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(Page 2 of 2) Man ... the Elements by Dan Bieger
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He re-wrote the phrase, eliminating the sin, the blue notes of his pen somehow scarring the page like a badly done tattoo.
A paragraph later he discovered an it's where there should have been an its. That was immediately followed by a their when context required a there. He found double periods where he had intended an ellipsis. The horror began to escalate with a thirty- three word sentence, the semi-colon that would have lessened the damage vanished. In his mind, unbidden, came the image of a lady of British lineage, blonde hair snipping in the breeze, index finger admonishing him, her imagined words complaining of a satanic sprinkling of apostrophes. Him, satanic!!!
That last thought sent a shudder of disgust through his frame. Goddess, this could not be. He had not thought in multiple exclamation points, had he? He hadn't! He wouldn't! But, he knew he had.
Turning the page, hoping that page 32 must be an improvement on page 31, a tear formed in his right eye. His left eye refused to acknowledge the comma in the very first sentence that was not in a list or before some dialogue or used to mark out additional information. No, that comma just sat there, inserted between two adjectives for no good reason that the man could imagine.
And so it went. Apostrophic refuges from singles' bars, dependent and independent clauses, an abhorrent dash, an un-mated hyphen, all danced on page thirty-two. On page 33, a run-on sentence began a two page paragraph. Page thirty-four developed a new category of horrors while page thirty-five seemed entirely innocent, not an extra space between sentences to be found. The momentary hope generated by page thirty-five vanished when page-thirty six began with "there are only seventeen rules in life; ..." A semi- in place of a full colon! And so it went, page after page, all the way through page forty-two, no page unblemished, no page an example of the professionalism he thought he had attained.
"At least," he thought, "I recognize what is wrong," but the rationalization provided no comfort. Slamming the binder closed, he placed it on the pier. Rising from his chair, he bent back and folded the device for carrying. Retrieving his binder, he began the journey home, the tears now dried on his cheeks. "Why is it," he asked himself, "when it comes to battle, the elements always win?"
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