afternoon, a story

Afternoon was first shown to the public as a demonstration of the hypertext authoring system Storyspace, announced in 1987 at the first Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext conference in a paper by Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter.[1] In 1990, it was published on diskette and distributed in the same form by Eastgate Systems.

The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who one morning witnessed a deadly car crash where he believes his ex-wife and son were involved. He cannot stop blaming himself as he walked away from the accident without helping the injured people. A recurring sentence throughout the story "I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning" where [I want to say] is one of many lexias built into a loop which causes the reader to revisit the same lexia throughout the story. The hypertext centers around the car accident, but also reveals the multifarious ways of the characters' mutual promiscuity.