Orphaned Paragraphs

I didn't take my computer to Boston because it was going to be a thirty-hour trip and my plan was to spend all of it with Max (my brother) and Roma (a friend from an online collaborative writing project we both worked on starting when we were about fourteen, who before you freak out mom I had met before). So I read on the bus. On the way down I read John Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In (Basis for two recent movies, one Swedish and one American) and all I can say is that I think Swedish reads funny in English translation. I've read a couple of novels translated from Swedish now, and they all have a sort of strange rhythm in the language, like there's an accent programmed right into the sentence structure.

Before my ride back to New York, I wandered around downtown Boston with Roma, who had her heart set on going to Fire and Ice before putting me back on the bus, and we stopped into Barnes and Noble while we were wandering. I picked up two Dystopian/Post Apocalyptic novels (a guilty pleasure) - Cormac McCarthy's The Road (interesting, but not anything that wasn't in the movie) and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. Don't ask me why I'd been avoiding reading the series, because it's brilliant. It reminds me of Uglies, but in the best way possible.

So, the best place to read a post-apocalyptic novel is in an automobile on the highway in the middle of the night, when it's really easy to pretend that there's just you in your little bubble of light and the whole rest of the world has gone away.

I don't know if anyone else gets like this, but when I'm reading a really good book, it makes my thoughts feel more creative when I put it down. Like the way words fall together is energized. So let's mess around some and I'm going to post some orphaned paragraphs for a strange idea that will probably never go anywhere.

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He's the kidnapped son of a sixteenth-century playwright. She's a girl carved out of living marble. Between them, they've got a time machine, the shoes on their feet, and the only copy of Love's Labor's Won left in the universe. (THEY FIGHT CRIME!)

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He woke up to find both the man's daughters staring at him. One about twelve, the other about eight, but otherwise identical. Pool-blue eyes, flaxen hair piled on their heads like haystacks.

"I guess he's not dead," said the younger one.

"Nope," said the older one, and continued to stare.

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Only Kara stayed behind, and it was because she was too young to go, not because she pitied him. If she were seventeen instead of sixteen, there was no doubt she'd have gone into town with the others. Certainly she wouldn't have remained in the boondocks with a crippled houseguest; that wasn't how anyone wanted to spend their last weekend on Earth.

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He never let the girl have long hair, and she never asked for it. What good was long hair? It was just one more hand-hold for an enemy to grab you by in a fight. There was no such thing as vanity after the end of the world. Who was there to judge you as pretty? Zombies didn't have aesthetics. And here was a girl who had never read a copy of Vogue. So he cut his hair short, and then he cut hers, and that was just the way things went.