Before I let you read the story, there is something I must tell you. This story developed as each member of the group added a sentence to the previous one. The start that was given to them was just a verbal image of an old man wearing tattered clothes holding a laptop in his hand, walking purposefully. Read on to find out this Old Man's Tale...
The first thing he wanted to do was to
dump the laptop. He had to get to rid of it. But how? Where? He glared at the
screen, where all evidence of his stupidity was sprawled. They were after him
now. He had to do this fast. He heard a noise, somebody was coughing. It was a
sprawling cough, echoing stories of joust smoking habits and dank opium dens.
Stupid fancy things, no memory of such had existed in his time, good that the
old method still worked. He looked at the broken pieces on the floor and ran.
They couldn’t track him anymore, now that the laptop was destroyed, they would
find only the remains of it on the ground.
Or so he thought. As he lumbered towards
the exit, a giggle rang through the air. He whipped around, to find a little
girl in violet rags ripping a doll to shreds as she giggled and giggled. Her
back was towards him. Suddenly she turned her head 180⁰ and looked directly at
him. And laughed. A cackle laughter that sounded like a machine gun made
butterflies. Her eyes were glowing. Glowing like a dead star, 7000 light years
ago. She approached on, unsteady dolly feet, hands stretched out, fingers
grasping blindly like dead limbs, eyes fixed straight at him. Boring holes.
Holes. Bullet holes. He was entranced. He couldn’t take his eyes away from
hers. The violet rags threatened to slip lithely off. He understood – however -
that it was fake. A memory, just a memory. This memory was older than his shirt
even. The image dissolved into the thin air of his sigh. Shoulders hanging
under the weight of his sadness, he walked towards the bookstore, his book
store, thinking of the pain he had caused, but with the laptop gone, they’d
never know.
“The
End”
He thought of this phrase – the darling
of movie closures. He trudged on. One foot in front of the other. On and on.
Into a nursery where - twenty flesh-and-bone children - mirror images of his
memory, ran about. Seeing them, his eyes glazed and a ribbon of drool slid out
of his out of his mouth. He shook his head to clear it. He had to stay focused.
Go to the bookstore. Back to his job, his old life. Like nothing had ever
happened. He had to act normal or they would find him. “Nothing has happened”,
he told himself. “Nothing”
“The End”
- Arista, Dagmar, Leila, Malavika, Radhika, Zelma
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