PATTERN
The fluent ninety seconds
What it is
When the year with Greg comes up, a sanded ninety-second version arrives on its own, true in every detail, slightly funny in the middle, ending with these things happen.
How it affects your life
You have delivered it to Danny's mother, to two sets of friends, to a mortgage broker, and now to a stranger at a barbecue, smoothly, in a garden, holding a beer, and nobody notices anything at all. The cost is that after four years you have started believing the sanded one in daylight, and the un-sanded one only turns up at three in the morning and in drawers.
You no longer know what it sounds like, and you think you would produce the ninety seconds automatically before you had decided anything.
Evidence
Latest 5 of 8
“Four people, four years, one story, and I told it so well that none of them ever asked a second question.”
Reinforced later
Read the entry →“She knew Greg left and the business had a bad year, which is the ninety-second version, which I have apparently been running on my own family.”
Reinforced later
Read the entry →“I would have to start by describing that year to somebody, out loud, in order, as a thing that happened to me rather than as the ninety-second version.”
Reinforced later
Read the entry →“I have not had the ninety-second version challenged by anybody in four years because I have only ever told it to people who had no reason to push.”
Reinforced later
Read the entry →“So there is exactly one person who got the unsanded version, and she got it by accident, by ringing at the wrong moment.”
Reinforced later
Read the entry →
These do nothing here. On your own map this card is yours to reword, hide or delete, and every quote opens the entry it came from.