Be clear about what objects can and can’t do


The socks he had on were thick and woollen and he knew they would keep his feet warm, but they could never insulate his soul against the chill of guilt. He rubbed his hands together briskly and breathed out a cloud of warm breath – a cloud that was neither large nor opaque enough to hide his face from the judgement of the world. Then, sheltering from the wind that could not blow away his troubles, he dug in his pocket (a pocket too shallow to contain all the secrets he carried with him) and pulled out a roll of mints. It took him a few attempts to unwrap them, just as it had taken him a few attempts to leave the house – but this time because his fingers were numb with the night’s cold, a numbness which had no bearing on his (also numb) emotional state. His hand shaking – a simple physical reaction to temperature rather than a sign of the fear he felt – he put a mint in his mouth. Its refreshing taste made his tongue tingle with sensation, but it could not prompt a similar feeling in his life as a whole, which remained torpid and unrefreshed by the cooling spearmint flavour of the powdery tablet.

8 comments:

  1. What a wonderfully bad piece of writing! When's the book coming out?

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  2. He should have gone for a fisherman's friend.
    :-)

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  3. Ha!
    I loved seeing his soul as being located inside of his feet.

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  4. That's quite impressive. Reads as if a graduate student in the English department were taking on some bizarre literary challenge--to make the physical events insignificant.

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  5. Is it really bad that I kind of liked that?

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  6. To pick, pick, pick apart the brilliance of this post, I think the subtle mismatch of tone between the situation and the description really makes the Badly work Well. The slightly technical bent of "opaque" perfectly fails to convey the depth of his shame, while the frivolity of "tingle" and "spearmint" is just enough to completely mute the atmosphere of fear you're being told exists.

    It's like the BrainAge test where you have to read the word "Blue", but it's written in yellow. Very Badly Well done. =)

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  7. Wow. I want socks that can insulate my soul against the chill of guilt.

    I think the most Badly Well touch was the (also numb) - putting it in parentheses really takes the zing out of the emotional impact.

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  8. All you need to do to get your socks to insulate your soul is to spell "soul" differently.

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