Sunday. That means the New York Times crossword — kind of a dull non-theme this week — and my writing group. I had to take the long way there, avoiding the Wantagh Parkway which was reportedly closed for the Long Island Marathon this morning and afternoon, and when I got there, this is what I wrote:
“This word,” I ask, “it’s written everywhere and he was reportedly shouting it at the end — what’s it mean?”
“It’s an obscure hue,” says Marcus. “A color the human eye supposedly used to be able to see until — well, who knows? A hundred, two hundred thousand years ago? It’s mentioned dozens of times in each of the diaries we procured at the scene, and scrawled all over the walls, and it turns up maybe once or twice in the referring texts we also discovered there.”
“So you’re saying he didn’t just make it up, then?”
“No, but god knows where he first found it, or why it seemed so important to him. He claims near the end to have actually seen it, seen this color, but I doubt any of that’s true.”
“The running theory in the precinct is he was nothing but a crazy man.”
“It’s not a bad theory. HE seemed to think he was mad. But I think if you could ask him — ”
“That’s not going to happen. Even if they’d let me near him after what happened, the doctors at Mercy don’t like his chances.”
“Well anyway, IF you asked him, I think he’d tell you it was the COLOR that drove him mad. ‘Man was not meant to gaze upon…yadda yadda yadda.’ It’s really just your garden-variety kind of psychosis.”
“Eighteen dead…that’s some nasty garden.”
“The color was a conduit. Old gods. He tried to sacrifice those people to make the voices go away.”
It’s admittedly nothing great, and I didn’t even manage to squeeze all of the prompt-words into it. But sometimes that’s how these writing prompts and forty-minute free-writing exercises play out.
After the writing, we went to see The Avengers. Because, seriously, how were we not? I thought the movie was genuinely terrific and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. I’m not un-tempted to go see it again.
So, anyway, that was Sunday.