from the ending of a story titled "Universal Chef." (1st full rewrite). "For days after he had been buried the vicinity of the house was deserted. People wanted to gather to see a spectacle, but no one wanted to linger around a house of death, empty and dark, and silent. The garden grew into a weed lot. The weed lot became a sprawling little jungle. The sprawling little jungle caused the eyes of neighbors and businesses in the vicinity to get sore from its sight. The house stood like an eerie mausoleum to no one, and that nobody had reason to visit. After the monsoon rains, when the floods receded, men in suits rode up in a caravan of expensive cars and SUVs. They hovered around the periphery of the overgrown vegetation. Assistants shadowed their footsteps, nodded at everything they said, scribbled notes. Then the caravan snaked away. Some days later construction crews rumbled in at dawn. As the city awakened engines roared, motors growled. Dozers and backhoes plundered the overgrowth, whinnying their battle cries late into the evening. Floodlights blasted the night like multiple fluorescent suns, and the crews, on the first day, having arrived with definite plans and little time to clear the way for them, razed the overgrown garden and upturned the earth, so that at sunrise the next day it was a patch of barren dirt; the house came crumbling down, like a diminutive giant whose legs had been shot out from under it, making it collapse on itself. The pile of bricks and demolished cement made a small pyramid on the desert of the plot. There was no evidence that anything had ever existed on it before."
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:07:04 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015