conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Falling Out of Time about Walking, Starred, Review with the genre: Literature & Fiction, World Literature.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: *Starred Review* With a strange and wonderful tale, the author challenges the boundaries separating life from death, sanity from madness. Announcing I have to go, a grief-stricken Israeli villager takes leave of his bewildered wife, embarking on a journey to therean impossibly undefined place where he hopes to find and to speak with his dead son. As he sets out walking, in ever-widening circles around his village, the Walking Man becomes a Pied Piper of Bereavement, drawing behind him the Midwife, the Net-Mender, the Elderly Math Teacher, the Dukeall staggering under loads of sadness due to the loss of a loved one. Even the Town Chroniclerwho narrates the bizarre questjoins his distraught wife in the company following the Walking Man into a dreamscape where the deepest fears stirred by death collide with the most passionate hopes for life. Together these grim marchers unfold a dark colloquyby turns heartrending and comfortingon what it means to love the departed, what it means to acceptor defydeath. Intensifying the pathos, deepening the soul-searching, husbands and wives repeatedly struggle to preserve their union despite sharply contrasting ways of dealing with their shared loss. A potent fusion of poetry, fiction, and drama sweeps readers into very deep waters! --Bryce Christensen
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A potent fusion of poetry, fiction, and drama sweeps readers into very deep waters! --Bryce Christensen. Announcing I have to go, a grief-stricken Israeli villager takes leave of his bewildered wife, embarking on a journey to therean impossibly undefined place where he hopes to find and to speak with his dead son. As he sets out walking, in ever-widening circles around his village, the Walking Man becomes a Pied Piper of Bereavement, drawing behind him the Midwife, the Net-Mender, the Elderly Math Teacher, the Dukeall staggering under loads of sadness due to the loss of a loved one. Even the Town Chroniclerwho narrates the bizarre questjoins his distraught wife in the company following the Walking Man into a dreamscape where the deepest fears stirred by death collide with the most passionate hopes for life. Together these grim marchers unfold a dark colloquyby turns heartrending and comfortingon what it means to love the departed, what it means to acceptor defydeath. Intensifying the pathos, deepening the soul-searching, husbands and wives repeatedly struggle to preserve their union despite sharply contrasting ways of dealing with their shared loss.*Starred Review* With a strange and wonderful tale, the author challenges the boundaries separating life from death, sanity from madness.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Falling Out of Time
  TOWN CHRONICLER: As they sit eating dinner, the man's face suddenly turns. He thrusts his plate away. Knives and forks clang. He stands up and seems not to know where he is. The woman recoils in her chair. His gaze hovers around her without taking hold, and she—wounded already by disaster—senses immediately: it's here again, touching me, its cold fingers on my lips. But what happened? she whispers with her eyes. Bewildered, the man looks at her and speaks:
  TOWN CHRONICLER: Perhaps because of the long years of silence, his hoarse voice fades to a whisper. He does not take his eyes off her. He watches so intently that her hand trembles.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: In the hush that follows her shout, the man retreats until his back touches the wall. Slowly, as if in his sleep, he spreads both arms out and steps along the wall. He circles the small kitchen, around and around her.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: TOWN CHRONICLER: After I left him this evening, I turned around for another glance or two. His large, pale face in the window grew gloomier as I walked away. His long eyelashes moved with incredible slowness. A slim band of light suddenly glowed from the lakeside and quivered over the dark sky. I ran to see—
  TOWN CHRONICLER: Now she notices me and falls silent. The entire pier lies between us, but she reaches out as though I were standing right beside her.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: She forcibly shuts her mouth with both hands. Her great black eyes fill with terror. If you ask me, Your Highness, the poor woman has not the slightest comprehension of the words that leave her lips! Incidentally, I think she truly believes that if I only came and touched her, this false spell would be lifted. But it has been almost thirteen years since I touched another person. Now I must hurry, Your Honor: it is almost midnight, and I cannot be late for my wife.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: Under a streetlamp that glows with a yellowish light stands an elderly man writing in chalk on the wall of a house. A white halo of hair hovers around his head, his walrus mustache is silver, and my soul alights when I realize it is my teacher, my math teacher from elementary school, a likable man who suffered a tragedy years ago, I cannot recall what, and disappeared. I thought he was dead, yet here he is, in the middle of the night, standing by a wall befouled with lurid pictures, writing columns of numbers and exercises in tiny, neat handwriting. When he notices me he does not seem alarmed at all: on the contrary, he gives me a toothless grin, as though he has been expecting me for a long time, and gestures with his crooked finger for me to approach the wall.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: He turned his back on me and resumed writing numbers on the wall in his miniature handwriting. I stood watching him for several more minutes, drawing strange comfort from the ease and swiftness of his motions. Then suddenly I remembered what it was that had befallen him, amazed that I could have forgotten. I almost went up to him and said: Sir, such and such happened to me as well, and you never taught me what to do.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I almost went up to him and said: Sir, such and such happened to me as well, and you never taught me what to do. His large, pale face in the window grew gloomier as I walked away. His long eyelashes moved with incredible slowness. A slim band of light suddenly glowed from the lakeside and quivered over the dark sky. I ran to see—
  TOWN CHRONICLER: Now she notices me and falls silent. The entire pier lies between us, but she reaches out as though I were standing right beside her.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: She forcibly shuts her mouth with both hands. Her great black eyes fill with terror. If you ask me, Your Highness, the poor woman has not the slightest comprehension of the words that leave her lips! Incidentally, I think she truly believes that if I only came and touched her, this false spell would be lifted. But it has been almost thirteen years since I touched another person. Now I must hurry, Your Honor: it is almost midnight, and I cannot be late for my wife.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: Under a streetlamp that glows with a yellowish light stands an elderly man writing in chalk on the wall of a house. A white halo of hair hovers around his head, his walrus mustache is silver, and my soul alights when I realize it is my teacher, my math teacher from elementary school, a likable man who suffered a tragedy years ago, I cannot recall what, and disappeared. I thought he was dead, yet here he is, in the middle of the night, standing by a wall befouled with lurid pictures, writing columns of numbers and exercises in tiny, neat handwriting. When he notices me he does not seem alarmed at all: on the contrary, he gives me a toothless grin, as though he has been expecting me for a long time, and gestures with his crooked finger for me to approach the wall.
  TOWN CHRONICLER: He turned his back on me and resumed writing numbers on the wall in his miniature handwriting. I stood watching him for several more minutes, drawing strange comfort from the ease and swiftness of his motions. Then suddenly I remembered what it was that had befallen him, amazed that I could have forgotten.TOWN CHRONICLER: After I left him this evening, I turned around for another glance or two.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Then a shadow suddenly moved upon the plain. It was a woman extracting herself from the earth. She took a few slow, heavy steps. She stood hugging herself. Her head was slightly lowered.
  CENTAUR: Damn it all, if only I could be with them! If only I were there, not sitting here writing and writing! I would ram the wall and tear it down, I would break in and I would—
  CENTAUR: The walking man suddenly fell on his knees at the wall and whispered his son's name. There was no voice in his whisper, only a gaping mouth and torn eyes. In my room, I felt a sharp blade fly over here from there and slice me in two. Through my swoon of pain I heard behind me, from within the piles of objects, the voice of a small child who said quietly, softly murmuring:
  CENTAUR: I stood up on my feet. I walked around the room. I picked up this or the other object and touched it, stroked it, brought it to my lips. Then I went back and stood at the window. I could see very well using a pair of binoculars I found in one of the piles: the walker's whisper seemed to reap the other walkers. Like him, they, too, fell to their knees, the midwife and the cobbler, the elderly teacher, the net-mender and the duke, the town chronicler and his wife. And each and every one of them, each and every one of us, called out, whispered, to his child: