Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Still Life
Page 68
Finn tries saying "inheritance" with a Dutch accent, then with no vowels.
Susie writes a new entry; "De Haar: A castle that performs its own irrelevance."
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The Ban of the Hundred Percent: A Parable from Amsterdam
In the year of the Tulip Eclipse, when canal fogs whispered secrets to bicycles and bureaucrats alike, the city of Amsterdam issued a decree that would ripple through sermons, graffiti, and sandwich boards. The phrase "100% Jesus" was hereby banned from all forms of communication.
The announcement came not from a pulpit or parliament, but from the Department of Semantic Hygiene; a little known office tucked between the Ministry of Urban Whimsy and the Bureau of Bicycle Justice. Their spokesperson, a former mime turned linguistic ethicist named Willem van der Blur, explained the rationale in a press conference conducted entirely in interpretive semaphore.
"We are not banning Jesus," Willem clarified, blinking solemnly. "We are banning the percentage."
The problem, it seemed, was mathematical. The phrase "100% Jesus" implied a quantifiable divinity, a metric holiness, a