Plot
In this western-period themed-episode, an unscrupulous peddler, after selling the executioner some five-strand rope needed for a hanging, sells a bag of "magic" dust to the condemned man's father. The condemned man had been found guilty of causing the death of a child (accidentally). The peddler collects ordinary dirt from the ground and insists that it will spread good will throughout the crowd and will make them feel love and sympathy for the man sentenced to be hanged. After making the purchase as the crowd gathers for the hanging, the man's father cries out and starts sprinkling the dust everywhere. To his dismay, he hears the floor drop behind him and turns to see that the fresh and sturdy noose has broken and his son is unharmed. When asked if another hanging attempt should be made, the girl's parents decide that it shouldn't, that the condemned man has suffered enough. As father and son walk home, the peddler discovers that he is also affected by the "magic" after throwing his gold pieces from the sale of the dust to the poor children of the town, laughing about it afterward.
Read more about this topic: Dust (The Twilight Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)