Literary Genre Translations.
BY Cirocco Dunlap
-Original Text-
“I ate a sandwich and looked out the window.”
-Sci-Fi-
“I placed the allotted nutrition capsules on my tongue bed and looked to the Nahin VI-8373 space podhole.”
-Fantasy-
“My dragon, Ralfarus, and I, Genflowfla’ii, choked down the hardened cheese curd and two-part-moons-old bread as we peered out of the meeting cavern.”
-19th-Century British Romance-
“Being but a governess with no prospects but a fierce wit and a quick temper which is out of mode, I nibbled a soda biscuit and looked off into the glade, awaiting my dear friend—whom I surely could not come to love—Mr. Wadswortherton.”
-Young Adult-
“I gagged on rancid human food and instead drank the gushing blood of a rat as my night-kind are wont to do with our pointed toothbones. I gazed longingly out of my coffin into the human world where my true lovemate lived (how mortal!) and breathed (MORTALER YET!). The Lofty Council would never allow our soul union.”
-Choose Your Own Adventure-
“You eat a sandwich. You are then compelled to do something so you:
- LOOK OUT THE WINDOW AND REFLECT (Turn to Page 65).
- WALK OUTSIDE INTO A DARK CAVE WITH PIRHANAS AND SNAKES (Turn to Page 27).
- DRINK FROM A BOTTLE MARKED POISON AND TAKE A NAP (Turn to Page 27)."
-Erotica-
“I nakedly slurped sauerkraut off my engorged bratwurst and looked through the peephole for the endowed plumber.”
-Drama-
RICH: Thanks for the sandwich, Dad. Don’t think it makes up for all the boozing and you walking out on me and Mom and Baby Boon and Old Lady Glipper and all the beatings with the belt and the stick and the rusty rake and the vacuum cleaner and the Swiffer and the hourglass and the brass pocket watch. [Rich looks out the broken window.]
-Beat-
“i me you we he she ate a yum yum grubemups smorgasbording its like breathing take a man out of fish you can fish we all are fish where’s that fish the man looks at us like fish through his crystal window and we we we we we weeeeeeee (!) look back”
-Poetry-
There was nary a doubt,
For my sandwich I’d shout,
If it took its own route
Through the glass I looked out.
-Russian Classic-
I, Shanvokovic, steadily finished my becoldened soup made by Gregorinoviczh as if the weight on my conscience weren’t pressing deep down into my darkening soul. I looked out the architect’s airhole into the bleak grey of the day – grey, indeed, as my morality – as I waited for the sweet nightshade to seep into my bloodstream and for Borsha to find my explanatory farewell tome.
-Magic Realism-
I ate a sandwich and flew into the air vent.
