Friday, March 18, 2011

Old birds and new tricks

I'm on a 3000 words per day (as in "translated", not "written") regime until the end of March. Of course, Mrs Perry chose this particular week to do this and all hell broke loose.
This is what happens when Dags goes bird-watching at 4 AM...

Calling of Thunderbirds
(a.k.a. "Wasn't geeky enough")

Mrs Orlovich silenced the angrily buzzing contraption with a wave of her hand. It was a good thing she remembered the medication, she acknowledged to the now silent device; the tremor was less pronounced this morning. It made life easier for sexagenarians if things didn't slip through their fingers the first chance they got – or at least that's what Mr Orlovich used to say before they stamped his birth certificate “deceased”.
Mrs Orlovich was a patient woman. Even Mrs Golubovich, the annoying gossip-monger from the second floor, admitted as much: she had waited forty years to see her husband’s back (and consequently felt cheated when they refused to place the old bastard face down on his lacquered catafalque) and twenty years to see her only child’s face again (after two decades of international phone calls, it was rather anticlimactic to have a balding, middle-aged stranger walk into her flat with an unintelligible brunette in tow) without so much as a word of complaint.
But she missed her grandchildren terribly.
Having sat through countless tirades on young generations’ lack of regard for the elders and their time (courtesy of Mr Orlovich and that spouse-stealing biddy, Mrs Golubovich) Mrs Orlovich still tended to disagree: the young did, in fact, possess a healthy regard of both their elders and time – precisely the reason they strove to avoid the former. There were times even the ever-patient Mrs Orlovich had the urge to throttle the codger (especially after the hundredth retelling of the same story – the one involving his first car, a bottle of home-made spirits and a very young and very willing Mrs Golubovich).
She still missed her grandchildren so very much.
Carefully, Mrs Orlovich picked up the blue-glowing tool and navigated her way through the arcane symbols.
Thunderbird 3.1.9. flashed into life.

2 comments:

  1. The bit about wishing to see her husband's back made me smile. I love the personality that comes through for Mrs Orlovich!

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  2. This is awesome writing, humourous and feels so real! :) Can you do some more?

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