Haruki Murakami: The Second Bakery Attack I think this a very impressive piece of writing. It is 10 pages long. synopsis: A young couple decides to rob a bakery to lift a curse from the first bakery attack years ago which one of them perpetrated. excerpt: "But even so, we had this feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. And somehow, this mistake has just stayed there, unresolved, casting a dark shadow on our lives. That's why I used the word 'curse.' It's true. It was like a curse." "Do you think you still have it?" I took the six pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of a bracelet. "Who knows? I don't know. I bet the world is full of curses. It's hard to tell which curse makes any one thing go wrong." "That's not true." She looked right at me. "You can tell, if you think about it. And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it'll stick with you like a toothache. It'll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too." "You?" "Well, I'm your best friend now, aren't I? Why do you think we're both so hungry? I never, ever, once in my life felt a hunger like this until I married you. Don't you think it's abnormal? Your curse is working on me, too." I nodded. Then I broke up the ring of pull-tabs and put them back in the ashtray. I didn't know if she was right, but I did feel she was onto something. The feeling of starvation was back, stronger than ever, and it was giving me a deep headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to the core of my head by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds of complicated machinery. I took another look at my undersea volcano. The water was clearer than before--much clearer. Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely nothing to support it. I could see every little pebble on the bottom. All I had to do was reach out and touch them. "We've only been living together for two weeks," she said, "but all this time I've been feeling some kind of weird presence." She looked directly into my eyes and brought her hands together on the tabletop, her fingers interlocking. "Of course, I didn't know it was a curse until now. This explains everything. You're under a curse." http://ctina.com/bakeryattack.html How did you take the story? Was it good? Why? Or bad? Why? Let us see if anything will come out of this...
