IC Quotes

[Nicolai]

ITT: long sentences

"Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the
hillside's van's ramp as a madly squeaking brass-colored blur, a
snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded to it and out front skimming the
ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of grass it's mowing, moving
terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps
in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a
skier's pure speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair
slaloms, the dim glittered movements of arrangement for reception deep
within the curbside van way at the bottom of the steep grade, the engineer
arching his neck way out to capture sun on the scarred hollows under his
jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator clipped by a squeaking rubberized
wheel at an angle and sent clattering off down the hillside, spraying
possessions, the homeless shoe to which it had been roped skittering empty
behind it and the cart's now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the
air in front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and
worldly goods, the calculating cart whumping into the side of the hunched
man vomiting and flipping over and bouncing several times and the vomiting
man rolling and yelping, vulgarities echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be
seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow with a start and starting
to turn and look above and behind him up at the ridge just as the speeding
wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair's shovel scoops
the engineer and his NASA blanket and shirt and book up and runs over the
glasses and bottle of M. Fizzy with one wheel and bears the engineer in the
scoop up and away and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the
bottom, a van whose own angled ramp now slides out like a tongue or
Autoteller's transaction-receipt, the NASA blanket blowing away from the
scooped engineer's flailing form about halfway down and suddenly aloft in a
hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St. traffic by the keen
November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and
coming back down and up again, the snatched engineer in the chair's scoop
appearing to the hillside's roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle
of bare limbs and strangely wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out
Below, all as the modified chair squeaks frantically straight down the
hillside's most efficient downward line toward the van with the ramp now
idling in gear, its pipe's exhaust beating the street in high-rpm idle, the
NASA blanket twisting co-ruscant in the air high above the street, and the
shriek-roused figures on the hillside lying there still bent in and barely
moving, stiff with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the
unwell man who'd been hit by the dislodged cart, who's rolled to a stop and
is thrashing, holding the parts that were hit."
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