Amanuensis - The Entries

n.
One who copies or writes from the dictation of another.



Amanuensis

I wish I had amanuensis when i have to write research papers for school so that I do not have to write or type anything.

-Nawaf Mutair




AND THE WINNING ENTRY IS.....

Amanuensis

I was out for my evening constitutional last night, in a shady end of town, when I came across a man lying in a pool of blood under the glow of a broken streetlight.  Just a single bare bulb flickered across the grisly scene.  At first I thought he was a gonner but then I heard him moan, and when I leaned in to him he whispered, "Word of the Week...".  His breath rattled and then again, more faintly, "Word of the Week."
I instantly knew what must be done.  I leaned still closer, and he whispered a short tale in my ear.  Then he smiled a faint smile, and breathed "Just make sure my story is told."  I nodded, peace came to his tortured eyes, and he expired.
I raced to call the cops, and then returned to the scene of the crime.  As you might expect, the remaining bulb was darkened, the body was gone, and the ground was clean and dry.  No trace of the corpse remained, save a battered fedora leaning against the lamp-post.  A jauny petunia was stuck in the hat band.
"This could be the start of some tale," I thought to myself.  "A hell of a lot more interesting than the story he told me."  But a promise is a promise; I have written down his tale as best I remember it, and it is attached.
Have a good week.
Your pal,
Ken      

Amanuensis

    by ‘Anonymous’

As so often they do, the Circulation staff were lolling about in the office bitching about how slack all the student assistants had become.

Somewhere in the depths of this conversation Nancy concluded that rather than listening to others bitching about the problem, she really ought to do something about it.  Even worse, she decided that what needed to be done was the setting of a good example.  A mistake Sue would not have made.

At the same time, as it happened, two bookworms met at a bar near the intersection of the spine and the middle pages of PR 3348 C65 M45 1985.

Boris and Dieter, two of a number of Trogium pulsarium working their way through the second-floor collection, met there at the bar most afternoons after work.  Dieter usually stopped by for a quick beer; although his wife nagged him to come straight home, secretly she was just thankful that he was nothing like his wastrel friend Boris, who stayed late at the bar every night and came home loaded, and who scarcely noticed that his wife had taken up with her personal trainer and that his oldest daughter had fallen in with a rough crowd and was peddling dope out by the CIP.

Unlike his more passive friend, Boris was the life of the bar.  He was always surrounded by barflies, who stood him rounds and laughed at his jokes, and who admired the tales he told and the poems he so easily created.  As he worked his way through the collection Boris was always on the look-out for quotations or unusual words he could use to impress his drinking buddies.  He digested new material quickly, and delivered his best lines with the skill of the practiced tavern raconteur.  Though Boris found Dieter a bit dull, his friend was a steady after-work companion and useful sounding-board for the bon mots Boris later deployed for the entertainment of his more serious drinking buddies.

So it was no surprise to Dieter when, just as he finished his draft and got up from his stool, Boris leaned back and intoned,  

The rest of bugmanity,

That ilk and that tribe,

Call the dictation taker

The simple word, ‘scribe’.

But not us, their betters!

‘mong us there’s consensus

That the one word to use

Is amanuensis.

The last line was accompanied by a grand flourish of Boris’s arm and hand, which Dieter interpreted as his dismissal; the family man ducked out to worm his way homeward.

At that very moment Nancy, whose idea of a good example, unaccountably, is shelf-reading, had just worked her way to the letter and number combination PR 3348 C65 M45 1985.

Now, because this is a fable there will be a moral to the story, but that moral is decidedly not that this thing we call ‘setting a good example’ lies very close to the heart of its near-relative, ‘being a terrible warning’.   Still, inevitably, Nancy’s gaze somehow slipped upwards from the call number to the spine title of the book, and with a start of recognition and fond memory she was moved to wonder whether she would still find this as excellent a work of literature as she remembered from the first dozen or so times she had read it.  And whether a quick peek inside might be rewarded by a warming revisit with some of her favourite naughty bits.

A startled Boris felt the sturdy tome shift beneath his many feet, and was stunned when the book was opened to the very page where he had been basking in the self-induced glow of his latest literary triumph.  Too far from the spine or any hole to scramble away back, he froze as Nancy’s fierce gaze pierced his compound eyes.

“Shit,” Boris thought. “Going to have to talk myself out of this one.”

Nancy took the lead instead.  “Pick a number between one and seven”, she offered.

“Oh good,” Boris thought.  “She just want to…Okay, I’ll play her silly game.”

“Three?” he offered.

“Not today,” said Nancy, and with a wicked smile she slammed the book shut on poor Boris.

The moral of the story is thus: The end of the other end of the tail is the end of the tale.

- Ken Clare