And, as often in a Spark story, the small detail hinted at a larger, darker story.
Caroline Worra brings a persuasively carefree style and a lovely vocal timbre to "The Girl I Left Behind Me," the Spark story about a young woman waiting at a bus stop, troubled about something important she forgot at her office and irritated by her boss's constant whistling of the British folk tune for which the story is titled.
This little hardbound edition of "Life-Spark Stories" isn't just weird — it is exceptionally rare.
In the late 1930s, the Women's Printing Society, in London, published a slim book with a curious title: "Life-Spark Stories for the Intelligent Young".
The Monkey's Paw specializes in oddities like "Life-Spark Stories": printed matter that has fallen between history's cracks and eluded even Google Books' all-seeing eye.
In late trading on Wednesday, for instance, the value of the yuan actually spiked higher, which sparked stories that the government had intervened in the market to drive the yuan up.
Plans to overhaul schools in Finland — whose students have been at or near the top of international exams for years — have sparked stories in the media saying that traditional subjects, such as math and history and art, will be abandoned.
The 2018 strikes sparked stories about teachers who don't make a living wage, who have to take second and third jobs, and who are being asked to educate high-risk children with few resources and sometimes in freezing or sizzling classrooms.
The forest itself sparked stories in their heads, and thus, by integrating their innovative video environments into the natural setting, they imbued reality with a mystical twist.
It has the steroidal-sucrose flavour of a standard-issue Sparks story about lovers wrenched apart by fate and flung together by destiny – usually hinging on some super-secret handwritten letters.
