Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Transcriber, Backwards

More backwards fun, following on the heels of A Particular Sunset, Backwards from two weeks ago. Perhaps I should institute Backwards Wednesday as a regular feature.

So again I’ve taken a small work and reversed the sentence order. This time it’s Transcriber, another work from Thinly Sliced Raw Fish.  To clarify, I’m not just picking a story at random and saying, voila!  I’ve gone through a bunch of them that don’t make sense in reverse.

So, here’s the new “backwards” story:

Through the open window a jeep backfiring, scents of sea water, pork roasting in a pit. He laughs. Her piano player’s fingers—they’d have to be bent, broken, rendered unusable. He is the end. The man from the sea. He imagined her hands of concrete bone moving across pages, leaving ink trails. Smooth skin the color of wet sand. Young, she could be his daughter. The colonel sees her in the chair, sitting erect, staring straight ahead. A man emerges from the sea. She wrote by hand their book of revolution.

Here’s the original, in case you didn’t click the link:

She wrote by hand their book of revolution. A man emerges from the sea. The colonel sees her in the chair, sitting erect, staring straight ahead. Smooth skin the color of wet sand. Young, she could be his daughter. He imagined her hands of concrete bone moving across pages, leaving ink trails. The man from the sea. He is the end. Her piano player’s fingers—they’d have to be bent, broken, rendered unusable. He laughs. Through the open window a jeep backfiring, scents of sea water, pork roasting in a pit.

(One thing I did notice doing this is that I made an error posting this work originally. The words in italics were supposed to be that way in the original version but weren’t. I’ve changed them at the site and used the intended italics for this experiment.)

2 comments:

  1. I like these backwards story. I think I may have said this the last time you did this but I like how easily the meaning of something can change by telling it differently. I've noticed this doesn't work with dialogue-driven stories, however ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. This one works really well backwards, I think because that first / last line about the jeep backfiring provides a great starting image. And a nice piece whichever way round.

    ReplyDelete