...so this is what it has come to...

whisperes Roy wistfully.

a governing thumb enclamps his mouth stifling what would have been Roy's soliloquy:

"a novel by any other name..."

the novel is being bulldozed to the ground so a highway can be built where you are sitting. art is being reinvested in technology.

oils, canvas, ink, paper will be burned to thicken the atmosphere.

the novel ends like grey rain falling drearily on fields swept with an ambivalent ballet of precipatory eddies, tiny cyclones of melancholy dance across autumnal harvest stubble, shrouded in drifting mystery.

"what time was that bus supposed to get here?"

recurring characters wonder as the plot is dismantled around them...