When we left our hero last time:

“Halycon Sage forgot the button and went back to his daydreaming. He had been wondering lately if he should begin another minimalist novel.”

Here is what he wrote:

Stranger

by Halycon Sage

Every time you think life can’t get any stranger, it does. The strangeness is squared, cubed. What the heck?

The End

Ruby gave him a withering look, and the novel was deposited in the wastebasket. Feeling a little shame-faced, he secretly fished it out later and re-read it. Was it really that bad? Was it any worse than his other novels through which, as founder of the post-modernist minimalist neo-symbolist pseudo-realist school of literature, he had found worldwide acclaim? Perhaps he had lost his touch, or perhaps Ruby’s standards for him had been raised by his actual completion of his autobiography.

There is one more episode to relate in connection with the post-modernist minimalist neo-symbolist pseudo-realist metaphysical novel Stranger. A couple of people who longed for the old world and were inspired to bring it back had begun a version of the ‘talk show’. One of their first guests was Halycon Sage, who was interviewed in front of a small audience at the local library, without benefit of a microphone, since such no longer existed.

“So, Mr. Sage, is your new novel about an exciting, change-producing stranger; a mysterious and frightening stranger; an intriguing, romantic stranger?”

“No,” said Halycon Sage.