movies

Happy Labor Day! I’m not spending working, unless you count working on a short story.

I also wrote a little something else yesterday, as part of my weekly free-writing group:

There was nothing to be done about it, Harold thought. If the snow didn’t let up, and judging by the sky it wasn’t going to, then he was going to be trapped here longer than just overnight. And there was barely enough firewood to see him through until morning. Over in the corner of the cabin there was a radio, shiny and almost brand new from the look of it, and a flare gun on a shelf in the pantry. But neither of those things were going to do him much of any good, he realized. He’d been halfway across the room to the radio when he remembered where he was.

But there was nothing he could do about that now. At least not until he got the recall.

There wasn’t a lot of food in the pantry, Harold noticed. He wondered, briefly, about whoever had lived here before him. There were no bodies, at least none that he’d found, and no sign of a struggle. Maybe they hadn’t been here when it happened, the worst of it. Maybe they’d headed to town for provisions, or been headed here from further south. The place looked lived in, but not recent. It couldn’t be recent. Whoever it’d been, they’d left behind of few tins of canned peaches, some beans, and that flare gun, but not a whole lot else. Whoever it’d been was long dead now.

Harold supposed it could be worse. This was supposed to be survivalist training, wasn’t it? This was supposed to get him ready for work in the field. He’d heard about agents-in-training thrown off into worse assignments than this, cadets who had barely survived before recall — and plenty who hadn’t. Holing up against a winter storm after the end of the world didn’t seem so bad by comparison.

He checked his readings. If the radio was going to give him nothing but static, he could at least be sure about the equipment he’d brought with him. It wasn’t much — couldn’t be, according to protocol — but at least the scanner’s blip-blip-blip was comforting, the steady green light that confirmed there was no more contagion. The plague that had killed everybody on Earth, at least, was gone.

So it’s a little cold, he thought. There’s probably some blankets, and you like peaches. Got to check their sell-by dates, check for dents, but it could be worse. You’ll be fine. Harold almost laughed. It wasn’t like he’d been time-jumped back into the Pleistocene or anything like that. He wasn’t going to end up on the roll of cadets who had been crushed or eaten by dinosaurs. There’d been this one guy, tried as a witch back in sixteen-something in Salem. They’d had a noose tight around his neck before the recall came. You could still see the marks. Harold was just here, up north in the Canadian backwoods, trapped by bad weather, the last man left alive on the planet. It wasn’t going to be fun, but it was going to be easy.

And that’s when there was a knock at the door.

Meanwhile, Saturday night I watched The Abyss, which was pretty much everything I expected it to be. I can’t say that I loved the movie, but I thought Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris were great together. (This scene in particular — spoiler warnings — was pretty damn terrific.) I do think the movie would have been a little better without the science-fictional elements, though, which seems like a weird thing to be saying. The aliens — again, um, spoilers — almost seem like an afterthought. The director’s cut apparently expands on that, though possibly not to the betterment of the film. I dunno, I enjoyed it.

Last night, I also re-watched Jacob’s Ladder, which I think was a little better the first time I saw it, if only because I didn’t know how it ended.

And that’s kind of been my long weekend, such as it is. Hard to believe it’s already September.

A quiet weekend of slow but decent progress on a short story I’ve been writing.

Today, though, I also spent some time writing this, in my weekly free-writing group:

[removed]

And there’s where time ran out. It’s not exactly a story, but I had fun writing it. Though, knowing that I would have to read it out after the fact — which is something we do — I maybe should have realized that “Enigmatic” isn’t a word that exactly flows off my tongue.

I also watched 12 Angry Men last night, which was pretty damn terrific, but otherwise it was a quiet couple of days.

It’s been a weekend.

I wrote some yesterday, and then again some today. In between that, I watched Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s last movie. I’m not entirely sure the film works, and in fact it’s kind of a mess, but it’s not altogether unenjoyable. Bruce Dern and William Devane are both a lot of fun, and you certainly couldn’t accuse Hitchcock of not being an audacious filmmaker, even when it doesn’t quite pay off for him.

Anyway, the stuff I wrote yesterday is still a work in progress I probably won’t post here. The stuff I wrote today was with my free-writing group and is more just a scene:

She stands at the edge of the river, hugging herself against the morning’s cold, and looks for the slow rise of smoke to begin in the distance. The cell in her pocket will start ringing soon after that, but for now she just tries to enjoy the quiet, tries wrapping it as close to herself as her thin sweater, or the blanket she left with the rest of her gear back down the road in her car. No sounds but the whisper of the water and the distant call of birds that, even after five years in these woods, she doesn’t recognize. She knows that soon it will evaporate, this early morning hush, fly away from her like the birds themselves, like the dust of her former life scattered in the wind. She knows that this moment, like all the rest before it, will pass. The more you tighten your grip, the more it slips through your fingers, she thinks, remembering Edward’s words. There’s a sadness in that, but also a strange satisfaction. And so she stands by the river, scouting the horizon for smoke, the curl of black among the distant trees, and waits for the call that will tell her that Edward is dead.

She knows she should be moving. She should head back down the hill now to the car and drive — in any direction, north across the border, where they’re likely to start looking, or south, if she thinks she can navigate around the quarantine zone. She doesn’t think they’ll be afraid to look for her there, especially not if it’s Edward’s people in addition to the police — but the thought of seeing it all again — the ruined towns, if not the things that ruined them — gives HER a shiver, and she knows a move like that could only buy her time. She’s only losing time here. She ought to move. Casey can call to tell her it’s done just as easily from the road. Laura doesn’t need to see the smoke to know the cabin is finally ablaze. Just like she doesn’t need to see what Casey’s done to Edward to know the bastard is finally gone.

And then she does see it, the smoke at least, and she smiles.