#281 words

Pad pad pad pad pad pad pad.

Soft sounds. Barely audible tiny hairs under her feet, keeping all warm.  

Her ears twitch, everything is loud and surrounding her everywhere. There are loud footsteps and scritches of insects and quieter footsteps and heartbeats fast and slow and everyone and everything was taller and didn’t care.

It was warm, very warm, too. Nice. Very nice, but not something she could do. Warm was wron and strange and so she ran down the stairs in the shadows, where it was colder and smelled different and there were less noises.

Going away from the noises was good. Peaceful.

Her nose led her around, er ears swivelled without her say-so, everything bright was blurry, the dark worked. A little. There were actual steps, there.

The corridors were mostly dark, and it became quieter. Much quieter. And a corner was good for resting.

She curled into a ball, tail wrapped around her, and closed her eyes.

There were still a lot of noises. Each made sense, though. And she had an overview of the area. Slowly closing her eyes, she drifted off.

Until a LOUD clanking noise woke her.

A clanking noise and laughter. She stood and ran. Limbs stretched out and claws rapping on the floor, simply following her nose.

Corners and edges and doors flew by until she stood in front of a door, a heartbeat behind. She scratched at the door, insistently.

There were more noises inside. And the door creaked. Opened.

She chittered.

And rubbed against the big being’s leg when she slinked inside.

Good smell, safe smell, good place.

 "Where are you from?"

"Poland."

"Oh, wow! You don't have an accent at all!"

"...Poland, Ohio."

Conversations like this frequently plague my boyfriend. English is full of ambiguity--in metaphors, double meanings, sarcasm, poor wording, irony, and others. Sometimes ambiguity is taken advantage of for laughs, like with Who's On First? by Abbott and Costello and Mehoo with an Exactly Watt by Shel Silverstein.

What makes this type of humor so funny? First of all, I think it's because everyone's been in a situation where ambiguity has caused confusion, so everyone can relate to situations like these. The joke's audience usually already knows the context and is in on the intended meaning.

Sometimes, ambiguity preservers--in jokes and in real life. If my boyfriend had not clarified that he was talking about Poland, Ohio, for example, the conversation could have continued with ambiguity intact:

"So how is the weather in Poland?"

"Much like it is here. It's not really that far away."

"Yeah, I guess once you get used to the distance, the travel time passes by pretty quickly."

"Yeah, I guess so."

In this invented example above, the person continues to interpret the context to suit his/her incorrect interpretation of Poland. A psychoanalysis writes on TheAmericanScholar.org, "Our preferred method for integrating incongruous information is not to revisit a faulty premise, it seems, but to squeeze and stretch the existing premise in ever more convoluted ways to fit the new information."

Not only does the person continue to frame information to fit his/her incorrect interpretation, but my boyfriend also does the same from his perspective.