun, cherie!" cried Claude, carefully. Counting coins, clucking chickens, cajoling cowpokes-- Criminy! Exhumed earth, earned eloquence enters echos... Exhale earned. Never noticed, not needed, necks noosed. Nihilize. All agreed, all appalled, after average auspices arose. Apparent, actually.

- The Smackdown, Anon, 2015.

>>7293851
Fuck off with that sjw shit. I've know refugees and exchange students whose first impressions of America are even more exaggerated than the guy in my story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Giwujxh2No

The entire point of a foil is contrast, so of course I'm not going to have some metropolitan African guy who has nothing to be surprised about.

>>7293866
Thanks for pointing that out. Some of that is intentional, but there's a lot that wasn't.

>>7294091
Disgusting

>>7294091

overwritten and trying too hard to stream of consciousness. Is this a joke?

>>7290938

Let me know what you think, or don't think:

Zack and I went to this club on MacDougal with tall doors and blue shades. The bouncer kept telling me I was underage and I kept telling him that I wasn't and that I should know better than him. I was 28 and I had a fake ID because it was the only ID I never lost. The club was playing this one New Order song that sounded a lot like an Erasure song that I remember once hearing sung by a gay bartender at a karaoke place somewhere in alphabet city. About 4 people made eye contact with me that night. I told the 4th one they wouldn't have won the bronze medal of catching my attention and they told me to fuck off.

The place where I heard that Erasure song had this zebra-skin couch and a strobe light and I kept sipping my rum and coke thinking that was definitely not bacardi. I remember complaining about how tired I was and how people always sing showtunes. I told whoever I was with that night that my drink wasn't strong enough and that it definitely wasn't bacardi and they told me not to complain because they had to get ready to sing "Mamma Mia" in ~2-3 minutes.

Zack and I sat by the bar at the club talking about flying fishing. Zack said he didn't know anything about it and that I should lead the conversation. The DJ at the club was playing something by Armin Van Buuren, probably off Mirage because I didn't like it very much. I kept stirring my drink lightly and ice kept falling out. I decided to stir it harder to see if I could make all of the ice fall out and there was ice all over the bar.

>>7292690
This is a more recent excerpt - I usually drop everything I start after a few paragraphs, but I'm considering finish this one

Nine Claro's traveled between the woods in the cold of the night, carrying from shore to shore the body of their last child born dead four days ago. The rattling wheels awoke the twins Cherry and Maple, who raised their heads to the windows and encounter themselves in the dead of the night, barely lighted by the moonlight behind the clouds. It wasn't until after their eyes got used to the dark that they could tell apart the shades of the black – a glance to the darkness outside revealed the forest they entered the morning before. They realized, they were still in its core.
“How much more until we get out of here?”
“How much time until we reach the far shore?”
Asked Cherry and Maple to their father who was at the time holding the straps of the horse.

>>7291844

what a cuck

>>7292788
>>7292776
This is actually quite good. I was thoroughly entertained. I don't know the extent to which a foreigner from a poorer nation would speak as he does. Some of his dialogue seems contrived;
for instance, his awareness of "exorcising" but not "exercising" seems dubious. He has such a relatively thorough-sounding grasp of the English language for a foreigner, the notion of having to "decipher it" seems strange. In any case, nice work.

>>7294470
Thanks. Good point on the dialogue. As for the exercise/exorcise thing, the way I saw it, he'd be more likely to talk religion with a missionary or someone than health/fitness. Did you post anything on here?

>>7294573
Ah, I guess that's a fair way to think about it - the missionary thing. I just assumed he would know both use cases, I guess. I do like how he mixed up homonyms though; I guess I just thought that particular example was dubious.

I didn't post anything, just lurking. Thanks for offering though.

Keep it up, m8

>>7294091
kek'd so hard.

All the silly Anons don't get it.

>Take first letter of every alliteration.
>Put them together.
>"The Smackdown"

>>7294903

>>>>>reddit

>>7294903
Not falling for that

>>7295011
JOHNNNNN CENNNNAAAA

>>7294312
You've got the attitude, but your sentence structure is really basic.

Pain, true pain, by the absence of her soft voice and softer breath: pain by the loss of the shores of softest blue around her irises, by the loss of the strongest smile every born in Wausau. Love, in truth, is pain--lovers but masochists. And never has one loved--suffered, too--like Leo E. Shepson, whose heart of hearts died in the reddening maple with the passing of Joy O’Felif.

Excised from land by two rivers—one green under the sun, the other gray with shadow and sludgy refuse—is the river bluff mounted Wisconsin-Illinois border town of Yonkers. On the south edge of town, perched like an ancient seabird upon the vertiginous sandstone over the white-capped rivers' confluence, is an old oak church, where elderly David Milton sat upon the granite steps facing the rolling glacial hills of northwestern Illinois. His face was creased in canyons, deep in thought of images past.
As they flew by, film passing thorough his mind's inner projector, a creeping worry developed. That the projector, its room and all the cans of nitrate film (marked 1979–20XX) are close to a fire. But not a normal fire, rather one that burns all like wax—features drooping into mush as they slowly reach toward ground– until eventually the room, seemingly surrounded by fire from birth, becomes an amorphous pool of forgotten time. As he remembered his past, and its foggy if certain occurrence, he still felt the rush of warm air as the fire began to melt his strips of memory, and a doubt, a worry that his life was not as it was, that it was merely a melted strip of film– images bleeding onto an unseen ground. And so he sat outside the church waiting for the feeling to disappear as the moon burned a hole through the sky.
He repeated this ritual every night. Dimming the faded red and green marquee of the Sauk Street Theater, and walking along the cracking, pothole-imbibed street to the stairs of the oak church, where he sweeps his hand over the dust-covered, polka-dot gum stains and sits on the third step. Then, after worrying sufficiently, he would pick himself up, pat his rear end lightly, and with the birds' early call walk back to his home above Jeremiah’s Tool Shop.
That night, David felt something was off. He could still hear the rivers—their gentle lapping at the ancient sandstone his usual interlocutor—but he made out a headlight's cone sweeping through the switchbacks, glittering in and out as the road dipped through the tree line. Normally, he would have only briefly considered it—the thought of narratives not his own was a favorite of his, even as he spent most time locked in his own burning memory—but soon a string of lights, and the belching rumble of diesel, emerged behind the first. A convoy was coming.

Excised from land by two rivers—one green under the sun, the other gray with shadow and sludgy refuse—is the bluff mounted border town of Yoskish. On the south edge of town, perched like an ancient seabird upon the vertiginous sandstone over the white-capped rivers' confluence, is an old oak church, where elderly David Milton sat upon the granite steps facing the rolling glacial hills of northwestern Illinois. His face was creased in canyons, deep in thought of images past.
As they flew by, film passing thorough his mind's inner projector, a creeping worry developed. That the projector, its room and all the cans of nitrate film (marked 1979–20XX) are close to a fire. But not a normal fire, rather one that burns all like wax—features drooping into mush as they slowly reach toward ground– until eventually the room, seemingly surrounded by fire from birth, becomes an amorphous pool of forgotten time. As he remembered his past, and its foggy if certain occurrence, he still felt the rush of warm air as the fire began to melt his strips of memory, and a doubt, a worry that his life was not as it was, that it was merely a melted strip of film– images bleeding onto an unseen ground. And so he sat outside the church waiting for the feeling to disappear as the moon burned a hole through the sky.
He repeated this ritual every night. Dimming the faded red and green marquee of the Sauk Street Theater, and walking along the cracking, pothole-imbibed street to the stairs of the oak church, where he sweeps his hand over the dust-covered, polka-dot gum stains and sits on the third step. Then, after worrying sufficiently, he would pick himself up, pat his rear end lightly, and with the birds' early call walk back to his home above Jeremiah’s Tool Shop.
That night, David felt something was off. He could still hear the rivers—their gentle lapping at the ancient sandstone his usual interlocutor—but he made out a headlight's cone sweeping through the switchbacks, glittering in and out as the road dipped through the tree line. Normally, he would have only briefly considered it—the thought of narratives not his own was a favorite of his, even as he spent most time locked in his own burning memory—but soon a string of lights, and the belching rumble of diesel, emerged behind the first. A convoy was coming.

>>7295693
Great opening sentence. A bit purple but otherwise great. Maybe you could use a few colons here or there.

[THE SHOP]
[Enters SHOPKEEPER, CLIENT I]

SHOPKEEPER: Now you see the problem, don't ya'?
CLIENT I: Can I have my change please?
SHOPKEEPER: Yes yes, in a minute.
[SHOPKEEPER plays with the cash register]
SHOPKEEPER: The problem with dark matter is that it's pure nonsense! Pure nonsense I'm telling ya'! Physicists nowadays are utterly useless. They'll invent stuff only to fix their calculations! There is no dark matter! There is no dark energy! How come you people believe this bullshit?
[SHOPKEEPER stares at CLIENT, waiting for an answer]
CLIENT I: I don't know about any of that. I only want my ch- [interrupted]
[SHOPKEEPER jumps the counter and puts an arm over the client's shoulder]
[CLIENT tries to get out of the shop, SHOPKEEPER pulls him back inside]
SHOPKEEPER: What we're gonna do Phil? What? How can we have any future? How?
CLIENT: Listen. I don't care. I don't even care about my change anymore – I just want to get out of here.
[SHOPKEEPER takes a hand to his face, cursing the gods]
SHOPKEEPER: You don't care you say? How can you not care? How can you? It is a man's duty to extend human knowledge, it is our duty to point out the lousy grounds of modern physics or we're all- [interrupted]
[Enters WRITER, PHYSICIST]
WRITER: Morning my dear fellow. My friend and I were on a happy stroll down the park when, sighting your shop from far away where the lake, we wondered if you had by mere chance one τσιζkειk for us – to appease our hunger, and to ease our minds in the long walk of life.
[SHOPKEEPER stares at WRITER]
SHOPKEEPER: What? Shit keet?
[SHOPKEEPER stares at the ceiling, “thinking”]
[CLIENT I exists, slowly, avoiding to be noticed]
PHYSICIST: Cheesecake. We want a cheesecake.
PHYSICIST (at WRITER): Drop the greek Edward. It's getting old.
WRITER (at PHYSICIST): What a φιλισταίος you are! Sometimes I think you're simply jealous of my quick wit!
PHYSICIST: Cheesecake, do you have any?
SHOPKEEPER: Oh, yes! Let me get it!
[SHOPKEEPER pulls ice cream boxes out of the fridge, drops them in front of the shelves. Climbs over the ice cream boxes to get a rusty cheesecake from the top of the shelf. Jumps from the top of the ice cream boxes to the floor, landing on a pool of melted ice cream]
SHOPKEEPER: Here! This is the one we have. Top-quality cheesecake, aged like a fine wine. Costs a fortune, but we have it on sell for $1.99.
WRITER: Dear God…
[WRITER covers his nose]
WRITER: It has a rather sour smell, doesn't it?
SHOPKEEPER: It's a french cheesecake.
[WRITER and PHYSICIST look at each other]
PHYSICIST (to WRITER): Is he really trying to sell that stuff to us?

>>7292684
I know exactly what you're describing as it's something I've been feeling recently, but my god have you put it so well into words.

Keep it up.

>>7292684
>There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million.
This is not mathematically true. The cardinal of [0,1] is exactly the same than the cardinal of all R.
Your intuition applies only to finite sets.

>>7295929
>the same than the
the same as the*