\"Grendel\" Narration Excerpt
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
British (England - Cockney, Estuary, East End) British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
excerpts from Grendel written by John Gardner. One. The Old Ram stands looking down over rock slides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare in horror. Scat! I hiss. Go back to your cave. Go back to your cow shed whatever he cocks his head like an elderly, slow witted king considers the angles, decides to ignore me. I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a skull size stone at him. He will not budge. I shake my to Harry fists at the sky and let out a house so unspeakable that the water at my feet turned sudden ice and even I myself and left uneasy. But the Rams stays. The season is upon us, and so begins the 12 year of my idiotic war. The pain of it, the stupidity. Ah, well, I sigh and shrug, trudge back to the trees. Do not think my brains are speech shut, like the Rams by the roots of horns, flanks and tremble. Eyes like stones, he stares and as much of the world as he can see and feels its surging in him, filling his chest as the melting snow fields dried out creek beds, tickling his gross lopsided balls and charging his brains with same unrest that made him suffer last year. At this time and the year before and the year before that, he's forgotten them all. His hind parts shiver with the usual joyful, mindless ache that mount whatever happens near the storm, piling up black towers to the west, some rotting Darcel stump. Some spread a leg. Do you? I cannot bear to look. Why can't these creatures discover a little dignity? I asked the sky. This guy says nothing. Predictably, I make a face uplifted, defiant middle finger and give him seeing little kick the sky ignores me forever unimpressed him, too. I hate the same as I hate these brainless, budding trees. Thes Brattle ing birds. Not, of course, that I fooled myself with thoughts that I'm more noble, pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of dead men, murdered Children, martyred cows. I am neither proud nor ashamed. Understand one more dull victim, leering at seasons that never were meant to be observed. Ah, sod, one poor old freak. I cry and hug myself and laugh, letting out salt tears. He he till I fall down, gasping and sobbing. it's mostly fake. The sun spins mindlessly overhead. The shadows lengthen and shorten as if by plan, small birds with a high pitched yelp lay eggs. The tender grasses pick up innocent yellow through the ground, the Children of the dead. It was just here, the shocking green that once when the moon was tuned and clouds I tor off sly old Athol guard's head here, where the startling tiny jaws of crocuses slap at the late winter sun like the heads of baby water snakes. Here I killed the old woman with the iron grey hair she tasted of urine and spleen, which made me spit sweet mulch for yellow blooms. Such are the tiresome memories of a shadow shooter, Earth Rim Roma walker of the world's Weird wall. Wow, I cry with another quick, nasty face of the sky, mournfully observing the way it is bitterly remembering the way it wass in idiotically casting tomorrow's nets. Ah yeah, I really smash trees, this figured son of lunatics. The big, bold oaks gaze down at me yellow with morning beneath complexity. No offence, I say, with a terrible single pen, Tish smile and tipping imaginary hat. It was not always like this. Of course, on occasion it's been worse. No matter, no matter. The dough in the clearing goes stiff at sight of my hardness, then remembers her legs and is gone. It makes me cross blind prejudice. Eye ball at the splendid sunlight where half a second ago she stood. I ring my fingers, put on a long face. Ah, the unfairness of everything I say and shake my head. It is a matter of fact that I have never killed a deer in all my life and never will. Cows have more meat, and locked up in pens are easier to catch. It is true, perhaps, that I feel more trifling dislike of deer, but no more dislike. And I feel for other natural things discounting men but dear, like rabbits and bears and even men can make concerning my race No delicate distinctions. That is the happiness they see all life without observing it. They're buried in it like crabs and mud except men. Of course, I am not in the mood just yet to talk of men