200 words to do what 100 words couldn't. An extended drabble from the ‘Technology’
Challege, courtesy of the LiveJournal The Dark Is Rising drabble community.

Standard disclaimers apply. Will Stanton and The Dark Is Rising Sequence
are property of the wonderful Susan Cooper.

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Mobile
By: Gramarye

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‘Dr Stanton, I still don’t understand why you won’t get a mobile.’

‘Because I don’t need one.’  He didn’t even look up from my essay – that red pen
of his was getting quite a workout. ‘That’s the long and short of it.’

‘If you’d had one, I could’ve let you know sooner that I was going to be late today.’

Again with the not-looking-up, and again with the pat answer.  ‘It wouldn’t have
changed the fact that you were going to be late, though, would it?’

‘No, but....’ God, this was like arguing with my mother.   If he was going to be that way,
then it was time to try the argument that always worked on her.  She’d used it on me often
enough, anyway.  ‘But what if it had been really serious?  What if it had been a matter of
life and death?’

He put his pen down, and looked up – and something in the look on his face me feel like
I was shrinking, dwindling down to nothing, and now he wouldn’t look away and I wanted
to look away but he wouldn’t let me.

‘Then I would have known already,’ he said.

And I absolutely believed him.

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Gramarye
gramarye@postmaster.co.uk
http://gramarye.freehosting.net/
3 October 2004

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