Weekend

I’m not watching the Oscars tonight. I have no problem with anybody who is watching it, or spending what promises to be a very long evening live-tweeting about it, but I pretty much lost all interest in the spectacle of it several years ago.

On Friday afternoon, my parents returned after three weeks down south, in Georgia and Florida, sightseeing and seeing my father’s extended family. It’s good to have my parents back — I was immediately thrown over by them in the dog’s affections, since they brought him toys — but it’s also a little strange getting used to sharing the house again. I love them dearly — they brought me gifts, too — but I do think this needs to be the year I move out on my own again.

Last night, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is an odd movie. Jimmy Stewart is very good in it, and it’s understandable why it’s such a classic — recently beating out Citizen Kane as critics’ choice of best movie ever. There’s just a lot to unpack in the movie. Roger Ebert goes into some of it here, but…well, it’s an odd movie, maybe even by Hitchcock standards.

Today, I did the crossword puzzle and finally went back to my weekly writing group. I hope this means I go back to regular writing as well. Anyway, here’s what I wrote off of today’s three-index-card prompt:

As she turned the silver key, a Mask, the same one who’d been following her ever since 85th Street, stepped out of the shadows and leveled his gun at her back. She could hear him pull back the hammer, chamber a round, and even though she couldn’t see his face, she knew his hands were shaky on the makeshift pistol. He wasn’t nearly as good at this as he thought.

“You should leave,” she said, still not turning around. In front of her, the door unlocked. She repocketed the key but she did not open the door; she would not enter the apartment building with this Mask they’d sent to kill her still waiting in the street below. She would not let him see what was waiting just inside. “Put that stupid thing away and go home like a good boy.”

And he was just a boy. She’d seen him lurking on the subway platform, and then failing to look inconspicuous on the train ride downtown. The mask and cowl hid many of his features — she assumed they were supposed to look imposing — but they could not hide the obvious fact of his age, which she pegged at maybe fifteen. At first, she had almost felt insulted, that they’d put a young pup like this on her trail, that they had such little respect for her as a quarry. But then she’d laughed. If the Masks were recruiting this young, they were in more serious trouble than she’d even dared hope. It was ridiculous: the tail, the gun — everything. She wasn’t going to let some teenager interfere with the ritual that was awaiting her inside.

As he pulled back the trigger, she started to reconsider. He was just a boy, but he might also be a true believer, and he might very well prove to be dangerous, even if just by accident. This wasn’t a panicked shot. She’d refrained from showing her true powers deliberately so not to spook him. This was deliberate; she could sense that now. He was nervous as hell but he believed in what he was doing. He was, after all, a Mask. And she, after all, was the enemy. The bullet speeding even now towards her back wasn’t a message or a warning or an accident. It was an execution.

She’d maybe read the kid wrong, but she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. She threw open the building’s front door and the let the darkness swell out into the street.

That, plus a little bit of cleaning, was my weekend. Seriously, I am no that exciting. Did I tell you? I’m not even watching the Oscars.