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Learning From History (Short Story Competition Entry)

LEARNING FROM HISTORY BY EDMINZODO

John Smith, the sort of man that epitomised and averaged his sex as a whole, was drunk. Twenty-one years old, a bottle of vodka with a half-unscrewed lid on the floor by the sofa he was sprawled across, a book of poetry resting weakly in one clammy palm. He was kidding himself into thinking that he was actually reading it, absorbing it and taking in the information he should have remembered a month ago.
He had a fantastic imagination, only accentuated in his drunken state. His shaky gaze moved slowly across the ceiling, down the peeling wallpaper to the bookshelf.
‘Lucky you,’ he slurred, pointing at a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev. ‘Lucky, lucky you.’
‘Why?’ asked Mr Gorbachev, running one hand over his port-wine birth mark, adjusting his tie with the other.
‘People remember you.’
‘Do you really think that’s everything?’ chuckled Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, his religious policy a nutter failure, or so John vaguely remembered from a module he’d taken a while back.
‘No one’ll remember me.’
‘Do something about it then,’ sneered the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses II, living up to his name as Ozymandias (you know ‘look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’, or so proclaimed Percy Bysshe Shelley). ‘Build a massive temple or something, bruv. Oh, wait. You can’t. Lol.’
‘Ignore him,’ sighed Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. ‘It is my belief that with faith, discipline ands elfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ moaned John. ‘All of you. I’m going to have a boring life, working in an office or something, paying off my student loan. Even if it’s going all right with my girlfriend at the moment, it’s going to get boring. We’ll probably get married, end up hating each other, and the kids. I’ll have a stupidly high mortgage on a three bedroom terrace and probably a Ford Focus as well.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ snapped Thomas Hardy, as John looked down at the poetry book once more. ‘Get off your backside and sober up. Do something. Come on, man.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course,’ said Ramesses, with a grin. ‘I manipulated my legacy. You can manipulate your future.’
‘Just don’t be remembered for having a massive jaw,’ grumbled Charles V. ‘No one remembers me for being the first King of Spain, do they?’
‘You all mean it? Seriously?’ asked John, whose head was spinning more and more by the second.
‘Duh,’ said Gorbachev. ‘Come on, fam, just be proactive. Aim high. The sky’s your limit.’
It occurred to John that he was suddenly grateful for the stack of four history books he had lying on the shelf by the TV. He chucked the Hardy anthology at the rest. It missed and hit the wall. John instead decided to curl up in a ball with a blanket over him, waiting for the hangover to pass.
But he’d finally learned his lesson.
The world’s your oyster.
It's up to you to make it a pearl.
(edited 7 years ago)
For some reason my post lost all of the spaces between the lines?
(edited 7 years ago)
Any opinions on my writing? :s-smilie:

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Original post by Edminzodo
Any opinions on my writing? :s-smilie:

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I liked the idea - very interesting.

Lots of direct speech too, which made it even better.

Not sure about this, though. "
His shaky gaze moved slowly across the ceiling"
Original post by ZiggyStarDust_
I liked the idea - very interesting.

Lots of direct speech too, which made it even better.

Not sure about this, though. "
His shaky gaze moved slowly across the ceiling"


Thank you very much! And yeah, that sentence was a bit dodgy . . . I might change it!

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Any more reviews or opinions, guys?

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