E. and I spent part of this long Memorial Day weekend in Monterey. We stayed at a fancy B&B, partly because breakfast is the most important meal of the day and partly (okay, mostly) because it was the only accommodation available at the last minute.
So we enjoyed such classic country inn fare as tawny port left on living room sideboard, homemade cookies between 2 and 4 p.m., chocolates from a local gourmet shop every evening, and a grandly landscaped garden with really spotty Wi-Fi.
On the nightstand in our room was a leather-bound journal I first took to be some kind of guest book. But when I opened it, I found a collaborative story started by the inn’s proprietors. It kicked off thusly (ellipses between storytellers and brackets mine):
The house was quiet, for the most part. But, as with all old haunts, it creaked and moaned when you were least prepared to hear something in the silence...They say every house has its story and this house is no exception. For the memorials that stain these walls [ew] will freighten [sic] the bravest of men...One Saturday afternoon a gentleman, Clayton Bates, arrived to stay for a week in his silver roadster. [Strange, considering he had just arrived at an inn.] He planned on a week of quiet study, unaware that the house had other plans. The first afternoon was uneventful. After a regimen of steady calisthenics, adjacent to the fountain, he sat in the garden to take his tea and read the first of his briefings. Due to the dense content, he dozed briefly and awoke with the name of Beatrice on his lips...Beatrice — why here, why now? What had brought her into his thoughts. He spent so many years thinking of her upon waking and seeing her in [illegible] who passes before him...
Anyhoo, I reckoned I’d better leave my mark on The Old Monterey Inn by adding a passage to the book. The installment immediately before mine went something like this:
...As Mary awoke from this horrid nightmare of a dream she began to analyze why she had envisioned herself in the tub dead. Perhaps this was a tell tale sign that she needed desperately to save her marriage...
To which I added:
...Or perhaps it was yet another symptom of the electronic chip nestled deep in her brain — put there months ago on the moonless night when the glittering, strangely silent spacecraft descended on the north forty of Mary’s family farm. It had seemed so like a dream at the time. The diminutive creatures with spidery hands, leading her onto their odd craft. They were so gentle in their violence. And all that remained of her encounter with the otherworldly creatures was this miniscule square of silicon, blinking out from behind a cushion of gray matter, inspiring in Mary the strangest of thoughts, the most bizarre of impulses...
Take that, Ficlets.
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.