I have been tinkering with some writing lately. Lots of
false starts. This is part of a longer scene I was working on yesterday. Two
men are exchanging business cards on a plane. One of them has been telling people
he works for the Encyclopedia Britannica. (I don’t know about you, but that is
on the very short list of day jobs I would enjoy.) The other guy is named
Mississippi Clarke.
.
Mississippi
Clarke, esquire thoughtfully studies the card I have given him. “You work for
the Encyclopedia Britannica?”
“I do,”
I lie.
“What
do you do?”
“Field
research.”
“I have
no idea what that means.”
“Not
everything in the known world is yet known. Sometimes somebody needs to go look
at it.”
“Recently
discovered, previously unknown phylums of lobster, that sort of thing?”
“The
term ‘lobster’ describes its species. All lobsters are of the phylum arthropoda,
which also includes insects and spiders.” This is true.
“So
when I pay sixty bucks a plate for Maine lobster?”
“You’re
basically eating a giant underwater spider, yeah.”
.
.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment