Turgenev the Tables

So, here I am, 15,000 or so words into NaNoWriMo when an old romance between myself and a certain Russian author of the 19th century (who happens to be the critical whipping boy of literature professors everywhere, but who has securely won this author's heart) is suddenly rekindled. Before my steadily flowing narrative about a man and a hill - a sickly but determined love-child of Kafka and the Diamond Sutra - knew what hit it, I was leaping up the stairs to my bookshelf to draw, nay, to embrace, my volume of Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man.

By way of answer to the question posed by that admirable work, I resolved then and there to write my own work in the same format, illuminating the opposite reaches of the heart than were explored by Turgenev with his superfluous man. So, dear readers, I give you:

Diary of a Mellifluous Man

August 21

Today the doctor told me, “You're dying.” Feeling rather exposed at this revelation, I retorted, “Well - so are you.” Then he told me that he was giving me two weeks to live. I told him that if the situation were reversed, I would have been more charitable. We shook hands. Very grim business. His solemnity was infectious. I couldn't help but imitate his manner. For anyone looking on it may well have seemed that I was consoling him. A very courteous affair.

The stale light of the office was reflected in his shoes. It's a peculiar thing to stare at a man's shoes, but as a dying man is presumably allowed some extra latitude, I excused myself from his parting words and stared at them. They were solemn, too. Maybe they gave the doctor my two weeks for him to give me. The brown leather was very clean. Disarmingly clean. There's something about excessive cleanliness that is disturbing – there's a touch of malice in it. My own shoes are shot to hell, and I was relieved at that moment to be in them, whether they belonged to a dying man or not.