Plot
In a small Irish town, a frantic man named O'Shaughnessy dashes into the local pub called Kelly's. He rushes up to the bar demanding a drink in return for bringing the town the news of what he saw in Killany Woods: the little people! Although the entire bar erupts in laughter and disbelief, one man, Mulvaney, gets up angry at O'Shaughnessy for telling foolish stories while the whole town is out of work and no one is happy. He tells O'Shaughnessy to never return to Kelly's. O'Shaughnessy sulks away, claiming that he will go to the only real friends he has.
Not long after, Mulvaney sees O'Shaughnessy coming out of the hardware store, long after closing, with a box. Mulvaney questions the hardware store owner about it. Apparently, the "little people" gave O'Shaughnessy gold to pay for tools to help them. Mulvaney then discovers O'Shaughnessy has paid up his landlady and gathered his belongings and left. Mulvaney finally confronts O'Shaughnessy, but O'Shaughnessy claims he cannot give him any of the gold because it is not his to give. Mulvaney insists, but O'Shaughnessy hits him over the head with the box and runs off into the woods. Mulvaney follows him and discovers the "little people"--small-statured aliens and their spaceship. While O'Shaughnessy laughs and enjoys Mulvaney's predicament, Mulvaney runs back to town and attempts to tell everyone at the pub about what he saw. They just laugh, like they did at O'Shaughnessy...
Read more about this topic: The Little People Of Killany Woods (The Twilight Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“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)