[Originally.]
THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. After all, this was the first time I’d brought up the issue with Fortunato – just because I was at a 10 emotionally didn’t mean he could read my mind.
“Fortunato,” I said, “you have injured me a thousand times.”
“A thousand times?” he said, surprised.
“A thousand times,” I said. “I should have brought this up sooner – I’m not saying I don’t have a part in this – but yes, a thousand times.”
“Well,” Fortunato said, a little taken aback. “This is news to me.”
“But I’m open to hearing about it,” he added, and I walked him through the thousand times I had been angry with him without saying anything.
“Jesus,” he said when I was finished.
“It’s a lot to process all at once,” I acknowledged.
“You really should have told me sooner,” he said. “I mean – I’m also sorry – but if you’d told me sooner, I would have stopped sooner.”
“That’s a good point,” I said. “In the future, I won’t wait so long to speak up, if something is troubling me.”
“I appreciate that,” Fortunato said. “And I’m really sorry for those thousand times I hurt you. I truly did not intend to.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I meant it. “I also realize that by keeping my feelings to myself, I was denying you the opportunity to do better. You may have hurt me one thousand times, but I’m equally to blame for about nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven of them.”
From then on, when I was upset about something, I said so out loud. And it really made a difference. Also, I had a cask of Amontillado in my basement. It, like my feelings, had been bottled up for too long.
[Via]
For the love of God, Mallory!
Yes, for the love of God!
I present to you, as the winnings due to your comment, one internet.
And also a bill for keyboard repair.
Oh this was delightful.
Have you read A Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore?
Dallas News.com describes it as “full of sex and chicanery” 🙂
A+
This just… I am filled with a glowing happiness, and I am not sure how I feel about that?
*laughs and laughs and laughs*
When I was in the second grade I accidentally read a fully illustrated picture book edition of The Cask of Amontillado which was inexplicably shelved in our classroom library next to The Mouse and the Motorcycle and promptly had nightmares for a solid month. Reading this has finally given me peace. Thank you.
I read that too! Was it great illustrated classics with lots of Poe short stories?
I had the illustrated ones too, but I didn’t read them at so tender an age.
Oh! For me it was Fall of the House of Usher and it was unlike anything I’d experience up to that point. Also shelved along-side the stories about heroic dogs and bunnies. I can still see the illustrations.
Mine was Masque of the Red Death in fifth grade, shelved, yes, right next to much more innocuous fifth grader reading material. Freaked me the crap out. I had trouble sleeping that night.
I was disappointed, though, when, after I had told some of my classmates how creepy it was, I read it to them and they had….no reaction. They didn’t find it scary at all. They were much more bothered by the story of Bluebeard, also contained in the same illustrated children’s book. For some reason Bluebeard did not bother me at all at the time, though it is obviously also pretty creepy.
Also, I had a cask of Amontillado in my basement. It, like my feelings, turned out to be much more unpalatable than I had originally anticipated, so I threw it out.
Sometimes an ancient alcoholic beverage is just an ancient alcoholic beverage, you know? No murder needed!
See, in this version, the narrator *began* by figuratively walling off Fortunato in the back of his cellar, and ended by setting him free.
METAPHOR
WHOA
Jack Black voice:
I did not mean
to blow your mind
but that shit happens to me
all the tiiiiiiiiiiime
I am here for this treatment of the entire Poe oeuvre, please.
I enjoy the pendulum on the grandfather clock in the hall and also this peach is delicious and its pit nicely shaped, don’t you think?
My cat’s breath smells like cat food.
Her heart told a tale, and after trying for what was probably too long to ignore what it was saying, she told the object of her affections. It was mutual.
while hiding out from the plague I held a ball and met a masked stranger. she turned out to be a beautiful woman – the real human living kind – and also a scientist who developed a plague vaccine.
The House of Usher has a reflecting pond that’s full of koi and sun ripples, plus you get to have all sorts of inventive lucid dreams there, about death and non-death and incest and worms. When you wake up let’s draw some pictures of how weird that worm was, man it was weird but the sun is shining and nobody’s dead.
I assumed that the talking bird in my living room was someone’s lost pet and put up signs in the neighborhood, rather than engaging it in anguished, existentially-fraught questioning. It’s not there anymore because its owner took it back.
There was a lady who had a black cat. Both were loving and sweet with no hidden mysteries at all, and no one’s limbs ever got cut off for any reason whatsoever.
How about: when I was a child I knew a little girl who died. It was sad and I still think about her sometimes, but not in an unusual obsessive way.
One of his eyes resembled the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to talk to my therapist about why I often disturbed by the site of persons with disabilities.
I’m very sorry my girlfriend and/or sister died, but it’s been years now and I realize that the best way to honor her memory is to allow myself to really live again.
Quoth the raven, “sure, tomorrow”
I ENJOY THIS.
This is my new favorite series on the toast.
mallory???????
r u ok
Is this what happens when you write from Australia? Everything gets turned upside down?
OH!
Can you do this for OTHELLO next, please?
Othello: What happened to that handkerchief I got you?
Desdemona: Oh, I’m so sorry, honey, I misplaced it the other day and haven’t been able to find it.
Othello: Oh. Well that’s too bad. I can buy you a new one, though.
FIN
“i’m beginning to think Iago doesn’t have the best of intentions. will take his word with a grain of salt from here on out.”
/cue adorkable shopping montage, including the trying-on of many hats
I AM HERE FOR THIS.
HE’S NOT EVEN A VERY CLEVER VILLAIN. It drove me nuts when I was reading it in class. Wasn’t Iago supposed to be some kind of maleficent genius? But no, he’s just lucky he picked on such a big dumb idiot
My latest theory is that Othello is a play-as-intervention in one of Shakespeare’s friends’ life. Theme summary: ACTUALLY, YOU IDIOT, ALL WOMEN AREN’T SO MUCH PRONE TO CHEAT AS YOU ARE PRONE TO BEING AN IRRATIONALLY JEALOUS BELLEND SO MAYBE DON’T SUSPECT YOUR WIFE OF STUFF SHE DIDN’T DO BECAUSE OF SOME MANIPULATIVE LITTLE TOOL, SHE’S A GOOD PERSON, EVERYONE LOVES HER, OK WATCH THIS PLAY PLEASE JFC
” You may have hurt me one thousand times, but I’m equally to blame for about nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven of them.”
Is there an accidental extra nine thousand in there, or am I just missing some delightfully clever numerological symbolism?
Poe, like many poets, was not great at math.
“Here’s an itemized list of 30 years of disagreements”
That’s how I initiate most arguments
As long as you’re not prone to duels…
AND JUST WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT
At the very least, don’t throw away your shot!
Lensky and Onegin looked at each other and said, ALOUD, TO EACH OTHER, “You know, this is a really stupid idea,” and shook hands, remaining friends for the rest of their long, love-filled lives.
Sweet Jesus.
Careful how you proceed, good Manka, intemperate indeed good Manka, Mallory’s been very clear, Hamilwords should not appear, when she posts a thing on this site here, good Manka!
I have the honor to be, your obedient servant! A.Kate
Yikes! Thank you for the reminder! I’d completely forgotten.
It’s unclear if she’s fake-mad or actually annoyed when it happens but I don’t want to take any chances since she is some sort of literary witch who can see into our souls and lay them bare on the Internet and call them humor, so…
Well, my soul is already pretty much laid bare on the internet and I think it’s fucking hilarious, so….
Oh, this is good to know. Must’ve missed the original request.
Okay but the duel of 1804 could definitely use a “comforting and anodyne” treatment…
And here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yqXlN7NdG4
Aaaahhh thank you!
Okay then I revise my request: Mallory does Dirtbag Hamilton. (Pretty much needs about as minimal work as Dirtbag Zeus.)
I think that’s pretty much just Farmer Refuted. And part of Cabinet Battle #1. And Say No to This. And The Reynolds Pamphlet. Hey, Alex, maybe cool it with the ad hominem attacks and maybe think about the effects of your actions on other people?
Posited: Young Frankenstein is a very early and also rather roundabout issue of the “Made Comforting and Anodyne” Story Series
He vas my BOYFRIEND!
“Werewolf!”
“Werewolf?”
*points*
“There! There, wolf. There, castle.”
“Werewolves, not swearwolves!”
Fun fact: I was super duper into Poe as a kid. This was due to two almost simultaneous television experiences. One being Homer Simpson’s Raven in the Treehouse of Horrors. The other was wee li’l me stumbling onto an adaptation of the Cask of Amontillado on, like, PBS or something and having my mind effing BLOWN by the ending. Like, there’s a guy? And he just walls a dude up? In a crypt? And leaves him there? Just walls him up and leaves him? Whaaaaaaaaaa. Super Grover would never!
Whoa… I read that and Ex Machina just came into my head.
Oooh, oooh, I’m gonna do The Girl With No Hands!
A miller fell slowly but surely into poverty, until finally he had nothing more than his mill and a large apple tree which stood behind it. One day he had gone into the forest to gather wood, where he was approached by an old man, whom he had never seen before, and who said, “Why do you torment yourself with chopping wood? I will make you rich if you will promise me that which is standing behind your mill.”
“What can that be but my apple tree?” thought the miller, said yes, and signed it over to the strange man.
And then the miller went home and it was totally the apple tree, not his daughter, and the devil went on to make artisan cider and no one got their hands chopped off for no damn good reason.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm031.html
Oh God that story.
http://www.midorisnyder.com/essays/the-armless-ma…
IT IS MY LEAST FAVORITE FAIRY TALE.
I like to point out how FRELLING USELESS God is in it. “An angel came to help her eat some pears, but no one stopped her dad from CHOPPING OFF HER GODDAMN HANDS.”
“Why do you torment yourself with chopping wood? I will make you rich if you will promise me that which is standing behind your mill.”
“You mean the apple tree?”
“….”
“The apple tree, that’s what’s standing behind my mill right now, is that what you want?”
“…yerdaughter”
“Excuse me?”
“Your daughter? She is ALSO standing behind your mill, you know”
“I mean…no? No, you can’t have my daughter? Do you…do you want the apple tree or not?”
“…yeah okay”
“The Montresors,” I said, “were a great and numerous family.”
“I forget your arms.”
“A huge human hand d’or, in a field vert; the hand tenderly scritches the ears of a rabbit sejant who nibbles on a stolen carrot.”
“And the motto?”
“Amici optimi erimus aetatem.”
“Good!” he said.
I can’t not hear the voice of the narrator in the audio version of the story my 8th-grade teacher thought would be more “fun” to have us hear it than read it. That deep-voiced “AMONTILLADOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH?!?!?!” will forever haunt me.
*shudder*
I wonder if it was the same one we listened to in seventh grade! I remember just having the worst secondhand embarrassment for the way they over-acted the whole dang thing.
Quite possibly! It was so terrible. I want to find it.
My mom–who, as I’ve noted on here before, is a 100% A-plus mom–gave me Edgar Allan Poe socks for my birthday last month. They have floating Poe heads and croaking ravens on them and are awesome. (She also gave me a “Never judge a book by its movie” button, a Jane Austen finger puppet, and a Jane Austen board book that’s called Emma: A Babylit (R) Emotions Primer. Like I said, A-plus mom.)
So did you guys know that there is a theory Edgar Allan Poe is a time traveler? It’s my favorite thing, I think.
http://historybuff.com/edgar-allan-poe-had-a-time…
Ronblepoe.
I am healed. I read this as a kid and was scarred, and now i’m… well, at least a little less scarred. Ahhhhhh.
STOP DOING THAT.
You’re freaking me out, Mallory. I need you to return to tormenting my soul and making me question the universe and my place in it.
Ironically, the insult that Fortunato ventured upon was, “You are so petty and vindictive, one of these days you’ll overreact and seal someone up in a wall.”
In my 7th grade English class we all had to read this and write an epilogue saying what happened. In mine Montresor gets away with everything and guess who got “see me” on her paper. I was the only kid in the class who did this apparently.
“…so I sealed my teacher up in a wall!”
1. How is “Amontillado” pronounced?
2. Patient Griselda. Anodyze that!
Uh monty yah doh, is how I always here it.
Ah-mon-tea-yah-doh, accent on the yah syllable
Thank you. I now feel completely comfortable with this story.
True story: Poe may have written The Cask of Amontillado as part of a long-running writer feud with a former friend who rightly called him out for being a drunk jerk who was an asshole to women.
Only to women? I find that unlikely… I imagine him to have been more of an all-around douche
Poe, like many poets, was not great at math.
"Werewolves, not swearwolves!"
I’m dying. This has totally made my evening.