Topical Guide 289
Mark Dorset
Foreshadowing: The Payoff
Too quickly for fear to stop him, Herb leaned forward and kissed her cheek. It was hardly a kiss at all. His lips just brushed her cheek. As the years passed, Lorna would become less and less sure about her memory of what Herb had said to her when he returned, but she never forgot that wisp of a kiss. It was the unforgettable statement Herb had hoped to make.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 7
She twisted the wheel again, slowly, while she observed the little copulating couple from various angles. They enchanted her. In part, they won her over with their fluid agility and their cunning construction, but most of all, a small gesture won her: a gesture that Herb had supplied by shaping one tiny pulley with an eccentricity, the slightest little bump, like the lobe on a cam, so that at one point in the performance the man brushed his lips against the woman’s cheek. It was a tiny gesture, one that Lorna had to see several times before she could be sure that it wasn’t accidental, that it wasn’t caused by the way she held the figures or the way she turned the wheel. When she satisfied herself that it happened every time, with the precision of all the other gestures and exertions that composed the performance, when she was certain that it was intentional, that whoever had made the little couple perform had considered this sign of affection an essential part of the performance, she was charmed.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 7
See also: Foreshadowing TG 63; TG 84; TG 127; TG 128
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