Monochromy

Apparently, I'm too abstract and don't use enough details. >_> Geh. Anyways, summations as usual and another attempt at doing detail/characterization/both.



Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning - I like this, the style of it is great and it explores a whole bunch of different perspectives and styles all focused on K., favorites included Reading the Newspaper, Attitude Toward His Work, Dress, Puzzled by His Children, A Dream.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - I really liked the details in this one even though I kind of went bug-eyed from the sheer 'what-the-heck-is-this' of it but the description is pretty great, smell is always interesting to read about and makes me hungry.

Fiesta, 1980 - As with Nilda, not a fan of this writer, not a fan of his style, but still grudgingly appreciative of characterization and detail, and I like how he characterizes via dialogue.

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He was an odd fellow, as most would described him, deckered out in his perpetually grayscale outfits even as shirt changed to jacket to polo, an oddity in the sea of the bright and flamboyant around him. It was as if God decided that the world needed less epilepsy-inducing people, and placed a grayscaled human in the midst of the lively colors of life, something bland and ordinary in the vibrant and extraordinary - which drew attention to him, so perhaps his ordinary-ness made him extraordinary as well. Stood out, a speck of boring in the excitement of life. Extraordinary in his ordinariness. Strong initial impressions that drew people to him, like an infant to shiny trinkets.

He was weary. So amazingly weary all the time that it often seemed as if his face, his body creased under the weight of the world, wrinkle lines forming as if they strained against some untold weight, giving him the look of elders thirty years his senior. People could not stand near him for fear of falling to the sheer aura of exhaustion, as if his weariness was contagious - perhaps it was. For the regulars at the bar he frequented, the legend of how he evaded a sniper's bullet due to collapsing of sheer exhaustion was oft-told to newcomers always led to rambunctious guffawing and laughter. Perhaps it was the thought of him wearing something non-monochrome? Army fatigues?

For his employers, they could only bemoan the two states he was ever in at work - asleep or working. When he worked, he set to the task with diligence that could make Buddhist monks envy, working as if his life depended on discovering 317 marketing strategies that would increase company profits by at least 342%. 'If only we had more workers like him!' his employers would lament, at least until he lost all motivation and turned his paperwork into a pillow and his desk a bed. At least employers learned that laptops make decent heaters during cold winters before they turned him into yet another vagrant ex-employee. Or that perhaps they should clarify that work hours weren't flexible, and were supposed to be one continuous period, as he always left near noon and would not return until late evening.

But what everybody didn't know, was that while trust between fellow primates and him were alien, he visited daily a blind alley cat, ragged and dark enough that it could be passed off as a shadow. The alley was in an ill-frequented sector of town near a seedier pharmacy, so those who saw him enter often thought he was picking up some sort of weariness-inducing drug. He brought food with him, remains of his lunch and whatever else he could cobble together on his way over. Feline and man, a cat was his best friend, shades of black. In the colorful hues of the world, the man found refuge with monochromy, his furred grayscaled friend. This was his routine, a set ritual that was irrefutable until his day of death.

Everybody that knew him thought he was going to die one day of exhaustion, just collapse, writhe on the ground maybe, and just pass away. Or maybe fall off a cliff while hiking because he fell asleep walking, or trip into the path of a truck. Morbid, but fitting to their perceptions of him. So they were surprised to learn that he did not die of the same exhaustion that gripped him day to day, but rather because he had hurled himself in front of a car with such energy that he made a significant indent in the car. And in the chaos surrounding his death, as black bled red and monochromy finally tainted with the luster of color, nobody noticed a small black shadow that slipped away into a neighboring alleyway.

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