This post is part of the May 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Dialogue Only” with a secondary prompt of “Wrong Place, Right Time.”
“So tell me, Cummings, how’s it feel to be in the pocket of the system, doing its dirty work? You know, I’m actually glad you turned up tonight. As Œ says, the true measure of any movement is in the enemies it makes. In you, we’ve got someone who stands for a thoroughly corrupt and rotten plutocracy, making our ideals stand out in stronger relief, and someone who’s so wretchedly incompetent that victory is less a question of why than of when.”
“You trying to goad me into a fight, Strasser? I think you’ve got me beaten there with those Christmas hams you call fists. It’s just like your so-called ‘movement’—violence and intimidation and thuggery dressed up with a few ten-dollar words.”
“You’re one to talk about ten-dollar words,” he grinned. “That’s all you write for the Guardian after all. Bankrupt ideas and lazy support for oppression and inequity wrapped up in some vocabulary words with a light glaze of sarcasm.”
“You’d rather I was breaking and entering? Hacking and stealing? Framing and lying?”
“At least then I’d know you were serious about what you believed in.”
“I don’t believe in anything! It’s all just rhetoric people use as an excuse to do what they please. Ideology and politics—of any kind—are poison, and just because you drank that particular kool-aid that doesn’t make it any less toxic!”
“Ooh, got you a little riled up there, have I? Easy, tiger. You know as well as I do that saying you don’t have any politics is just a chickenshit way of saying you don’t have the balls to fess up to the politics you’ve had all along. If you don’t believe in anything, why were you out with that camera and your little brute squad trying to catch the Nothing doing whatever you think we were doing?”
“Because you’ve been making a fool of me pretty much constantly ever since you sprayed that first bit of terrible graffiti on campus.”
“As if you need help to make a fool of yourself. Did it ever occur to you that we were screwing with you not out of any grudge but because you’re an easy target? You’re a representative of everything that campus culture has degenerated into, Eric Cummings: a lazy self-centered slacker who stands by a system built on repression and misery because it’s easy.”
“I don’t think tracking you and your cronies is something a slacker would do. I’ve got a nice big stack of unfinished video games at home and an even bigger stack of books I could finish writing. Hell, if I had a big stack of nails to pound through my forehead it would be more pleasant that being within a 50-yard radius of you and yours.”
“That’s the typical reactionary mindset. You’re trying to swat away the forces of change so you can go back to your little cocoon of brain-rotting, mind-numbing opiates and keep implicitly condoning and colluding with the abuses of the edifice that makes it possible. But the thing you and Mayfield and those stooges in your cell don’t want to face is that the Nothing is lightning in a bottle. Once it’s out, there’s no putting it back.”
Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
pushingfordream
articshark
pyrosama
Sudo_One
Nissie
Angyl78
Lady Cat
U2Girl
MsLaylaCakes
SuzanneSeese
LanaK
May 5, 2013 at 7:39 pm
This sounds like an excerpt from some modern day, hard-hitting noir novel. Love it!
May 8, 2013 at 6:02 pm
Thank you! That’s more or less exactly what it’s supposed to be 🙂
May 8, 2013 at 3:24 pm
I thought it sounded all dystopian and from an alternate/parallel world-ish.
May 8, 2013 at 6:04 pm
It’s funny how stripping away the dialogue tags can change the nature of a text, isn’t it? This is supposed to be a contemporary piece but I can totally see where you’re coming from with the parallel dystopian angle.
May 8, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Nice job!
Sorry I missed my turn, but this is very inspirational.
May 8, 2013 at 6:05 pm
Well if you want to go now, just post in the thread! I’ll rejigger the queue 🙂 I’m curious how you found it inspirational, since rereading it made me think it was too depressing 🙂
May 9, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Even without the dialogue tags I can almost picture these two characters! This was great!
May 14, 2013 at 1:55 am
I love how different the voices of the two characters are. No dialogue tag sneeded to tell them apart. Reminds me of the movie Brick, so definitely noir 🙂
May 14, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Oh I like this. Good job with the prompt.