Tag: dialect

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Very Very Tall

A thing I haven’t thought. This is what I’ve been itching for in my writing in the past month or more. Not having it is likely the reason I’ve recycled my meta on Charming and Partly. But I’m thinking this thing I haven’t thought is a red herring. I think it’s a brought flower off the main trail of my half-promise to plot several things this year. I think it’s an excuse to shield me from digging in to anything. I need to find a way to tell it to go fuck itself. What better way to do that then to write the things I promised to write?

Sigh.

I just re-read the plotting I did for Partly to remind myself. Overall I like it better than I thought I would—possibly because I didn’t recognize some of it. I need to make Bogdan an enforcer for the Priests.

Is hard to know the end of your stories. Real stories have no cataclysm, no satisfying denouement. Just…just more life. But usually beginning easy enough to find.

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Hulked on a barstool in one of the more backwater of backwater beer-doors in Terminus sits a man who named himself Cyril Rockandhammer. He wears a gray canvas jacket because this beer-door—like all beer-doors on Acetylene Avenue is unheated. And it’s cold tonight. He’s about to be on his ass.

“Would like to buy to beer as apology, friend,” said a short man who had forced himself and his belly into the narrow gap between Cyril’s stool and a third man’s.

“Dude, what?” Cyril thought he’d heard the man offer to buy him a beer, but something about the invitation unsettled him.

“I am sensitive about my height, and you are very, very tall,” said the short man.

This was true. Cyril was tall maybe even very, very tall by some standards, but that didn’t seem like something he had much control over. The promise of free beer seemed to be fading. He said, “OK.”

“Is not OK. You slouch at bar trying to be small.”

This was also true. Cyril did have some control over his height after all. He usually exercised it in the form of shrinking himself to fit in with others. At a diner he might slump in a booth. At a bar he might—was—slouching on the stool. Standing around talking in a group he often leaned on something or outright squatted.

“I am my height. You should not be.” The short man bent down to the floor and jerked the stool out from under Cyril Rockandhammer.

427 words on day 767

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Cyril Rockandhammer

Yes, yes. Thursday I served up crap.

“Take another then.”

Cyril turned the camera sideways to get both Bogdan and the Terminus sign in the picture together.

“Nyet, nyet. I vant bus and people in picture too.” Bodgan waved his hand over his shoulder to the bus just loading in the street behind him. Cyril complied. It was Bogdan’s camera after all.

Bogdan Grigoriu and Cyril Rockandhammer stood at the center of Terminus: the bus stop. Well, Cyril squated because he thought it made a better picture of his traveling companion, nor was the bus stop precisely the center it was more the heart of Terminus. [I swear I’ll fix that]

“Stop waving dude. There’s no flash. Just hold still.” Cyril dropped from his squat to a kneel to get a steadier hand. Light from the bus backlit Bogdan and made it difficult to see the man in anything but a silhouette. Cyril exhaled and squeezed the button halfway till the mirror locked up. He pushed the rest of the way till the shutter popped open then clacked shut a noticeable portion of a second later. He checked the screen.

“This one’s good dude. Take a look,” Cyril groaned to upright and handed the camera to Bogdan.

The short man looked at himself and liked how the low angle made him look tall, made him look like an adventurer. Like his Father before The Skip. He held his cane—Cryil called ia a walking hammer—in his right hand not leaning on it. The long canvas jacket hung in such a way as to make him look stout not fat as he was. Even the buckled shoulder strap looked like he might have a rifle slung when nothing more than a satchel hung from it.

Even the people were well captured. A group of men and women waiting to load the penultimate bus out of Terminus tonight stood to his left. The interior lights of the behemoth fish of a vehicle illuminated the first man in line quite nicely. Atop the bus the pilot loaded crates of chickens and yegs along the back. The front two tires slayed out like bulbous rubber fins. Behind and above the last bus hovered waiting to land.

To the right a man stood in a doorway backlit by coal fire. Bogdan looked up fromt he camera screen to see the man was gone. In fact, three of the four people to that side of the picture were gone. Only the ticket man with the umbrella was still there. HE stubbed out his cigarette and vacated the alley too.

“Spaseeba. Ees good picture.”

“Dude,” Cyril gestured to the bus. The pilot hung out the cockpit door but his foot was inside stomping the accelerator. Steam flushed from the sides and rear like the breath of a dragon. “Let’s get out of the way.”

485 words on day 560

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Before The Skip

“Do you remember before The Skip?” asked [the main character]

“Nae. Known a few what did though. Nae much mind ye. [couple good examples]. One guy I ran into even knew his mum’s name…”

[main character] draws a breath.

“…Did him nae good though. Spent five years looking for her then got shot up in a Landy bar in Terminus.”

This is coming together better than it seems. My thanks to the Internet for helping me out with the dialect; my apologies to everyone else.

74 words on day 553