Sunday April 12th, 2015

The exercise:

Write about: the agreement.

Feeling extra sleepy. Me write now.

Mine:

A gentlemen's agreement, that's what he called it.

No need for a written contract, barely worth shaking hands over really. We were men of honor, after all. Why bother with all the fuss and muss of a legal, binding contract, right? We would both benefit from the bargain!

That bastard.

I should have seen it coming. The way he left some things unsaid, while others were stated so vaguely as to allow a mile's worth of wiggle room. He knew exactly what he was doing, I'll give him that much. He figured he'd found an easy mark and took advantage of me.

Except that's not how this story ends. For this tale is not over yet. And he is about to discover that he was not the only party who failed to fully disclose every single detail of their side of the deal.

He must suspect something is coming. He's been down roads like this before, I imagine. He must be used to furious forsaken partners seeking revenge. I hope he's ready for me.

Actually... I hope he's not ready at all.

2 comments:

Greg said...

I'm feeling sleepy too, but it's only just gone 9am here and I'm in the office... I probably can't get away with crawling under the desk and sleeping.
Hmm, I hope the betrayer's not ready too, because I'm curious to see how this tale of revenge and double-crossing plays out! A gentleman's agreement is a dangerous thing, if you've ever met a gentleman....

The agreement
The language lab was six rows of narrow desks, each with a couple of sockets for headphones and microphones to be plugged into. Tablets were inlaid in the desk with touch-screens so that presentations in different languages could be shown and interacted with. A door in the far corner led into the dark-lab, with the ruggidised equipment where Odnose B could be studied; for obvious reasons the students tended to call it the suicide booth.
At the moment, all fourteen students in the room were looking confused, and the lecturer, Mimi Fallais, was looking exasperated.
"Look!" she said, her French accent getting noticeably stronger as she got more agitated. "Look, eet eez eezy! Ze verb must agree with ze number, gender, colour, size, phase-state and temperature of ze nouns. For example, alors, if we are talking about two liquids at ze temperature of ze room that could be each contained in a cup suitable for an adult, and the liquids are colourless, zen they must be masuculine of ze second type, and so zey take ze ending '-enexian". How is that hard to understand?"
Marvin raised a hand. "But what if we're talking about a dog and a cat, Miss Fallais?"
"How large a dog? How large a cat? What colours?"
"Um, a black labrador, female, and a tawny lion, male."
"So, zere are two of zem, and zey are at ze body temperature as such large animals are similar in temperature to ze humans. Zey are clearly solid, and ze lion is bigger zan ze dog, but ze dog is male of the first type while ze cat is female of ze third type so we treat zem all as neutral of ze fifth type. Black is a bigger colour zan ze tawny, which is not really a colour at all, so zey take ze ending '-illiative'."
All the students groaned, and everyone crossed their own answer out.
"But zis is ze eezy agreement! Wait until we get to ze difficult cases!"

Marc said...

Greg - sounds to me like you need a bigger desk :P

Man, I do not envy those students. That made my head hurt just reading it, and I don't even have anything invested in learning what's being taught!