The Man Who Could Talk Backwards

Bob got up and walked right out of this story.  The gall of the fellow!  We had a whole story worked out, with a plot and everyting!  What was going to happen (might as well tell you, now that it's not going to happen) was this:  Bob was going to walk into a pharmacy and fall in love with Janice, who was at work putting nasal inhalers on the shelves, but Bob just up and disappeared and now that we check the pharmacy is closed which is odd because we got special permission to keep the pharmacy open during the time it took us to complete this story.  But the whole thing's kind of pointless now that Bob has walked out, wonder what came over him, he said he wanted to be in our story especially after we showed him a picture of Janice who is a real knock-out, although the joke would have been on him because the Janice whose photo we showed him is not the same Janice who works in the pharmacy, the latter is really rather plain.  But plain in a clean-scrubbed and really pleasant sort of way so who knows, maybe they'd have hit it off after all.

It's heartbreaking when a story falls apart like this, it's as if Herman Melville had set down to write Moby Dick and Ahab had suddenly quit the whaling business to open a hot dog stand in New York City, leaving Melville to either write a book called Moby Hot Dog or find himself a new epic American archetype of dark ruminating obsession, good luck with that.  Not that we're comparing Bob to Ahab, Bob is really rather ordinary except for one thing, speak a sentence to him and he can instantly say it back to you backwards, no shit, we knew a girl once (this was in the late eighties when anything was possible!) who could do it and when we found out Bob could do it too we figured it was something he could do to show Janice, who he was going to run into in the pharmacy and fall instantly in love with, how far he would go to win her love.  "yldam uoy evol I," we were going to have him say, which is right up there we think with "You had me at hello" so far as romantic lines go though actually we guess not, there's really not much (now that we look at it written on the page) very romantic about the line "yldam uoy evol I," it sounds like a line from The Canterbury Tales, so who cares if Bob took off, and the pharmacy is unaccountably closed, and Janice is nowhere to be found, the story wouldn't have amounted to a hill of beans anyhow. 

Still we wish Bob would come back, for he owes us $20, and we like to listen to him talk backwards, and he is an orphan who grew up in New Orleans and there is not much he doesn't know about taking hard knocks and getting back up again, and did we mention he has a wooden leg? 

Comments

[Martijn]

Damn, that's the worst thing that could happen to an autor: a main character walking out. It must have happened to Tolstoy all of the time, hence the use of the understudies.

What I should have said was: vintage Unremiting Failure!!! Love it.

[UF Mike]

Yeah, Tolstoy had it good. He could afford understudies, stand-ins, elaborate sets (whole wars are fought in his books!)--the whole bit. I'm working on a low budget here. If a character walks out, I'm sunk.