\tMarcus went blind on Wednesday. Deaf on Thursday. Friday he lost the ability to taste. Saturday, scents no longer appealed, and Sunday, he could no longer feel even the breath of the wind. Monday, they all came back.<\/p>\n
\tHe still worked the full forty hour week, of course. Hardest on Monday and Tuesday, when he could see. Memorize everything he could before Tuesday midnight, and then use Braille the rest of the week, typing away in blissful silence until Monday rolled around. <\/p>\n
\tThursday and Friday, he was the most productive person in the office. It’s amazing how much you can get done without even the possibility of being distracted.<\/p>\n
\tThere were drawbacks, of course. His wife cheated on him, twice a week. Thursday and Friday, between noon and two. Sunday he had to lay in bed, eating nothing. Too much risk otherwise.<\/p>\n
\tIt also meant he could never see his children play sports as they grew up, or spend time with them on the weekend. Marcus cried over that, when he thought no one was looking. <\/p>\n
\tSomeday, he was sure he’d find out what the affliction of his meant. Doctors certainly didn’t know, they just waved their hands. Oh, they’d been helpful at first, trying every cure and treatment they could conceive. But if you heard of a product with a 99% success rate, well, Marcus was that 1%. Everything failed on him. So he accepted life and moved on. Mostly.<\/p>\n
\tIt was Wednesday again. Blindness had struck, as it always did, at midnight Tuesday night. Today though, he hadn’t gone into work. Marcus wanted to experiment. So he shot himself. Dead, of course. No reason to do things poorly. As for what he found, well, he had a hard time telling anyone. But the corpse did have a smile on its face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marcus went blind on Wednesday. Deaf on Thursday. Friday he lost the ability to taste. Saturday, scents no longer appealed, and Sunday, he could no longer feel even the breath of the wind. Monday, they all came back. He still worked the full forty hour week, of course. Hardest on Monday and Tuesday, when he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[36,4],"tags":[21,22],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pRIK4-7o","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":173,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=173","url_meta":{"origin":458,"position":0},"title":"Writer's Blog Carnival, Part #2","date":"May 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"So, this got a decent amount of feedback and comments, so I'm going ahead with it. I will be posting an open collector for the posts Sunday night or Monday morning, and closing it Tuesday night at midnight. Wednesday morning, I'll post the links to all of the submitted entries.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flash Fiction"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":164,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=164","url_meta":{"origin":458,"position":1},"title":"Writer's Blog Carnival","date":"May 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Update: How does Wednesday sound for Blog Carnival day? And I'd like to get theme suggestions in today, so I can put a poll up for the next carnival (the week after next Wednesday). This is an idea that sprung to mind this afternoon, and was fleshed out by chatting\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flash Fiction"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":126,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=126","url_meta":{"origin":458,"position":2},"title":"In The Fields","date":"April 30, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"A short piece written this morning for Friday Flash. The old man and his wife sat around the dinner table, talking quietly. It was a scene they had repeated day after day, month after month, year after year. They had lived in this house for almost their entire lives, farming\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flash Fiction"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":569,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=569","url_meta":{"origin":458,"position":3},"title":"Tarranau Reviewed","date":"November 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I woke up to a wonderful gift this Friday morning - A long review of Tarranau by Alex Laybourne. Here's how it opens... Epic Fantasy is not normally a genre I read, but ever since I have started becoming serious about my writing, I have promised myself to expand my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Tarranau"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":537,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=537","url_meta":{"origin":458,"position":4},"title":"Coupons and Double Features","date":"July 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"In addition to my normally scheduled post today, I have a little gift for you readers. If you go to Smashwords\u00a0and enter coupon code\u00a0LV72P, you'll get Tarranau for 40% off. AND L.M. Stull is making this deal\u00a0even more enticing --->\u00a0Visit her blog for details on how you can snag an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flash Fiction"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":27,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=27","url_meta":{"origin":458,"position":5},"title":"Source of the Delay","date":"January 21, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"So, it's been a little quite around here recently. There's unfortunately been a good reason for that, which is while the layout and all internal structure of the book is complete, I've been having a pretty hard time finding a cover artist who I like, and who fits within the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Tarranau"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}