copy error

while copying a book on the philosophy of aesthetics a scribe is compelled to re-write major portions of it. the person who ordered the copy refuses to pay for it, but one of his friends buys it and then passes it off as an original work that he authored.

schooling

Son of a merchant family goes to university with two scions of nobility. He’s a monarchist at first, but the two princes disillusion him. One starts campaigning for democracy, and the other reveals his arrogant depravity.

tiger

My heart is a tiger and your leaving has removed the lock on its cage. It now wanders the zoo hungry after having eaten all the food and all the keepers.

homecoming

English monk goes abroad in 1535 to study, and returns in 1543. He returns to find the monasteries destroyed.

windows

you left today. (i say that to myself every day) now i can wander the corridors of the space station, the empty mansion, the abandoned castle, the isolated island fortress, looking out every window hoping that your face will magically appear in the glass. i look past my reflected face, but not all the way to the scenery beyond. somewhere between the reflection from inside and the transmission from outside there must be another level, a border, an interstice where you have gone. if i stare long enough, shifting my attention forward and back i may chance to alight it on this frontier as you let a wisp of that lovely dark hair slip through it.

Advertisement

coating

the oxygenation of the river was going to ignite the secularization deal. after everyone was satisfied that the blame for the anodization was accurate, the guilty were sentenced to prefix it to there signatures from then onwards. one of them turned it into a superbrand.

taxing

The tax collector could no longer work – he had found that the numbers in the documents he reviewed all day were becoming blurred – he could no longer read them. when he went to the eye doctor his vision always checked out. he could read the charts on the wall just fine, it was only the numbers at work. he tried hypnotherapy but it didn’t work. in fact he would come home and vomit after every session. His wife believes it’s because the therapist is of another religion, and is trying to prosuletize him while he’s under. His vision still seems fine for his hobby, flower gardening. So he decides to try and turn it into a business. He enlists the help of one of the accountants he used to deal with in his previous job.

overhearing

Two students, one male and one female, go out to dinner and compare notes on the test they took that day. They had to go down a hallway, listen at each door, and based on that write up a report of what was happening in each room. Meawhile, the instructors, also a male and female, grade the reports together over a bottle of wine.

new club

The group of men went on vacation as they did every year. After the first night of uproarious laughter, the next morning Pete calls for a revision of their club’s charter so he can testify. It is rejected. The proposed change is too radical. It would be a completely different organization. If he wants to form a new club, fine. If enough members want to join him then the club will be dissolved.

the leather-covered world

at moments of great inspiration he saw shifting silhouettes, cloaked in neon-primary colored shawls, sliding left and right. For example coming off of a train he would see this figure gliding in between the bodies crowding the station and he then saw in his mind’s eye a tree standing alone in and electrifying a backyard somewhere. He turned around and immediately took the train home to paint that tree in contrasting pastels and dark earth tones. And he did it – he captured the energy surging out from that tree in the late evening. It was the centerpiece of his next gallery showing.

He suffers an injury while out mountain biking, and the doctors remove a strange apparatus that at some point during his modifications was inserted behind his eyes. They’re not sure what it does, but it’s definitely non-standard and they can’t keep him under warranty with it in there. But once it’s removed his inspiration disappears.