It's Still Life

Beyond an Intersection Named After an English King and a Saint
Six Sentence Story: Day 8 Part 4

Enter Ozymandias

“That book doesn’t belong here—it’s a clock that strikes thirteen, a poppy in a wheat field… a perfect misfit,” says an elderly gentleman.

He stands beside us—scholarly, spectacled, with a wonderfully unkempt shock of white hair and a Gandalf-esque beard—his focus intent on the book; oddly, neither Nick nor I had noticed him until he spoke.

“My name is Ozymandias,” he laughs, his voice drifting in wafting harmonies (and Percy Shelley races through my head: “the hand that mocked the heart that fed”), and then he slowly leans toward the book, his hand grasping it—and the pages suddenly erupt from their binding like startled birds bursting from a tree.

“This is old magic, and you are playing with fire—are you old enough to play with fire?” snarls Ozymandias, and Nick, whose voice threatens to extinguish light, says, “Neither fire, stone, nor fucking book are older than I.”

And I watch the book heal itself, pages reassembling, stitching back into the binding. “Meet me at The Old Bookbinders Ale House in town tonight, seven o’clock. Buy me dinner, I’ll bring the book, we’ll talk…” —he leaves, the book shedding pages behind him like autumn’s scorn.

… continued here (click)

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Note on punctuation within dialogue: When dialogue is embedded within a larger sentence, the punctuation inside the quotation marks follows normal speech rules (question marks, exclamation marks, full stops for complete sentences), but the overall sentence structure determines whether a full stop or comma follows the closing quotation mark … ie, “Meet me at The Old Bookbinders Ale House in town tonight, seven o’clock. Buy me dinner, I’ll bring the book, we’ll talk…” —he leaves…” (This is one sentence; the embedded, mid-sentence full stops don’t break the complete sentence structure.)

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “perfect”.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.