Vienna
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Frankie arrived at Vienna International after a short flight from Paris. Today she felt oddly detached from reality, lack of sleep was likely the culprit. 243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡm8qolmdVyd
She’d made use of her time in transit to ruminate on the last encounter she’d had with a man she’d once held dear. It had been a hot December evening last year, the final day of a 4 day heat wave, they had been arguing about Ian McEwan’s 2001 best seller ‘Atonement’. The gist of her contention being that the novels weakness was that it preyed on romantic sensibilities in the reader too often as a hook and thus took something of a literary shortcut. Her lover disagreed, countering by contending that ‘the book was successful because of its openness to sensibility and that it was a strength and not by any means a shortcut or weakness.’ It had been a short argument and despite the topic being impersonal, she still felt angered he didn’t see it her way. She forced herself to break free of the memory. Instead deciding to reflect on the emotional importance of reading and how surreal and essential the concept of inhabiting the mind of a another human being through written word was. She felt satisfied at her observance.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrxzkv5M16b
Walking through the departure lounges toward the exit she noticed a woman reading a book by Salman’s Rushdie she’d heard people rave about: ‘Midnights Children’ she knew nothing of the books subject matter but thought it was a catching title nonetheless.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiHODyF6HOT
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After a short cab ride, Frankie arrived in the city district of ‘Landstrasse’. It was eerily quiet for a Saturday and sheets of cold rain swept the streets in a manner that seemed to have a kind of menace to them almost as if there were a spectral entity pupateering.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQ4i5Xgo6Rj
Walking to her hotel, she noticed a vagrant laying in the gutter, disheveled and sick looking. She decided to give him €10 out of pity, at which point, he thanked her and produced a sealed envelope with a wax stamp on it.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0Y8LBHIFRY
‘What is this?’ She asked,243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiA4eKrAOZ7
‘I pickpocketed some Jew dogs on their way to the Opera earlier. I think there’s tickets inside, they won’t let me in anyway, try your luck.’243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYSSu2c0JVO
‘Oh.. umm, thank you!’.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpUTfUAd8Jn
She hurried away from the unusually grateful metro-hobbit and tore open the envelope. It contained 3 tickets to 243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUeSsHtyfXY
‘Il Barbiere di Siviglia’ at the The Vienna State Opera. (The Barber of Seville).243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKg8YE1lyHM
She’d never been to such a thing. Her only experience with anything theatrical was when she’d tried her hand at standup comedy when she was 19. 243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdNbrdqPcrk
It was a short lived affair.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbYTwVuPdKY
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Frankie decided she may as well put the tickets to use, but what to do with the two spare tickets? Vienna was a city in which she had no ally’s, and she was averse to the prospect of the tickets going to waste.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgCZb2G4Xws
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In front of her hotel stood a hotdog stand. ‘Weiner Wurstle’ the sign read. She decided she may as well try a real Vienna sausage, as she’d already had the ‘other’ kind in a backpackers in Prague some time ago. A regrettable encounter.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2tllu2aqkd
‘One Scharf Wurst please.’243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKAi2mGTE0T
The man handed her the sausage in bread.243Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAfK1QL86yd
All of a sudden, she began to feel an odd sensation come over her, almost as if this whole time she’d been nothing but a marionette, every action she’d made being controlled by forces unknown and that the power over her had just switched hands..
