[LNHY/ACRA] The Daily Super Short-Short Story #37

Saxon Brenton saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au
Thu Oct 14 15:15:06 PDT 2004


The Daily Super Short-Short Story #37
 
A Devil Came Down to Georgia 19
 
Last Time: More nightsiders were introduced.
 
     TJ sat watching as the others as they laughed about his predicament. 
It gave him a slightly sick feeling to be in a cage - again - while people 
were laughing at him, but he knew at gut level that it was important to 
pay attention. Any hope of escape depending on him paying attention to 
what was going on around him. He knew that because he had learnt a very 
long time ago that he only had himself to rely on. So TJ sat watching.
     TJ sat watching impassively, because he knew that if he allowed 
himself to react to how he was feeling he might miss something important. 
It was important to remain calm. Overexcited people missed things and 
squandered opportunities.
     TJ sat watching impassively and most definitely not allowing himself 
to be provoked. After all, emotions were something that other people could 
use against you, and it was important to remain calm and keep aware of 
what was going on around him and be ready for any opportunity to escape. 
And if you didn't thrash about when they tried to hurt you then they'd 
get bored and stop trying to provoke an interesting reaction from you and 
maybe he wouldn't get more scars, especially not on the face because he'd 
been damn lucky last time not to lose an eye.
     TJ sat watching and listening to what the nightsiders said, carefully 
filing away everything for future reference. It didn't surprise him that 
there were demonic socks lurking about. Anybody who paid any attention to 
the stuff that the superheroes got involved in would realise that there 
were stranger things going on all the time. And for his part, TJ would be 
hard pressed to disbelieve anything bad after he had found out the hard 
way that his country was still maintaining concentration camps.
     Not that he would accept uncritically any sort of wild story, oh no 
no no. TJ paid attention to everything and then subjected these details 
to keen logical scrutiny. One could not, for example, take at face value 
both the allegation that the Apollo moon landings were faked and the 
assertion that the US government had a space program based on flying 
saucer technology confiscated from the Nazis. They were more or less 
mutually contradictory, yes? Only by applying the tools of common sense 
could you discern the truth. TJ had years ago settled on the logical 
tool of trying to determine which possibility gave the nastiest outcome.
     And so TJ sat watching and listening. He was briefly disturbed by 
Damian's recitation of what had happened in the camp, but TJ quickly 
realised that that was a trick to put a prisoner off balance. The sock 
overplayed its hand, however, when it made the obvious lie of saying that 
TJ was broken. Yeah, right. TJ had learnt to be strong and self reliant 
during that time. You had to be, to survive. He wasn't broken.
     Not broken, damn it!
     ... not broken ...
 
Tomorrow: Back to Martin, I guess.
 
The Daily Super Short-Short Story series and the wondersocks created by 
Arthur Spitzer, and used with belated permission.
 
-----
Saxon Brenton    University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
     saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au 
The Eyrie Archives of Russ Allbery which collect the online superhero 
fiction of the rec.arts.comics.creative newsgroup can be found at:
     http://archives.eyrie.org/racc/



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