“You don’t fit in here anymore. You’ve got to go."
“But you said you loved me, that I fit in perfectly with your plans.”
“That was before I’d had time to evaluate you. You aren’t capable of carrying your own weight. You know how these things go.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve never been here before. I remember your sigh of satisfaction the moment I first arrived. You called me ‘beautiful’, said I belonged here with the others.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry.”
“Please give me a chance! Perhaps with a bit of shuffling I’ll still find a place.”
“You just won’t work out. You don’t have what it takes to endure to the end.”
“But if you throw me out I’ll cease to exist! I have nowhere else to go.”
“You’re flawed. It wouldn’t be fair to keep you around. You’d diminish the quality of the others.”
“No, wait! Don’t cut me!”
“Relax. It will be over in a second. It’s the quickest way to get rid of an errant sentence. Don’t worry. If I change my mind I can paste you back into the paragraph later.”
But what happens to the commas? :P
ReplyDelete:) Ah yes, I remember it well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the smile in my evening, Laura. A very pleasing vignette.
hahaha... clever ;-)
ReplyDeleteLike I would expect anything less.
~2
Laura, you are a nut. I mean that in the kindest way. I've often thought the most effective key for a writer is the delete key. You've managed to elevate the delete key to a protagonist. Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteYou ruthless author you! Thanks for a good smile!
ReplyDeleteThis one brought me a warm cup of morning smiles. Mine usually gasp and cry for mercy as I cut and hack and chop them away.
ReplyDeleteGood stuff.
Ha-ha... and extra points for doing it all in dialogue! Fun... Peace, Linda
ReplyDeleteAfter spending much of this week cutting back a story by 50% of its word count, this feels very familiar while being totally original. Loved it.
ReplyDeleteNice! I'm thinking you should follow up with a brooding tale of the sentence's revenge.
ReplyDeleteOoh, I like Bradford's idea. The sentence might haunt the author forever, invading her dreams, niggling at the back of her mind forever, demanding to be reinserted somewhere.
ReplyDeleteFunny one, Laura. Thanks.
~jon
I love Bradford's idea too. You could take metafiction to whole new levels here! Lovely piece, an antidote to this week's very dark Anasazi story...
ReplyDeleteThat was funny. Thanks for that.
ReplyDeleteThis made me smile.
ReplyDeleteNice, Laura! Thanks for the laugh.
ReplyDeleteWhen the writing talks back....scary thought. Think I'll encrypt my files to keep them hush-hush.
ReplyDelete