the voice of reason
by uzwi
After all this time I should know the score. I should know who you are. I should know what we want from one another. I’m sitting here airside, thinking about that. I’m listening to the turbofans the other side of the glass, the grinding manoeuvres out on the tarmac that pass for action, the premeditated dashes & lunges that pass for freedom. My bag is by my leg. I’m in the smell of coffee & steam. I’m eating an almond croissant. I think: it’s the usual impasse. I think: it’s the customary inauthentic fuck-up. I wait & wait to hear from you, then when my phone rings I don’t answer. Why do you imagine I would, when everything you say, every assumption you make, has for forty years caused me to feel less than I am ? In two hours I’ll be away from here. I can wait another fortnight to find out what I’m worth during this phase of our negotiations, our cross-purposes. I’m sure I’ll be as calm as ever.
I once got a duty-free bag from Schipol airport on which was printed, SEE BUY FLY. Enlightenment, action, release. You would relinquish the first two options, I remember thinking, if only the third looked possible.
the m john harrison blog 
Now, class, each one of you write a different short story using paragraph one as a starting point.
Doesn’t the first paragraph have THE END written all over it though? I don’t remember for sure, but I think when I read that yesterday I hadn’t even properly read the first two words of the “second” paragraph when I “knew” it would be unrelated in the usual way that final paragraphs here often are. But now I see that the release thing in the second para is clearly something to do with the first paragraph. If those two paragraphs had formed a part of a physical book that was also a novel or short story, I would have had to think of them as related by default. In isolation, as a lonly group of two paras, as they now are, it’s still difficult to think of them as related in any other way than the second being a blog commentary on the first, which is a piece of writing from the drawer that the writer realized was self-contained and something that couldn’t be used except perhaps as a very short story, but would be more interesting as an online experiment.
Woah/Wow.