"The Prince of Neither Here Nor There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cullen Sean)

PART 1
Awakening
Another Note from the Narrator

Ha! What a prologue! Really whets the appetite, doesn’t it? A good prologue is the soup before the meat, don’t you agree? Maybe a salad. An appetizer? You know what I mean!

Let me caution you: the next part of the story takes place several years later, fourteen years later, in fact. The jump forward in time is a common device in storytelling that allows us to skip over some, if not dreary, certainly timeconsuming and unexciting bits. I could have detailed each of the ensuing years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds in excruciating detail but what would be the point? You’d get bored by the time the child got potty-trained and we’d never get to the really interesting parts. Besides, can you imagine the size of such a tome? 17 All of Siberia would be utterly deforested just to print the first run of the book! You don’t want to be responsible for such a vast amount of soil erosion. I knew of one narrator, a friend from the Institute, who wrote the life of Winston Churchill starting with the point where his father met his mother at a card party until the great man’s death. Every single instant was chronicled! The manuscript was so large that the writer in question ended up abandoning any hope of mailing it to an editor and lived in the huge stack of paper instead. Sadly, the book burned down one night and he was forced to move into a small pamphlet. Sad. Sad but irrelevant.

So. Fourteen years have passed. The little boy is now in that dangerous and sinister place called “high school” with all its inherent perils. We join him in the most terrifying of all predicaments-the horror known as… gym class!

^17 Tome is another word for book. I could have used volume or manuscript or hardback or codex but I like tome. It comes from the ancient Mayan practice of writing on tomatoes. Unfortunately, all the great literary works of the Mayans are now just dusty ketchup.