HYPERTEXT: A Bottle of Beer – Insight
For me, what hypertext allows is insight into story, clues as to what has led it to this point. It may offer information via vignette about character, about the human condition, about society or just a particular individual. It can offer without going into great detail a particular scenario that is representative of the big picture, the tone of the setting and the time.
For three days the old man lay in his bed. Flies had laid eggs in his nose and his eyes. No one noticed him missing. No one saw that in the late afternoons he no longer sat outside his small house on the edge of the town, across from the church where he had been baptized.They found him instead by the rank stench of death.
His wife had long ago passed into the world that awaits all of mankind. His sons had their own wives and children to care for; his daughters had married away from the town. He was a good man, good to his children, generous to his friends and his church. He wasted little time at the cantina with the others, and he snuck candy to children on Sundays as they came out from Mass. For many years he had been the lone shoemaker in the whole of the surrounding area up to the hills in the north, the river to the south his border of labor. But there were other makers of shoes for them now, so it was the his neighbors who found him that day.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology