The man pushed the piece of notebook paper across the desk. “Can she be built?”
I studied it. A kid’s pencil drawing of a circle bisected by a rectangle.
“You are best architect in Montreal, yes?” he said, his accent thick.
I gave my most gallic shrug. “Perhaps.”
“And yet you have no French?”
“My parents were from Toronto.”
He might have been smiling or frowning beneath the mustache. “I ask again. Can she be built?”
I pretended to study the drawing. “How large?”
“Oh, large. Twenty or thirty.”
“Feet?”
He scowled. “Meters. My vision is not a small one.”
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That’s a big croque monsieur stand
Nice story! Dream big and make it happen!
And it’s been standing since…
J.,
A visionary indeed! Maybe he’s a meter ahead of his time . . . .
pax,
dora
Nothing like thinking big.
Yep, if something is worth doing it may as well be the biggest and the best.
I love the French/English metric/imperial interplay.
Dear Josh,
Apparently it could be built. Well penned.
Shalom,
Rochelle
Just because it can be built doesn’t mean it should be!
From wee little dreams come grand schemes… A great story.
Excellent, Josh. I like the small, telling bits of detail (eg not just ‘paper’, but ‘notebook paper’) and the deliberate slight distortion of the language (‘most gallic’ – something either is or is not gallic, so your qualifying it with ‘most’ introduces a deliberate note of falseness which suits your character so well.) Lovely, subtle writing!
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Noah built something that some said could not be built … and yet … there we are (if it happened as told, it was splendid, wasn’t it?) ;)
Someone has to dream big, or we would never have built an awful lot of things–the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center, The Ark, the Coliseum. . . .