Eddi got off the plane an hour before her liaison expected to meet
her. She swore her way through customs and attempted unsuccessfully to
haggle over the price of the rental car. And thence to Paris.
     Dispersing a clump of recent college graduates, Eddi screeched up to
the curb in the XVIIIieme. She vanquished a few who seemed like they might
have had a problem with it by hurling glove-compartment refuse at them.
Wadded-up maps and the rental-agreement carbon copy bounced off
overinflated noggins and rolled downhill.
     After scoring some hash at the cathedral she wandered around
Montmartre looking for Steven's apartment. It was supposed to have a
flowerpot in the window. She saw flowerpots, but only ugly ones. Ugly
flowerpots were no good.

     Eddi tormented an organ grinder, whose monkey engaged in a shockingly
vulgar display toward her to retaliate. The hash brought her to a full and
complete awareness of the grimy monkey peter ten times a second until it
finally stopped. Street sounds fortunately drowned out the smug gibbering
before Eddi had fled more than a few strides.

     Eddi found Steven (an urn, not a flowerpot) and melted into the
comfort of his regal purple apartment. "A drink?" he asked. Of course a
drink. Sadly, the drink came back out minutes later, over the balcony
railing, onto a disgruntled guy complaining about having to sell his car to
please his girlfriend. "Jet lag," Stephen said.
     A third friend had plans to come down from Nice, but Eddi couldn't
wait. "Bon voyage." "What?" "It means have a good trip, Eddi." "I don't
speak French."
     Then back to her illegally-parked car, where Eddi was forced to unload
on a policeman lest he ticket her. She dispensed her awkward kung-fu kicks
in a manner she thought of as particularly Gallic but in fact the cop found
her particularly alien, a fact that featured prominently in his incident
report due to a lack of other evidence surrounding the attack.

     By the time the corporate liaison caught up with Eddi, the French were
preparing to hang her. As corporate liaison he was explicitly charged with
providing assistance in case of legal trouble, but instead he took the day
off to watch street musicians.

by Aaron for Dustin * eVille, Thursday, 2002

If I can't get off the topic of people not doing their jobs, I thought, I might as well have some good old-fashioned malfeasance. My eyes were starting to glaze over trying to think of how to differentiate "stupid" from "annoying" when I remembered that during a recent trip to France, a friend had explained to me that the No Parking signs which read "stationnement genant" literally meant "parking [here] is annoying". So I started with someone parking illegally in Paris, which also provided a way to pick off "nice".

This story features abuse of the word "the", which is a surprisingly handy little article. I used it all over the place to indicate, basically, that objects I was referring to already had an independent existence and no explanation was forthcoming. Which grimy monkey peter am I talking about? Hey, man, I told you, it's _THE_ grimy monkey peter. It's _there_.

Anyhow... I'm relatively happy with this. Good timing, good variation in sentence structure, punchy planned-ahead ending. The "kung-fu kicks" sentence is a total train wreck, which I remember knowing as I started typing it but feeling powerless to fix. I hope I correctly remembered which arrondissement the Basilique du Sacre Coeur is in... let me see... well, I spelled it wrong.

There's an in-joke in the story that would be unforgivably self-centered if I expected anyone to notice, but I don't think I did. Well, in my heart of hearts I hoped someone was reading every single one of my stories and would flag it. I used to do that sort of thing a lot more. My *real* goal with bits like that is to make them seamless (also a goal with the inclusion of people's words in the first place) so I can entertain myself without imposing on the reader to make allowances for stuff external to the story. Really.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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