Today was a pretty normal day, spent mostly not finishing the Sunday crossword, then joining my weekly writing group in Huntington. I had been planning on driving my own car, like normal, when I discovered a giant crack along the length of the windshield. Thanks to last weekend’s trip to Maryland for my sister’s birthday, plus all the snow and ice that happened subsequently, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve driven my car. So I don’t know exactly how long the crack has been there, and I can only guess that it was caused by the lousy weather. I’m off tomorrow, for an early morning doctor’s appointment, so I’m going to see about getting it fixed. What fun.
Meanwhile, this evening, I re-watched Clash of the Titans, with the Rifftrax commentary. They made a noble effort, Mike, Kevin, and Bill, but that’s one movie that just can’t really be improved. It’s funny, though, seeing all the characters who were clearly meant to be important but who have such minor, inconsequential roles in the final film. Like, oh, the gods. Looking at the IMDB cast list is an exercise in bewilderment, as you discover lots of names you didn’t even know were in the movie. I suspect they cut two, maybe even three other crappy films in editing.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote in today’s writing group. We used this writing prompt from my friend Maurice, for our regular forty-minute free-writing exercise:
Bill’s mother was angry when he chopped down the tree in the front yard. He salted the earth, burned what was left of the wood, and then scattered the ashes at the crossroads a full mile from home. Bill’s mother was angry; she had always loved that oak tree; she could gaze at it from their kitchen window, and she and Bill’s father had carved their initials in its sturdy trunk the week they first bought the house. Bill agreed his actions might seem a little like overkill, that they might in fact defy understanding. But this was the only way he knew to make sure the telepath army from the future left him alone. This was the only way to keep those telekinetic bastards at bay. Surely his mother could understand that?
It had been difficult, this past year, for Bill’s mother. The doctors kept assuring her that, despite appearances, the tumor was ultimately benign; it was responding well to radiation, had been shrinking, sloughing off from the rest of the brain tissue. Bill should start experiencing less severe headaches, less frequent nausea, less vivid hallucinations. The time-traveling mind-readers from Earth Alpha Prime he had imagined, the murderous soldiers from 2385 who had been hounding him for more than a year, would start to pose less of a problem. The doctors assured Bill and his mother that the prognosis was good.
In the meantime, though, she was out a tree; Bill was still acting erratic, and the neighbors were starting to talk. And, waning hallucinations or not, that didn’t make the telepath army any less real.
They had been seen mostly in town so far; they had staged only a few excursions out here to the farm, for what Bill’s mother could have only described as reconnaissance. Why they had settled on Bill as their enemy — or future leader; it was never clear from their occasional talk which he was supposed to be — she couldn’t have said, except that they were ultimately his paranoid delusions, brought into being by his tumor, so why shouldn’t he be their driving focus? They kept mostly to themselves, had arrived en masse back in late October, and only very rarely displayed any of the future technology that Bill — or rather, his doctors had told her, his brain tumor — insisted made them so dangerous.
I knew a guy in Denver who said his windshield cracked from the weight of the snow after a particularly deep snowfall. You might have experienced the same thing, given the past several weeks.
It’s the only explanation that makes any real sense.