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A Short Story of Grammatical Rebellion

By James CrawfordPublished 10 months ago 4 min read
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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

It was a nice fall evening near the lower sections of Miami. Luis was tagging another building for the “grammar nazis” to clean. Nothing that would have not been vulgar 5–10 years ago. Misspelling “Fight” as “Fght” would have been cool at one point. It’s as if I was spray painting direct orders for publicly executing a certain sex or age of people Luis shook the thought out of his mind as applied the final additions to his art piece.

His “tagging” place of choice tonight was a concrete wall on what he presumed to be a normally dead street at this time of day. However, this was quickly becoming inaccurate as a distinct vehicle was heard turning on his street about 5 blocks away…

Now or never. he told himself as he quickly packed up and darted into the nearest alleyway. There was a slight hill between the approaching car and where he once stood. However, he did not want to take any chances. He ran to the parallel street at the end of the alleyway and, after doing some “parkour”, eventually found a good vantage point on another building further down the street. High enough that he would have been invisible to the car at his tagging location, but the car was still in his sight.

Unfortunately, to his dismay, there was no car at his tagging location. In the rush of hopping fences, climbing stairs, and clearing rooftops, he also realized he hadn’t heard the car’s engine running or tires on pavement for a couple minutes.

Panic started to settle in Luis’s mind and lungs as he leaped over rooftops to another vantage point that gave him a view of the tagging location from a distinct perspective. As well as a view of the rest of the street. All while being out of sight to someone driving on the street below.

Still no car.

There’s no way they were driving that fast, he thought aloud in his mind. They would have floored it to make it to the end of the road for it to disappear that fast.

Luis started to analyze the situation more in his mind, but then his thoughts suddenly froze in time when he heard “Lovely view, eh?” projected from behind. He slowly turned around to find a Miami officer standing with his arms crossed.

“Nice day!” Luis motioned around him and grinned “Who wouldn’t want to miss the view on a day like today?”

“Especially when the view includes some local artwork” the officer motioned in the direction of his tagging location. “You know what happens next, right Mr. Diaz?”.

Luis shrugged. “Sure? I would know if I did something illegal. This is just an artful expression”.

“Yes, an illegal one.” The officer reached down and unclipped his gun holster. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, you illiterate scum”.

Luis knew he was not getting out of this “the easy way” at this point. Sighing, he slowly raised his hands up over his head. The officer wasted no time at all cuffing his hands, leading him to his cruiser and almost no time passed before Luis was sitting in an interrogation room at the police station.

After several interrogation attempts, they could not crack Luis’s thick exterior. Mainly because Luis had nothing to hide and nothing to lose. A bad combination for his competition in blue uniforms. They could not grasp why he used improper spelling in his act of defacing property. Could not comprehend what his motive was for joining the rebellious illiterate folks, simply based on his actions.

After finding no connections to the non-grammatical rebels and keeping Luis in holding as per the normal procedure for handing charges of defacing property, he was eventually let loose. Walking away from the police station, he could not help but smirk while facing away from police officers guarding the main entrance.

After he had a few blocks between him and the men in blue, he pulled out a flip phone and dialed a pizza place near to his apartment.

“Hey, I’m out” he stated while stopping at an intersection waiting for the pedestrian lights to change. “I’d like to order a cheese pizza. Make sure the crust does not touch the floor this time.”

“Noted” said the employee on the other end of the call and hung up the phone. Soon the lights changed, and Luis was on his way home. In a few minutes, he was at the pizza joint he called earlier and picked up his cheese pizza.

About 5 blocks later, he was in his apartment eating his favorite pizza and watching TV. Soon, he noticed a plastic bag hidden beneath the pizza as he started taking slices out of the box. After opening the plastic bag, he started reading the message he was expecting with his order:

Gewd Jab Lewis.

Ths meeens pragras s ndrwey. Weigt fur furder innstrcteawns.

Veeva de revbealiawn.

de revbealiawn.

Smirking, he found a nearby metal can, lit the note on fire with one of his handy lighters and watched it be consumed by the fire within the can.

Veeva de revbealiawn indeed he thought to himself, focusing based on the TV.

____________________________________________

Thanks ChatGPT for the assistance!

Short Story
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About the Creator

James Crawford

Just a simple Christian/techie/gamer that also goes by the musical artist name "newbjamsir" as well as "newbpcsir" on Twitch and YouTube. You could say I've got a thing for music, gaming, sci-fi, technology and writing stuff.

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