The clock struck 3 - Short Story

 The clock struck 3 and inside a bookshop in Maradana, Codwin made a mental summary of himself.....Codwin, age 29, failed artist, indifferent poet, and now a bookshop assistant at Premasiri Bookshop in Maradana. The world seemed darker than it did a few years ago and he knew that it would become worse when he reached his thirties. He looked through the glass window at the traffic below....it seemed to move slower every day....so much like his life...........already he felt weary of his journey home.....the traffic before the Kelani bridge would take one and a half hours......why on earth did they build a highway without solving this problem first........but then he gave up this line of thought......these were nuts beyond his ability to crack.....surrounded by books that's what he must think about.....most of them horrid and unsaleable.....how on earth did they make a profit selling this junk. He knew Mr. Premasiri knew nothing....nothing at all about books… but knowing nothing seemed a good qualification nowadays...the novel's on the shelf's that he had read secretly were all trash.....but still Mr. Premasiri was a millionaire.....the wind blew in a different way nowadays.......and the likes of him with his half baked poems.....and knowledge of things unimportant wasn't going anywhere........but even in this trash, there were gems that had been bought accidentally.... take for example….. W. Somerset Maugham's short stories based in Malaya...... most of George Orwell's books were good too....though you got the feeling that Orwell like his characters had gone off his coconut. Maybe he should have become a teacher.... yes of English... general knowledge and things like that.....he could certainly write better than people in the XXXX newspaper……… but who cares about writing nowadays.....the way the wind blows Sir.....is the way the Crow goes.....But he was surrounded by horrible books and he hated them, the poets the novelist, they were rotting with nobody left to read them……They were crawling, yes crawling like dung beetles to a common grave, and so were we all…....

Written by: RJX