AcmeShorts

In the days of yore, the short-short scriveners worked late into the night by goose tallow wicks, copying the short-shorts and commentary that the Authors had written that week. Before dawn on Monday, they’d fetch a suitably smudge faced whelp from the streets to post the copies on the walls of every tavern in the city.

Young Jonas Matzos put down his stout mug of light lager and approached the posting wall. What he saw didn’t please him. TheMerchant had written an ill farce of low rank and Dylan the Dreary One had awarded it five stars. Five stars!? Already the sharp quill of rebuke was drafting on his mind’s parchment a vile invective, a fulmination of such wit and practice that all the tavern goers were sure to laugh at Dylan’s folly.

He scratched out the main points on a wax tablet he kept in his breast pocket, finished his light lager and was satisfied that within a fortnight his response would be copied and posted all over the city. He reflected on how as a boy he wouldn’t hear news from outside his tiny village from harvest ‘till thaw. But life was fast now. It was almost overwhelming. He was living on scrivener time.