A man in the training station waiting room blows his nose with a handkerchief. He's trying to think of the name of the film starring Jim Carey in which everything is artificial. I want to say The Truman Show. The man he's speaking to says he doesn't think it's the sort of film he'd watch. Maybe it's a trick question because every film is artificial. He uses the word salubrious to describe Oxford Station. I have to look the word up. I've never been so I'm looking forward to a fully salubrious experience. If I ever used that word in a conversation, I think I would take my time over it. Spend at least three times longer saying the word salubrious than I would another word of the same length. Sal-uuuuu-bri-ooous. It seems correct to say it like that. Like saying Wales in a Welsh accent. Way-ells. Or Newcastle with the castle spoken quickly and given much more emphasis than a southerner would give it: new-CASTLE. A woman is warming her face in the rising sun. She faces east. I work out that the train will arrive from the other direction because I'm catching an eastbound train. Oxford will be our vicar who always faces west as his passengers/parishioners all face east. A church congregation always faces a rising sun. Cloisters to their left/north, main entrance to their right (south). When I'm working out my compass points, I always imagine myself in a church. I've boarded the train. The lady sat across from me is reading What a Hazard a Letter is by Caroline Atkins. She's underlining things. I Google the book. The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem. My copy of her complete works spans 770 pages. The book is over two inches thick and yet there are only two known photographs of the great American poet. I often wonder how many people got to see Dickinson smile.
Samsa was now a human. He’d recently become a human after his architect decided to put a human heart in him and give him feelings. The five litres of blood that now pumped around his body warmed him up. It made for incredible nose bleeds, spasms, cramps and bruising, to name o nly a small fraction of the symptoms, but his architect assured him that it would all be worth it and that he'd feel normal very soon. He didn't know what normal was, but he knew it wasn't puking and shitting and bleeding all over the place for the first two months and then just feeling terrible for several weeks after that. Human life is agony, he thought, but he trusted the process. One day, a little over twelve weeks after the operation, he woke up from his first good night's sleep and was able to open the curtains without the light splitting his skull in two. Samsa had known Shabeezi before she became a human woman. All they had done was fight. Samsa especially liked doing flying
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