Their words were not empty (original short story)

radiosilence

Half short story, half experiment (beginning with the fact that writing in English, for me, is an experiment already). Tried to condense the three-act structure into a few paragraphs. Please let me know what you think of it. Thanks for reading it.

Their words were not empty.

Their words were not empty but they were too soft, like a roomful of pillows and you on top of them trying to stand up and walk out of it. Like small print so small that you couldn’t read it even if you tried. During all this meeting with these two strangers (but where have you seen them and how can they look at you familiarly if you can’t?), you’ve had the feeling that this wasn’t really a conversation about what you thought you were discussing with them; that they were meaning something else all the time and playing with you, having their fun from you. This was a conversation with no edges, no definitions, and (you started figuring out as you went further and further into this talk --as if it were dark woods with the danger of no return) no safety net either.
You saw that in the peculiarly incisive tooth that one of the three lawyers exposed every time he smiled. You didn’t like the cunning way of that smile. The three men could be one and perhaps they were lawyers, you realized you couldn’t really say. And when you mentioned familiar words like prices, loading issues, shipping, production and return of investment expectations, words that had been with you for all your life, words that provide you security, they used these same words but were still talking about something else.
And then they offered you the paper where you must sign to get your deal.
Did you sign?
When the ink of your own pen, the one you knew too well, drew your name in red instead of black, you understood you had just sold something else, the thing they had been talking about.
You were only not too sure to whom. Life seemed to go on as usual. They never returned. The project was a success. And you got to live a few hundred years.
Your pen writes in red now only when you write your name.

Navel · Moderator Joined: Mar 28, 2003 Posts: 34

Very poetic.