Anonymous Writing Group II: criticism thread

thanks lj. i am working on that as a whole play, i'm sure there'll be another chance to share more here. really appreciate all the feedback, this is the first two months ever where i have been finishing creative writing rather than bouncing the one idea around inside my head and never starting it (10 years or so of this) so it helps to just have encouragement. all that matters is to keep doing it and not lose the momentum.

xpost but what would bonehead think?

keep doing it

i wanted to say- it's very clear, imo, that it's a piece that has been worked on- and in a good way, not because the joins are showing. it has precision and structure in a way that doesn't compromise the rhythm or voice of the entire, and is definitely well worth working more on.

xp what would rock fly? what would tree walk? what would water run uphill?

what would bonehead think, indeed.

Fragment: given this is intended as an improbable vignette, I think the basic idea could be made more complex. When Borges or Barthelme does something like the conceit is like a little puzzle you have to unpick. In those cases the short form complements and seems natural for the content, because the idea becomes too contradictory to be drawn out in depth.

For e.g. the idea of an alien taking a human name despite being part of a non-individualistic telepathic community is comic and meaty in itself... why not develop that. How does an interconnected extra-terrestrial society react when a part of itself is suddenly called Mrs McCloskey? What difficulties does it represent for the customer when they go to partake in a simple transaction, (buying a car) and are faced with an unlimited repository of cold, inhuman, malevolent logic from across the void of space... The situation is inherently comic and odd, but would be especially so if it were taken really seriously.

On the monologue: I like the Maori and Father Damien details. Could have done with more of this IMO, we'd get more a sense of the character if the viewpoint was narrower, more focused on his obsessions. It's the details, the unexpected things, that make him unique, not the existential dread, the sense of being outside himself, the feeling he's not really living. Those are all fairly familiar post-modern sentiments that are certainly powerful, but would be more so if anchored in the unusual and specific.

Sea Nettle
by Elizabeth Cranfield

That was the year
We couldn't remember anything
But only felt nostalgia.

Everything shimmered and was out of focus,
All odors carried an erotic charge.
Life ran its course, coursing elsewhere
But we were inside it.

That was the year
We didn't care about anything,
And felt alternately liberated and imprisoned
According to what music was playing.

We laughed at how familiar this all was,
And understood familiarity as a feeling
But not a concept,
And we worked hard at our forgetting.

Blackfriars
by Elizabeth Cranfield

When your brother had
The words “empathy” and “patience”
Tattooed across his eyeballs,
I lost the will to live.

Later, in response to a McGriddle sandwich,
It returned, spurring a series of reflections about
Blood sugar, and our enslavement thereto,
Which became a treatise.

Alone and afraid, at the podium
Naked, I address the audience.
Look me in the eyes to see my eyes.
My doctors read my will to live.

Black
by Kate Hamill

Mr. Black, currently clutching a coffee, nervously adjusting his tie, pulling at his collar, is very fond of numbers. After all, they have been kind to him: from an early age he has used them to count his blessings, and other people’s shortcomings. Now, as he settles into his desk, he is luxuriating in them, almost unconsciously totting up the details of his surroundings. His new terminal, which arrived, shining, at his enclosure last week, normally takes between eight and ten seconds to start up. Today it takes six, which is very good. He has 27 new emails to read, which is normal for Mondays, on average, but rather high for a day in June. The company has ordered him a box of 50 new biros, which he predicts will last for 45 days, given his previous difficulties in keeping hold of them. He found a grey hair on his chest this morning, which makes three altogether. On the whole he still feels he looks three to five years younger than his actual age.

Mr. Black performs these quiet calculations in the manner of an athlete stretching – practiced, languid, a little bit drowsy. His glasses are so perfectly balanced on his face that they look like they’ve been drawn on, in thick, permanent marker. His suit fits his slim body impeccably. (It’s semi-bespoke, and Mr. Black asked the tailor for an extra half-inch of ease below the armpit, so that when he reaches for the calendar on the far wall of his enclosure, the seam is just a couple of millimetres away from touching the trimmed hair he has there). Soon, when he has finished adjusting his chair (an alien-looking, back-supporting designer number, which must have cost the company something in the region of 900 pounds), he will take a running leap at the figures buzzing away on the screen.

Mr. Black has a good job. He spent years working late nights, bringing the right people coffee, attending the right pubs and acquiring the right accent and wardrobe to get it. It’s a position that was incredibly difficult to attain, but is incredibly easy to do. When people ask him what his job is – that is, the people on the other side of the 700 glass windows that make up the office building’s façade – he tends to say something like “Oh, I won’t bore you by explaining – I’m a numbers man.” Then he chuckles. “Two and two is four, that kind of thing, ha.” People rarely question him further. Most mornings his main duties appear to be drinking coffee and clicking happily through a spreadsheet, watching the figures breed, the money rolling in.

Today is different. Hazily, over the rim of Mr. Black’s styrofoam cup, a plump, fertile-looking numeral 8 (the resemblance of which to the symbol for infinity Mr. Black has always particularly appreciated) appears to melt into a hawklike 7, then sighs and sags into the dumpy, bottom-heavy curves of a 6. Mr. Black blinks. He has issues, associated with a childhood loss, which he seldom goes into, that are typified by a paranoia about entropy. In isolation, then, this ugly numeric progression is enough to upset him. But it is also happening elsewhere. Mr. Black’s perspective deepens, Hitchcock-style, as he lowers the cup to the table. As his eyes are fixed on the screen – suddenly, vertiginously, trembling with falling numbers – the ridged bottom collides clumsily with the wood surface, and four drops of coffee spatter onto the table. This has never happened to Mr. Black before.

The phone rings. It has an idiosyncratic tone – three short bleeps and then a longer, growling blast. Mr. Black waits two and a half seconds before picking it up, noting the call’s origin before doing so. It is his friend and colleague, who is also called Mr. Black. “Are the figures looking right to you, Black?” says the caller (whose one failing, if Mr. Black is being particularly critical, is his rather pompous, brusque manner of addressing his co-workers). “No, not at all. Not at all, Mr. Black” replies Mr. Black. “Must be a mistake, Black,” barks the caller. “No?” Mr. Black pauses to look over the spreadsheet once more. “Well, if it isn’t then we’re in trouble, Mr. Black,” he says.

One of the first things Mr. Black remembers counting are his teeth, which he has had since birth. “It’s a boy, and boy, what a smile!” reads the energetic caption beneath the first baby photos, collected in a 72-page album his mother put together for him when she was expecting his younger brother, who is also called Mr. Black. On the upper jaw, one of the incisors is roughly one and a fifth times as long as the other one, something that’s barely noticeable to the naked eye but that gives Mr. Black’s face a slight cast of wonky jocularity, contrasting somewhat adorably with his overall neatness and earnestness.

As he hangs up the phone, that smile is frozen in place, but now it seems a little sickly, a little clenched. Above it, Mr. Black’s neat nose is pushing air around slightly faster than usual. His eyes, glued to the monitor, say most of all: two deepening black holes; a small galaxy of panic.

Now THAT is Douglas Adams pastiche

Nah, better than that, but perhaps a little kookier than it needs to be. The numbers thing is overdone. I get the feeling that the writer is quite eager to impress. Stuff like Hitchcock-style is plain clumsy

Cranfield poetry the sort of earnest self-important wonder I can never love, sorry

i just wanted to say gtf i like both those poems and especially the first. i don't have much in the way of practical critique to add at the mo, tho.

First one not so bad but still comes off like blogosphere confessional post-art handwring hipsterrunoff reaching. The obnoxious 'we'.

i'm a fan of mr black. more than anything else here so far i wouldn't be surprised if that turned into a book that sold.

id be surprised if i weren't right about the author too.

the poetry beforehand, i'm not in poetry processing mood tbh, i haven't really any feedback. poetry is harder to help along, it exists more fully in the head of the writer than a longer written piece like a story, that must usually stand on something concrete.

The "we" isn't obnoxious if it's addressing a specific person.

How are the numbers thing overdone if it is about a dude with a mania for numbers?
I agree there's something off about Hitchcock style in that I don't remember Hitchcock doing the fixed object size, perspective zoom trick a lot, but as with sarcastic panic, you would lose something (maybe something crucial) with a less offensive word choice.

I like "Hitchcock-style" , I am imagining a very specific scene in rear window that may be a false memory. In general, I think the best, most concrete images in writing often come across as "awkward" because they are distant from cliches, which sound as natural as ordinary words.

I like both of those poems too. The "we" is only obnoxious if you assume it's a Guardian We, and I don't think it is. Intrigued as to the relevance of sea nettles. I'm not great on critiquing poetry but the first first of Blackfriars is terrific.

Mr Black piece now coming off a bit The Curious Incident Of The Lanchester In The Night-Time. It doesn't work so well for me but others should definitely elucidate me on what draws them to it

Mr Black is pretty good, I think. The numbers thing isn't particularly overdone but there's a danger of making that yr character's defining characteristic and crowding out other elements. I agree that "Hitchcock-style" is a bit off, because it reads like the author is using it as convenient shorthand for the sort of effect they want to create, and I'd be wary of that.

But the writer writes well, the only issue I have with the writing itself is that there are a couple of action, action, action lines - the opening line would be a lot punchier if it were just "Mr Black is very fond of numbers", the rest doesn't really illuminate very much and gets in the way of the sentence. Ditto this line:

He spent years working late nights, bringing the right people coffee, attending the right pubs and acquiring the right accent and wardrobe to get it

^^^ This also suffers from the same problem of feeling a little like a list, I'm sure you could find a more elegant way of conveying something similar.

Second line is great and there's a lot to like in this piece. The voice on the end of the phone is short on personality though, if something is about to go wrong then that person needs to be a lot less mild.

Vertigo, guys.

Oh it was you then :P

Haha no I didn't submit anything

Half-sarcastic sense of coyness

LJ I'm pretty sure the point is to critique the work for the author's benefit not to justify liking it to you.

Nothing wrong with a list, nothing wrong with mr black #2 lacking personality, both v much harmony to the melody imo

xp no difference

re: the opening line would be a lot punchier if it were just "Mr Black is very fond of numbers"
I agree it would be punchier, but if the idea is to simultaneously communicate the visual of what Mr. Black is doing in the opening, there's really no getting around it, and raising Hitchcock suggests that the cinematic approach is fully intended.

re: "How does an interconnected extra-terrestrial society react when a part of itself is suddenly called Mrs McCloskey?"
In a Borgesian universe, they'd all be Mrs. McCloskey and therefore the name is once again meaningless as having no name at all. In this universe, they react by drooling, which I think achieves the same thing by showing rather than telling.

re: "What difficulties does it represent for the customer when they go to partake in a simple transaction, (buying a car) and are faced with an unlimited repository of cold, inhuman, malevolent logic from across the void of space..."
I like where this is going, but this doesn't require that Mrs. McCloskey be an alien or even a robot. This works better if Mrs. McCloskey is an inanimate rock, e.g.

"Always reject the first offer... Always reject the first offer..." but Mrs. McCloskey, not offering anything, just stood there, as did the sticker price.
The pamphlet full of advice the prospective buyer memorized quickly revealed itself to be powerless against Mrs. McCloskey's firm negotiating strategy.
"Walk away, and they'll be sure to crumble." She walked away, and turned back to see if Mrs. McCloskey was crumbling. Nope. Mrs. M was a literal rock. Across the way, though, she spied Mrs. McCloskey's son, Leroy, crumbling from the repeated assaults of an irate couple, apparently fed up with the McCloskey family brand of hard bargaining stoicism, which by now must have been rubbing off on her as well, since despite witnessing erosive violence visited upon Leroy, she felt no sediment.

haha amazing post! Writer continually adapting story in response to interrupting critics is a good idea for a piece in itself...

I agree it would be punchier, but if the idea is to simultaneously communicate the visual of what Mr. Black is doing in the opening, there's really no getting around it

But why convey this right at the start though? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I don't get the sense that it's necessary, especially as they're fairly standard everyday things to do. The nervous adjustment of the tie I like, but that stuff can be later in the paragraph. There's something about the rhythm of three of these things one after the other that stretches the sentence out - you need to have a really good reason for doing that otherwise you're unnecessarily deadening the impact of the first line.

I am entirely pro-list writing but the best lists have great rhythm to them, or what Ward Fowler upthread calls the shape on the words of the page - the explanation of how Mr Black got where he is today lacks that kind of shape and rhythm. It could even be a bit more anecdotal.

The cinematic element is a tricky one - you don't really need to write camera angles into this, but equally there's loads of terrific visual interest in the shapes of the numbers and then the sudden cliff drop as they start falling.

I'd probably avoid using paranoia and entropy in the same sentence, there's something a little Pynchon thesis about it - just straight out fear or terror might be better than paranoia. I can see where you're going with the entropy though (I think).

Harold Lovell Stands At The Edge Of The Water

by Malik Rehman

Harold Lovell stands at the edge of the water. The water looks black, from above, shaded by the trees that fringe it, and the cliffs on the far side. Reflected on its surface is the ruin of the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire that closed it down, before motorbike accident that cost him his fiancée, before the deaths of his parents and the creeping despair that prevented him from rebuilding his life. He scratches absently at his ear, letting his eyes wander up to the buildings perched on top of the cliff, close-windowed and splashed with red warning signs, not really seeing them. The cold rubber of the glove on his hand reminds him that he came here with a purpose, and it’s one he’d better act on quickly, or risk losing his nerve.

Slowly, he reaches into his pocket and draws out the trap. Inside, the tiny brown house mouse scrabbles unhappily, looking for a way out it hasn’t found in six hours of trying. Harold looks away from the mouse and down into the water, hoping to see the silver flash of a passing fish, or any other sign of life, but today nothing moves. The air between the trees is quiet and still; no birds or insects make these dark pines their home. His hands tremble.

One desperate plunge and the trap is immersed. He pulls door of the trap open enough to let the water in, without letting the mouse escape. Panicking, the mouse struggles, fighting for life. He holds the trap and forces himself to watch as the water closes around the mouse. The cold liquid closing around its head, the last breath of air burning in its lungs, no way out. No way out. But that’s how it is with death, sooner or later there’s no way out. Better a quick death by drowning than a lingering death from cancer or heart disease, better than feeling your body and mind atrophy and fail. And there’s a chance, just a chance, that for this mouse drowning isn’t the end. Be brave, he whispers. He’s heard that drowning is painless, but it seems nobody’s told the mouse that. With a gasp, it expels that last precious pocket of air, and takes in water. Harold can feel the fear slithering in the pit of his stomach. He almost changes his mind, but he steels himself and keeps the trap submerged until the mouse gives a final kick and stops moving, eyes still open. The moment of truth. Holding his own breath, he waits. Breathing because his body won’t let him go without oxygen, he counts his pounding heartbeats. A hundred. Two hundred. His arms ache from holding the trap at full extension. His eyes start to water, and he fights the urge to vomit.

A twitch. The mouse twitches, twitches and moves. Begins to fight again. For five minutes he watches in awe as the mouse swims frantically, paws sliding against the plastic. He was right. They were all wrong, and he was right.

Still shaking, he draws the trap from the water and drains it. Exhausted, his tiny victim, bedraggled and shivering, coughs liquid and collapses. He walks back to his car, making slow progress as he stops every few seconds to check it hasn’t died. Triumph courses through him, but cannot quite banish the nausea. Harold drives home.

It takes three days for the mouse to die. He has decanted the creature into a small cage, which he watches like a cat. On the first day, it doesn’t eat and moves little. Harold opens the cage and strokes the mouse every so often, feeling for warmth and life beneath the soft fur. On the second day, there’s a marked improvement: the mouse is eating and making a proper nest for itself, though when it retreats inside to sleep, Harold panics and prods it awake again. On the third day, though, its breathing is laboured and its movements are stiff. Its fur starts to fall out. By nightfall, the flesh has started to drop from the bones in a black slough. Harold notes the details in his diary, vomits freely in the downstairs bathroom, and buries the remains in a ziplock bag beneath the camellia on his back lawn. The poem Helen had read at their mother’s funeral comes into his mind and he chuckles, saying the last line aloud: May God hold you in the palm of His hand. Inside, he flicks on the kettle and the loneliness catches him, a lurching feeling as if he’d been walking and encountered a step down that he hadn’t seen, the world fallen away beneath him. His tears are brief.

The second mouse he leaves in the water. He doesn’t dare transport the liquid to his house, so he rigs up a fish tank beneath the surface of the lake and transfers the mouse into it. He visits twice a day. Four days in, it’s conclusive: the death of the first mouse was triggered by its removal from the water; this one lives. After a week, stricken with sympathy, he releases it into the lake, reasoning that if it stays in the water it will continue to live, but a mouse doesn’t reason the same way as a man. It scrambles up the shore and disappears beneath the trees. Stupid mouse, thinks Harold, and then Sorry, mouse, under his breath. He wipes something from his itching cheek with an angry arm, and curses how lachrymose he’s become, these last few years.

Three months, two more mice a squirrel and the neighbour’s chinchilla later, Harold stands poised once again at the edge of the water. His affairs are in order. He has made his last purchase at Tesco, he has listened to his last episode of The Archers, he has visited the graveyard and said his goodbyes. He has sat for a long moment by the camellia bush, feeling the grass beneath his hands and remembering its extravagant blossoms. He leaves no notes or messages. The only person to leave one for is Helen, and he doesn’t want to tell her he’s dead, and he doesn’t want to tell her he isn’t, so he says nothing. It will be months before she notices his absence, anyway.

Without the rubber gloves encasing his arms to the elbow, he feels naked already, but he unbuttons his jacket. Steps out of his jeans. Peels off his underwear. The breeze feels unfamiliar as it lifts the hairs on his legs and chest. The air is cold: it’s October and the leaves are falling, and the water is even colder. Standing ankle-deep, Harold looks down at his feet, white and distorted in the shallows. If he turns back now, he knows, he will he lose only them. Could he bear it? For a moment he’s paralysed, but remembering the blackening flesh of the animals he drives himself onwards. The mud is thick between his toes, cold and sucking and full of sharp objects that slice at his feet. Every inch deeper brings the thought of retreat: knees, thighs, balls, belly, chest, shoulders, neck. The trees and sky are shivered by his body as he passes gently through the mirrored surface, step by cautious step, and into another world.

Oh yes, season six. Yes.

First sentence of next one needs dicing but it too was brilliant besides.

season six was brilliant alright, just kind of enchanting and amusing at the same time. i write a lot of tv summaries for my job and i find them weird and interesting in themselves, love the idea of using them in this way.

i liked Season Six but sort of wished there'd been more movement in it - one could have swopped episode 18 with episode 2 without any particular effect. it wouldn't have had to be a movement towards greater loopiness, but... towards something. (also the way that the poem was always in a relationship with an A-name made for a strange feeling of substitution)

Also really into Harold Lovell but thought the lyricism was a bit too reflex on occasion - "step by cautious step", scratching "absently" at the ear - and that got in the way of what's a very neat use of cliché/set-phrase to express thought (be brave, fight again, it's conclusive, marked improvement, steels himself, full extension, etc). it's also missing a "the" before "motorbike accident" imo.

Harold is great, intriguing and evocative.

Would lose this exposition though:

" the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire that closed it down, before motorbike accident that cost him his fiancée, before the deaths of his parents and the creeping despair that prevented him from rebuilding his life."

could be changed to "the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire." – the rest is implied obliquely and/or you can bring in the other details later, feeding the reader little bits of plot at a time.

Also a little unsure about the "But that’s how it is with death," bit. Get that these few sentences are highlighting a key idea in the piece but it seems a bit HELLO MESSAGE HERE.

I liked Harold too - though I agree it could have some paring. I think Stephen King wrote one of those oft-quoted (tweeted) bits of advice that I've seen loads of times, saying to go through your pieces and remove all adverbs. One of those "rules" that is worth keeping in mind, in that piece I reckon you could lose a few and it makes it stronger. Like "scrabbles unhappily" - prob all scrabbling is unhappy?

I feel like stylistically you could maybe allow more tinkering too, like it is quite straight up in its telling of the story, I feel like some twists in how things are revealed might boost this a bit - sorry if that's vague advice, just my two cents.

I'll happily scrabble to disagree on the last part- the weird is in the happenings, no harm at all stylistically in the telling being straight imo, contrast/tension doesnt strike me as an issue there.

King's version of adverb advice is coloured by his anecdote of his first article on a junior basketball team game coming back to him practically halved by redlined adverbs and his realisation of how much better it was by their omission. Would always agree. An adverb or pronoun is almost always a copout when i try to use it.

Ismael couldn't live without pronouns

It's not even contrast/tension - I just think some sentences could benefit from being fleshed out a bit, I guess.

EG "It takes three days for the mouse to die. He has decanted the creature into a small cage, which he watches like a cat."

I feel like here you have scope to do something with that, but as is it's a bit on the nose, watching like a cat is sort of a cliché that you could turn to your advantage with a bit of tinkering, especially given it's a mouse that's being watched.

I'm not sure what Season Six is, but I'm not sure I mind about that. Is it a short story? Presumably a poem? Either way I really like it - I agree with C# it could benefit from a bit more forward motion or narrative direction but the meta/poem bits are fantastic.

There's a fine line between this sort of thing and Charlie Brookerism and this piece only really slips over that line with the masturbation bit. Otherwise it reminds me of Barthelme's Will You Tell Me?, which the author should definitely read if they haven't already.

Benson puts a gun to his head. Erica has to dispose of a body.

great work bobby s

Quite liked - nay, really liked Harold's epiphany. Agree that if anything it's underwritten, but it gripped me with its succession of ideas & its fusion of the commonplace & absurd - the surreal spirit shining out. 900 more pages of that and who knows, perhaps you have synthesised a universe

I mean, it covers about 40 pages in 1000 words. As a short story or vignette it's good but expand it and it could be amazing, although countering this, perhaps it works best as a vignette because we don't have time to work out Harold's eventual design before he himself is barefoot at the water's edge

It's interesting that we've had three mental anguish/water's edge incidences.

Four, mine is implicit but 'turtles' is a joycean callback/hint

so who wrote the "mr black" story then?

"but I don't get the sense that it's necessary, especially as they're fairly standard everyday things to do"
let's break it down:
"Mr. Black, currently clutching a coffee"
coffee drinker, narrows down the age a bit; he's not just holding the coffee -- he's clutching it -- high strung dude

"nervously adjusting his tie, pulling at his collar,"
works on office job likely, probably not the boss, though, and he's already at work, not drinking coffee at home

"is very fond of numbers"
dude is the fastidious sort, and because of the preceding info, we already have some idea why he likes numbers, and his job is likely number-based.

If it's just "Mr. Black is very fond of numbers", then you're left thinking Mr. Black is some kind of number pervert at first.

i would like to read a story about a number pervert

These are I think the last three pieces I have. If I've missed any give me a shout.

...
by Zak Evans

brevity, in parts: a new hermeneutic

(lively)

in september of last year a letter was penned by a resident of the okarns state correctional facility in purple crayon. struck through with schizophrenic allusions it was addressed to a nearby judicial functional whose job it was to oversee first amendment issues as they related to the local incarceration community. she had recently scribed a sweeping response to three pressing appeals concerning prisoner hygiene as objet trouvé, radical emancipation from Cartesian dualism, and the prolific use of highly specific threats in fictional texts. in each case she had ruled for a restricted reading of civil rights - finding that the state's right to punish criminals took precedence over their self-expression. naturally this made a number of people very unhappy. a civil rights litigator promised to defame her in the press. a certain academic leftist philanthropist withdrew funding from her "pet" project - papier-mâché crafted birds, cats and fish for the prisoners meant to substitute for traditional animal-assisted therapy. "for fuck's sake, mandy," he texted her after the local okarns press ran excerpts from her manifesto. "if they can't make true art what good are sloppy wet paper dogs?"

for the benefit of their disposition, she might have answered, but the poorly scribbled letter had fastened her attention.

five lizards have tacken control of local authority
beware they shapeshift
feds can't be trusted - part of the lunar conspiracy
eject all anticipations imminently

the prisoner had spent the last decade quietly serving time for the stickup of a neighborhood electronics shop. he had made it down two blocks with an armful of discmen when a nearby beat cop overtook him. the weapons charge, stolen merchandise, and handful of industrial grade laxatives and cannabimimetic schedule I cigarettes gave him fifteen years. not a peep before yesterday, and now a paranoid letter that did not quite seem like poetry. it was unsettling. plus, she could sense a fever coming coaxed along by the anxieties of her work.

the phone rang - caller-id indicated a former lumberjack savant turned state prosecutor; her mentor.

"you screwed the pooch now," he cooed over the phone. they always fell quickly into tense banter. "the prisoner's union is up-in-arms, leaders are calling for your head."

"we gave it to the air-controllers so i'm not going to let a few grifters tell me what to do."

the lumberjack picked up on some fear behind her bluster. "you don't sound so sure."

"they took away my animal money," she said mournfully, and then, as though it were an afterthought, "what do you think about lizards?"

"cold blooded, scaly, poisonous?" he offered.

"assuming the roles of important government figures?"

"stay away from the psilocybin," he cautioned and then he was gone, the line dissolved into static, blocked by a tunnel or a water tower.