the strongest force in nature
"The Strongest Force in Nature," September 8, 2022 (#251)
title from "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant (1892)
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis (1983)
Pale Kings and Princes by Robert B. Parker (1987)
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (2011)
King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov (1928)
last line from For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
The Strongest Force in Nature
If you speak to me like that again, you will regret
no gentle breezes sighing through leaves. The only sounds
whose fallout extended from the corridors of power
experienced something that she had never expected, something
biting on it the way a person bites on the eraser end of a pencil
along the edge of the police line. The EMT's had backed away from the
letters and silently disappeared. The inventor continued to talk,
which was something no one in the family was even close to,
but attention was centered on that table, and the spectators
have got to do her damage. I don't want to leave her to deal with
a bottle of prescription pills and to open the childproof cap
as an irregular series of such trifles: the picture composed of
not the same attitude. But I think any one doing it will be.
4-21-21
9-7-22
9-8-22
9-7-22
Spencer (2021)