An Explanation

"Great white? It's a shark, isn't it? Don't go swimming in Australia." He sat back, confident in the accuracy of his words. He'd been around, he'd lived. He knew these things. In his mind at least.

I felt, rather than heard, the breath expel from my body. He was exasperating beyond belief. He annoyed the shit out of me with his over-confident replies. "That's not what I said." My words were careful, measured, while I silently screamed that he was an idiot. "I said, great WRITE."

He sniffed abruptly, a loud and intrusive sound. I envisioned the snot retracing its way back up his wide nostrils, a reverse waterfall of mucus. I shuddered involuntarily. 

"Great write? It makes no sense."

I paused for just a moment before releasing my words in a steady and regulated order, stacking them nose-to-tail against one another. "Great write. It means, how do you place words on paper in a manner that translates to almost-genius? A genre of excellence, if you will."

"Hmmph." 

I watched him as he thought, his paradigms of thinking tracing their way across his lined face, as clearly visible to me as an 80's t-shirt motto glimpsed on a nightclub dance floor.

Finally, he turned back to me, an irritatingly smug expression pasted across his aged countenance. His faded blue eyes twinkled. "It's simple. Transcribe the unedited words directly from your heart and someone else's heart will hear them and understand them." 

I didn't look at him, instead busying myself with collecting the unused cutlery from the table and stacking the placemats together. The old bastard had won again.

@MsH