Rather embarassing how easily I was able to cull 1,500 words from ‘What happened while Don was watching the game’ (see previous post). That’s 6 pages even I could see the story can do without. Admittedly, it does hurt, but as the cowboy says in the Far Side cartoon, “it’s a good kind of hurt”. Nevertheless, two passages were clever enough, IMHO, to warrant a eulogy on my LiveJournal.
The story is about a young couple with a baby child and a horrendous marriage. One day, as they return from the supermarket together, the husband is so obsessed with the upcoming baseball game he forgets to take the baby out of the car before it is shuffled into the automated parking system (the car, not the baby). Furious with him and his obsession, the wife goes down to the autopark to retrieve the car and rescue the baby.
Down in what she refused to call the control room, she operated the control panel with an efficiency born of concern for her baby. Instead of her usual fumble around the different buttons and switches, she went rapid-fire through the entire sequence, pausing only, in irritation, when she had to enter their four-digit PIN number.
Of course, Don had selected the PIN digits, and every time she had to operate the autopark, she squirmed at the memory of his almost religious rant about the mind-numbing statistics of long-dead athletes. Who cared about the difference between batting average and slugging percentage, or whatever they were called? If he would spend half the brain power he wasted on Lou Gehrig’s statistics on remembering her birthday, their marriage would be in half the trouble it was.
3-4-0-4, she punched in
I thought it a nicely telling detail that the PIN number consists of Lou Gehrig’s career batting average and his jersey number (I looked them up on Wikipedia). Then again, the story is targeted for ASIM, and the reference would probably be lost on Australian readers. It doesn’t pay to try to be too clever, I suppose. Wham, 150 words gone!
The wife discovers the autopark is malfunctioning, and decides to enter the system by herself and retrieve her baby, only to discover the car is empty. Following a subterranean tunnel, she finds the child in the hands of creatures she instantly recognizes from her favorite movies as Goblins. Surprisingly, one of them explodes with fury as she calls them that. How do they call themselves then, she wants to know.
“‘People’! I don’t hear your people call yourselves ‘humans’! Any species with minimum of sentience call themselves ‘people’, just like everyone calls their world ‘earth’, or an equivalent!”
The Goblins, he explained, were just one of their families; unfortunately, they were the only ones who had ever identified themselves to the people they came into contact with. The name had stuck, much to the annoyance of these… goblin-people, Marjorie decided to call them. To herself.
Bam! Another 75 words stripped. This one hurt much less, mainly because it’s painfully clear this has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. “It seemed like fun at the time” is a terrible reason to include anything in a short story…
Other stuff that got deleted includes some business about a draft that the protagonist might or might not have felt; tons of redundant adverbs and adjectives; a few really pointless sentences; and several instances of the word ‘then’.
I just hope I can retain my obscure ‘Labyrinth‘ reference…
