EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE
Yesterday I went to the circus. A clown was standing on a chair. One of his shoes was yellow, the other was green. The clown was talking to a monkey in a whisper. Another clown approached them. His shoes were made of straw and mud. "Cómo se dice, 'te quiero,' en inglés?" he asked. The monkey began to laugh. A woman sitting next to me coughed. She was wearing a red dress. "I know what they are saying," she said. "I used to own a beautiful painting of Barcelona." Her daughter was eating popcorn, her husband was wearing a beautiful necktie. "Only certain shoe verbs use the changes within the shoe to form all forms of the future tense," he said. The clowns began to run in circles. "Lichen is not one plant, but two," said one. "I know," said the other, "it is the alga living inside that I adore." At the top of the tent, a red balloon wrote a letter to its mother: I am having dinner in a cheap restaurant; I am driving down a country road with a friend; I am in Madrid, looking for the Prado Museum. Somewhere there was a nondescript thirty-five-year-old woman looking for certain things to pack in her suitcase, somewhere there was a twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman doing the same.