She’d finished washing her hands and had rejoined Edward and Arthur in the living room. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with her, boys,” they heard her say from the kitchen, knowing Dukie was still involved. Unseen. Sitting at the small table Shelley and Arthur or perhaps Shelley and Edward would dine at later. Or earlier. She had to choose, they knew: real or fiction? They, Al and John the Mind Reader sitting around that table for now, talked about the past, the *waste* of it all. Glad to be outta that hellish hole at least for a while. Hot as rot there. They came out to talk about TILE. In a slice of time so orange that everyone had forgotten it existed. All Orange, then.
“Well,” said resigned John to his boss across from him. “It’s right there in the introduction of the manifesto, the first paragraph as it were, although I don’t tell that to the Tilist conservatives of course. ‘Let’s make this shit happen’,” he quoted.
Al uncrossed his arms and started tapping the table nervously, pondering options. 561 paragraphs, 561 words in the *first* paragraph, the one not making up the introduction. *He* was conservative too; in a way, in a manner. He didn’t really like discussing his right leaning tendencies to liberal John, though. And he blocked it from his mind as well, knowing John could dig it out if not. All Orange did the trick. Neither here nor there. A pause between destinies.
“What do you think about the ‘perhaps sentence’?” he decided to say, staring directly into the visor glasses covering his blind eyes, trying to read any emotions he could resulting in the spoken words. Rephrased (and implied): What did liberal John think about Bart and Lisa’s addendums to the manifesto? He’d save discussion about the even more controversial, more obscure Zero Hero until later. Best to deal with the 1 through 8 currently, the visible compendium.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 