The morning sun turned the curtains over the sink a gossamer orange like butterfly wings, as Leo grabbed his thermos and raced to the front door. He twisted the doorknob but stopped. He’d forgotten his book. Where did he leave it? His feet pounded the floor, and his dog barked as he backtracked through the living room and into his bedroom, grabbing his copy of Pride and Prejudice, before racing outside, down the street, and into the throng of morning commuters. Leo stopped and waited at the corner of Hellfire and Gates. The air sizzled with humidity. The smell of fermenting garbage floated on the breeze.
After a minute, a dusty bus belched and wheezed to a stop, cracking the door. As passengers rushed to board, a woman bumped him in the shoulder with her duffel, and another man stepped on his foot. But as long as Leo had a book to read during his commute to work, he didn’t care about a thing. He boarded and took a seat, smushed between a woman with a tiny dog and a man with an oversized briefcase. Leo began to read.
As the sun rose above the buildings near his home, Leo wiped the sweat from his forehead and drifted into the world of Jane Austen, and when he lifted his head to look out the smudgy bus window, instead of the city, he saw the cool and crisp English countryside. Leo smiled.
Hours later, his fingers grew tired from hastily typing messages into the comments of random blogs and sending spicy emails. He knew the words were misspelled and crude, but did anyone really read spam emails and comments anyway? Besides, if people clicked the links after he’d written such disgusting fodder and misspelled almost every word, they deserved what they got, right? Spam work was tedious, and guilt gnawed at his heart as he inserted the link for his company’s squeaky sex doll website over and over and over into the thousands of websites of random authors and businesses too dumb to install spam filters. He hated his job, but if AI took over, he would be obsolete. What would he do then?
Leo took a sip from his coffee cup and eyeballed the stack of books that sat on his desk. What if instead of typing vulgar messages, he wrote passages from his favorite books? Leo grabbed book after book from his desk, and for hours, his fingers flew over the keyboard, and he had no time to fix his mistakes...
…and Miss Bingleybegan abusing her as soon as she was out of the room Her manners werepronounced to be very bad –a mixture of pride and impertinence:she had no conversation,
…and now you comeover like a walking atomy with a rat,s tail at your wig
…The moths will fly out andclimb into the projector beam,so that the film will be obscured byfluttering shadows
…after a very well-cooked lunch in which the Yorkshire puddinghad melted in his mouth and the apricot tart had been so perfect thathe ate it all,Mellers smoking his cigar by the brightly burningfire the while hail gusts banged on the window
…where the thickest fought,the victor flew;The king’s example all his Greeks pursue.
…surprised.And presently Lady Droitwich began to do amusing things as well as saythem
…olonel Fitzwilliam entered into conversation directly,with thereadiness and ease of a well-bred man,
...“My dream! My dream! Even now it cometh topass! Help! Help!”The man drew the woman away from the skeleton and closer to thetrembling rock.”Even the dead come forth!” she wailed.
Ha! The previous and flawed sentences were torn, word for word, (then deleted and marked as spam) from my website. I begin every day by deleting unpublished spam comments from my author website. I only recently figured out how to manage them more effectively. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that they were botched lines from classic literature! It was and is still rancidly annoying, but intriguing, nonetheless. Po! Po! Away! Away!
But don't go yet, read this heartwarming and starred editorial review of Chorus of Crows at Independent Book Review! It's the best darn thing to happen to me as a writer. Look to your inbox for my next newsletter on May 18. And greetings from Peru! Be sure to check out my blog for upcoming photos.
