Xerox

xerox
noun (trademark). A xerographic copying process. A copy made using such a process. A machine for copying by xerography.
verb, transitive. To copy a document by the xerographic process.

Every so often, she got it out and read it again: the science-fiction story she had xeroxed out of a thick anthology before she passed the book along to a friend. The author's name was Bill Johnson. The story was entitled "We will Drink a Fish Together." It was one of the best short stories, in any genre, she had ever read.

It was long, as short stories go. She chuckled when she recalled the rainy Sunday afternoon when she had asked her husband and son to sit and listen while she read it aloud to them. It was that kind of story. Though each complained about the story's duration at different points in the narrative, in the end they were glad she had insisted on sharing it with them. Neither was a science-fiction fan, but they had enjoyed it as much as she had.

What she had always liked in science fiction was the fact that the human beings, despite their otherworldly environments and the as-yet-uninvented technology they so casually used, remained quintessentially, utterly human. As with so many other things, this aspect had two sides, but she found it comforting, nevertheless.

In "We will Drink a Fish Together," the main character who happens to be an alien seems just as human as the earthlings he befriends. This fact gives rise to the camaraderie of shared strife as well as a good deal of humor. The little rural American community where most of the story takes place is both unique and universal: the kind of place that, if you hailed from there, you would never really leave.

So she returned to the story now and again, to refresh that sense of delight she had gained the first time she had read it, to enjoy the nascent love story subplotted beneath the main arc, to laugh at the characters' mutual jibes and at the lawnmower race. Yes, there's a lawnmower race. Most of all, she enjoyed the anticipation of what she guessed the next phase of that community's life might be, hoped she was right, and wished Mr. Johnson had written a novel about it so she could read it, too.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.