“Counting today, how many stories have there been?”
The monk looked up wearily. “I really don’t know, quite a few. All I know is, one is needed every day. It’s the curse, you know.”
The reporter looked skeptical. “You’re saying you need to write a story every day, or something bad will happen?”
“Something bad has happened, and not just once. It’s very specific. The story has to be exactly two hundred words long, no more, no less. If it doesn’t show up in the book, then the demon will come. And when she comes, there is tragedy.”
“Why two hundred words.”
“Look, I didn’t write the rules, I just live by them.”
“How do they decide who writes the stories?”
“Well, everyone used to take turns, because the stress, the responsibility, can eat away at you. But it takes a very specific talent. So now, only one writes. These days that’s me. That is, until I fail.”
“Fail?”
“You can only do this for so long. One day I just won’t be able to take it any more. Like what happened to Brother Frederick.” he said with a shudder.
“What happened to brother Frederick?”
“One day he counted wrong.”
Of course, as a geek, the first thing I did after reading the story was to paste it into a shell where I had typed “wc” first.
Nice.
Hmm. I hope the demon uses http://wordcount2.com rather than http://wordcounttool.com 😉
Thanks Juan. Yes, that’s it exactly. She’s a UNIX demon. 🙂
Ha! The UNIX demons always seemed more masculine to me. (wc would have been my word counter of choice but I only have browser access at the moment.)
4 8 15 16 23 42
I prefer this sequence: 14 18 23 28 34 42 🙂
Haha, I wish I had figured out the last one without looking it up. Damn you, single-focused mind!