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Notes:
1. Discovered in December 2022
2. On a voyage to another realm
3. And eerily reminiscent of this
4. But how and why I do not know
5. Also, you can download this as a pdf if you really want.
6. Here: Arrpier Suphder, ik Voby Tok
7. Or even here (if you want to pay something for it, for some reason)
The penguin stood by the river and watched and waited and stared. It wasn’t lost anymore. It still had no idea what it was it was planning to do.
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Notes:
1. Written on August 3rd, 2021
2. See also…
Claire could have been watching TV. She could have been sat on the wall. She could have been shouting at everyone. She could have been throwing rocks in the lake. She could have been pretending to be one of the dolls. She could have been eating. She could have been writing poetry while no one was looking and then scribbling it out and pretending she had never written any poetry at all not ever she was too good for poetry it didn’t deserve her. She could have been holding the cat in the dark beneath the second lot of stairs and planning her revenge. She could have been doing cartwheels in the park. She could have been having a bath. She didn’t want to be having a bath but she could have been having a bath it’d have been better than this. She could have been throwing a ball against the wall over and over again until someone told her to stop. She could have been bursting balloons. She could have been stamping in the mud in her wellies. She could have been stamping in puddles in her wellies. She could have been stamping on people’s toes in her wellies. She could have been pushing people over into the mud and then stamping in a puddle in her wellies. At the same time. While laughing.
But she was pretending to be ill so she didn’t have to go to school so she couldn’t do any of those things at all because she was too stubborn to stop pretending to be ill and go and do any of them at all.
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Notes:
1. Written on January 1st, 2022
“What if,” Claire said. “Instead of going to school, we just didn’t go to school? Like ever again?”
At first Claire thought the silence that followed was because everyone was in awe of her great idea, but then it turned out that Tina and Ethel just didn’t understand it all, the idiots.
(Daniel wasn’t listening.)
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Notes:
1. Written on December 7th, 2022
It was always blank, the very last page of a book. Tina found this almost incomprehensibly sad. She always had. She always will. The sort of sadness that if you tried to explain it would simply dissipate away as soon as it left your lips, like your breath in winter. The sort of sadness that if you tried to alleviate it by filling all that emptiness in with words of your own would only get worse and worse until you could not look.
So she treasured it for herself. Her own secret sadness. It was nice knowing it was there. She could look at it whenever she wanted to. Look away when she’d had enough.
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Notes:
1. Written on January 1st, 2022
2. This is the last chapter of the pointlessly palindromic sequence started here.
3. 30 odd tales ago.