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A quote: “The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.” ~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
I’ll start with a story …
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“Carpentry?”
“No.”
“Farming?”
“No.”
“Hunting?”
“God, no.”
He looked up from his list, pale eyes hooded by bushy grey brows. She fidgeted under the cool, hard regard.
He glanced down “Any experience with fibers or cloth? Spinning, weaving, sewing?”
“No.” She sniffed, “I am a tenured professor in Gender & Women Studies and …”
“WAS”, he interrupted, “In case you haven’t noticed, the majority of your students, colleagues, and fellow citizens are gone. We’re starting from scratch. What can you do?”
“Um.”
He scribbled on the page, handed it to her, gesturing toward the door.
“Report to Stevens, latrine duty.”
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Now it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
GWB says: That doll is damn creepy. I keep expecting it to suddenly look at me.
And your story is a beautiful dream. Work camps for the grifters. I wonder how green our sewage systems could become with enough manual labor for them?
Navig8r says: For several seasons it dangled from a tree, part of a macabre trailside display. The back story – a Halloween prankster? Warped satanist(s)? Drug and human smugglers marking their turf?
Perhaps savoring the sense of the unexpected and mysterious, perhaps cautious of triggering a dangerous personality or cult or worse, passing hikers left it undisturbed.
The desert sun had rotted the lashings that held it to the tree and not been kind to the doll either. Flash floods had moved it along the dry canyon bottom.
So, he wondered, what was that black disk now showing in the chest cavity?
(elements of a true story here)
Cameron says: I was about ready to give up for the day when I saw the ruins. Even now, the area was still devoid of life except for a few animals. I swept at a patch of dirt and found what I was looking for. All these years later, it was still easy to identify.
Three weeks later, a young lady who had escaped a war torn nation with her family received an anonymous package as she was getting ready to go to college. She opened it and gasped in amazement as the doll she had dropped years ago was staring back at her.
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