Misstep

200-word sentence written for a contest. I know it's not great -- my first shot -- but I'm sure glad it's over. That is NOT as easy to do as it seems. Also, it's easier to get if you read aloud.

_______Looking back on all the tragic happenstances which had befallen him -- deaths, betrayals, humiliations, and such -- in his now-evanescent past which clung to him like a cloak that refused to be discarded, and wondering if these misfortunes of life really were, in the grand scheme of things, cruel enough and of large enough consequence to account for the drastic step he was about to take off the roof of the thirty-story high-rise residential apartment building in the middle of the Chinese city of Hong-Kong, young Malcolm Sessions, who had forever been an observant little man, came to two conclusions of the utmost importance, the first being that he had lived long enough to realize that the world was no place for him and nothing he desired could be found in it, and the second being that , if there was no one there on the ledge with him, no lifelong friend pleading desperately with him not to jump, who had been willing to become close enough to him to really, deeply care what was going on in the depths of his perturbed mind, then the world no longer needed or wanted his presence on its selfish expanse and wouldn’t mind in the slightest if he simply fell forwards off the building into the sea of apathetic faces below.

 

Word Count: 218 (words with hyphens only counted as one word)

Author's Note

I know the picture isn't of a building in Hong-Kong, but what can I say? I'm a fantasy-buff and it was one wicked, looming tower.

Reviews

[Emma Berman]

Wow- this one is even better.

Great job, sport.

[Aeternal Oceanfire]

Wow that tower is epic! SO COOL!!!!!!!!!!

[Tom Cook]

Haha one of my professor friend's told me that writing 200 word sentences would help my writing. And don't feel bad on fantasy, my friend Joe--also a writer--is into all sorts of fantasy. Him and I at one point were writing a book together about a desert metropolis fit with magic and guns, all fighting for water. Alas, we fell from it.

Good piece though. The best way to drag out a 200 word, from what I've studied, is dashes. Dashes are the herpes of long sentences.