Saturday, October 25, 2008

Un Soir dans Paris VI

This is an insert that will eventually go between parts II and III. When I'm done with the whole thing, I'll fix the numbers and probably combine it into one long story on another page. Also, I've posted this picture before, but I just recently found a photoshop tutorial for making a good grunge photograph. I like how this came out.

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Cold was fluorescent.

Cold kept things slow and bright; cold left nothing unexposed. Cold examined everything, every opportunity you missed and every mistake you made, but more than that cold was synonymous with the dirty kind of light that illuminated everything, that bounced off grimy cement walls and oily snow and damp asphalt and blinded everyone. Cold had good intentions, probably, but in the end cold didn't really solve problems. It just provided the light people needed to get things figured out.

On this evening, Nicolas had an idea that changed everything, and he had it in a cold, bright library under the streets of Paris.

Nicolas was a poet by birth and a scientist by profession but a worker by every other standard that anyone cared to name. He wanted change and was one of the few people in Paris working for it, and he was doing it the only way he knew how: science.

Things were not going well. He had energy and stamina but no ideas, which were the things that really mattered. He was willing to be meticulous and careful but didn't know what he had to be meticulous and careful about, at least until this night when he had his idea.

Nicolas had a theory. He thought people fought because it was hot; people fought because it has hot and they were sweating and it only seemed natural to be fighting when it was this hot. So he had an idea to change the heat and the fighting all at once, an idea that would make people smile again, an idea that would save the life of a stranger he had never met and would never meet, an idea that would shed light on a problem enough to solve it.

Nicolas would make it snow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tell Nicolas that we're all 99 degrees fahrenheit on the inside, so we'll never cool down.

Anonymous said...

Sig figs, Jesse, sig figs.

Anonymous said...

I really like that spelling of Nicolas without the h like in Nicholas.