The exercise:
The word of the day is: proof.
Oh hey, the power just went out. And now we're back, after 30 minutes or so. Quite the lightning display going on at the north and west sides of the lake. Can't hear any thunder here though.
Where was I? Ah yes, proof.
So we received many lovely and generous gifts for our wedding, but the one I want to mention today came a day early: my free proof copy from CreateSpace of my NaNoWriMo novel, Lessons in the Dust.
Right now there is a book with my name on the front, and my words in between the covers, sitting on my coffee table. It needs a lot of editing, but that's still pretty damn cool.
Mine:
The judge had let him walk, something about "insufficient proof" or some nonsense like that. As though she couldn't smell the blood on his hands, or feel the violence he wrapped around himself like a poisonous cloak.
So he's free now, not even a single cop keeping an eye on his comings and goings. Free to kill again. Free to steal another father's little girl away in the middle of an unsuspecting night.
Just like he took my Isabel.
Well, that's what he thinks anyway. Me and my newly purchased .38 Special have a rather different view on the matter.
Your thunderstorm sounds great! We get very few in London, and they rarely last more than a few minutes when they do arrive, so I'll just have to imagine yours for a while.... Glad the power came back on for you though!
ReplyDeleteThat's great news about the book, I remember you saying you wanted to get it before the offer expired. It's weird to see your name there and read your own words when you pick it up, isn't it?
Intriguing story! A nice little twist at the end, and the whole thing is a good set-up for something altogether dark and tense.
Proof
There was never any...
It was as though I stood
At the end of long, dark,
Echoing hallway,
Listening to the judge,
A bewigged man in his fifties,
Describing another person.
Describing the actions
Of another person.
Words lodged in my throat,
Piling up, tumbling over each other,
Unable to break free and defend me.
And the judge droned on.
Your tight smile said it all.
You thought you were going to win,
Your false accusations,
Your palace of sparkling lies,
Which shattered into as many pieces
As there are wrinkles on your face
When the judge finally said
"There is no proof."
They didn't need proof to come for him. His so-called friend's word was enough. It was a joke, what he said, but that didn't matter. They were coming for him.
ReplyDeleteMarc - That was really intense! That first paragraph, second line was a proof of that intensity :)
ReplyDeleteGreg - This is a great piece, excellent!
Morganna - I would love to follow up on that :)
Mine: Proof
I remember that when I was small, I had a dream that I wanted to be one of the top soccer player in the world. I was ambitious and the world felt small when I was running with the ball even when most of the time I was trying to catch up with my short blasting breath that came shortly a sprint. I very much wanted to proof to all of them that they were wrong to mock and laugh at someone who is trying his best to overcome all his little shortcomings. I know that I am ignorant and don’t have much creativity nor technical skills that resemble professionals that could trap the ball perfectly in a very bizarre fashion and yet I looked up to the sky and said to myself: “Just do it!” As simple as it sounds, three little combined gems of words that formed up its own large universe and unlimited potential about it! This is where it is getting started, so let’s just do it, I tried to communicate with my inner negative department.
Mock at me and I will grow stronger,
Laugh at me and I will make you cry,
Hit me hard with all that you have got,
I shall proof to the world that you are wrong.
That is exactly what I was thinking but definitely with no ill intention but just a little simple tactic to score against my negative self. I was really into it after these thought came to me. Our team managed to score more than three goals in the end. They couldn’t get through our tough and stubborn defense with myself acting as the heart of the defense which provide pin-point direct long passes most of the time throughout the game.
Greg - that's a great poem, very nicely done :)
ReplyDeleteMorganna - I love that, sounds like the start of a very exciting story. You should totally continue it!
Zhongming - sounds like a great way to pump yourself up :)
He jerked from his attempt at sleep violently, almost falling out of the chair and onto a stack of papers. He had barely left this room in days, perhaps weeks; collapsed mountains and scrunched drumlins of paper dominated almost every available surface save a patch in the floor reserved for sliding out his chair from his desk and furious pacing. Plates piled up near the door, many still contained enough remnants of meals to still distinguish what the food was supposed to be. He'd barely eaten, hardly slept, for weeks. This work, this proof, was all that occupied his mind. For weeks on end he was so close to solving it, to making a breakthrough, but he always found a mistake, some tiny error that threw everything else off, and he had to start from there. But now he thought he had it, but was too exhausted to really notice, and slumped in the only other chair not buried in figures.
ReplyDeleteWhen he started from his stupor his eyes, veined with fatigue, darted feverishly around the room, landing on the paper-coated desk. He staggered to his desk, and allowed his hands to scrunch the papers together into some kind of pile, and he began to check his work.
After hours of checking and double checking, with some time to recover from near heart-attacks brought on by false mistakes, he finally reached the end. The conclusion of his monstrous proof. The proof that had all but consumed his sanity. He began to scribble at the bottom, "Therefore, logic does not...", but something stopped him. His delirious mind thought of something: he had just disproven logic... but hadn't he used logic to prove it?
The pencil dropped to the floor just a little before he dropped to his knees, head buried in his hands. No, no, it just didn't make sense, it just didn't... it worked, and yet it couldn't! To his work-weary, obsessively-fatigued mind, this was just too much.
- - - - - - - - - -
I remember hearing that somebody used logic to disprove logic, then subsequently went crazy and (I'm pretty sure) committed suicide, I just can't remember who it was.