Sondranos: The Narrative of Leon Bishop Read Online Free Page A

on the
elbows, but the parental supervisory board has strict regulations
on clothing. As long as they aren’t placing blame on him for their
children’s shortcomings, he’ll follow the regulations.
    Eleven
first-year students stare back at him. Some jot down notes with the
graphite pens they got at the school store during orientation,
while others soak in the information by listening. Not one of them
knows the answer to his question. He laughs the feeling of unease
away and starts towards the projector. He clicks it on where an
image of Richter’s Guide to the Psychology
of Selfish Symbology flashes and rotates
slowly on the holographic screen.
    “ The correct
answer,” Leon begins, “is the ‘All-About-Me Generation Literature
of the early twenty-first century’. Novels like The Garden in the Brush, Delgado’s Union, and the Refuge of Albion are examples. These three novels show how the
literary tool of postmodernism assumed the blame of society and
translated it into a more subconscious, selfish level of thinking.
But stop. Selfishness is not a bad thing, it’s just got a negative
connotation. Sometimes you need to think about yourself, otherwise,
how’d you survive?”
    Leon watches as a student in
the front row scribbles POSTMOD = LITERARY TOOL on her notebook and
Leon stifles a smile. Rothrock next door would have his hide if she
knew he’d allowed that. She’d only gotten her PhD in postmodernist
theory a year before it was written off as a period due to the
inability for it to be proven under a single time constraint. That,
and when the most a ‘period’ could do was offer a strange tone and
a handful on conceits, then something had to change. If there was
ever a war between the Literary periods, Leon was sure he and
Rothrock would be on opposing sides, a fight to the death, even
though he couldn’t even nail down the title of his own period. ‘All
About Me’ Literature is just one of the many threads he used to tie
them down.
    But Leon is comfortable here;
he is at home. There is nothing a student or professor or adjunct
could say for which he wouldn’t have an answer or argument, and no
attention seeking parents can strip him of his pride.
    Leon turns to a male student in
the front row.
    “ Mr. Bell,”
he says. “Pick one of the titles I just mentioned to
you.”
    Jamie Bell stares back at him,
open mouthed and eyes agape. Leon waits.
    Eventually, Mr. Bell lets the
words form on the tip of his tongue and he stammers, “The last one.
The one about refuse.”
    “ Refuge of
Albion, by Pierre Albert, published in
June of 2023.”
    The voice recognition system in
the projector recognizes Leon’s tone. The key words and the
rotating image of the class textbook shifts to another book – the
cover showing a castle. In the reflection of the pond below it, the
castle is decayed and destroyed. Below the author’s name is an MPAA
sticker outdated by a few hundred years. Leon doubts anyone could
find the film for the book since it was archaic by at least six or
seven forms of data management crystals, but still listens for the
clues that someone’s forgone the reading. Mostly, anyone who says
that the book had some great acting is a dead give-away.
    Leon addresses the class: “The
author calls this book his ‘most important work because of its
mental capacity’ and yet this novel is about a man who runs from
his life because he can’t handle what he’s becoming. Sound
familiar? You’ve probably read a version of the same story six,
maybe seven thousand times, seen it in films, and heard it in music
and productions.”
    Leon paces the room, holding
his hands in front of him. “What makes it different from all the
others is how inherently selfish the author approached the story.
He took an old tale, used that as the spine for his work, and then
proceeded to use all his own concerns, memories, defeats,
victories, and perceptions about the world to fuel the pages. If
postmodernism gave us comfort in