personal

Something like a Sunday

A quiet Sunday at the old homestead, toiling away at the Sunday crossword and watching the end of the first season of The Killing. And I wrote this:

They found her in Popular Fiction, hands tied behind her back, slumped against the back wall, her head resting against the bottom of a hand-drawn poster advertising the library bookmobile’s hours and locations. She might have been sleeping, as restful as she seemed, which is what Georgina Shaw thought when she first spotted the girl from the circulation desk that morning. Georgina liked to come in early on Saturdays, especially over the summer when the library closed early on weekends, and she had just started to turn on the overhead lights and boot up her computer when she noticed the body on the floor at the end of the long row of book-filled shelves. She knew right away it was a girl; her husband sometimes joked that her eyesight was failing her, that she was blind as Mr. Magoo without her glasses, but there was no mistaking what she was seeing now. “What are you — ” Georgina started to say. “You can’t be — ” And she was all ready to scold the girl — thinking that later she would share some of that scolding with Robert, who had obviously left the back door of the library unlocked again last night — when she noticed the blood.

Later, she would learn from the police — or maybe it was from the newspapers, she couldn’t remember which — that the blood loss had been the chief cause of death. Blunt force trauma — and god, Georgina would think, there was a phrase — to the head. It was a head that had looked so peaceful from a distance, so undamaged in profile, but that hid the ugly splashes of red that had by that morning already started to dry to the bottom of the poster, the carpet, and the wall. Georgina had missed the killer by what, maybe an hour? If she hadn’t stopped for her morning coffee, would things have been any different? Would the girl still be alive? Would Georgina have been killed as well?

It wasn’t any good thinking about those kinds of things. The police, anyway, were more interested in the more obvious, more easily answered questions. Did any of the library staff recognize the girl? How many people had access to the building overnight? Had they noticed anyone or anything suspicious in the days or weeks leading up to the murder?

Because that’s what it obviously was, a murder. The brutality with which she’d been killed might have been momentarily obscured by the quiet setting, the deceptive tenderness with which she’d been posed, but this was obviously murder. Georgina didn’t recognize her, nor did any of the other Saturday staff, although the detectives would want to question the rest, the students who came in on afternoons to restock shelves or run the computer center. And of course Robert, the caretaker, who…where was he anyway? Georgina wondered. He was never in later than ten, even in August. She didn’t think…

So, you know, a normal Sunday.

Such a Saturday as this

I didn’t do a whole lot today, beyond send out some Kaleidotrope acceptances — a cent a word really starts to add up, doesn’t it? — and finish re-watching Torchwood: Children of Earth. This latter was partly in anticipation of the upcoming new episodes, but also just because I’d recently re-watched most of the second season. (I gave “From Out of the Rain” a miss the second time around.)

I also went for a walk. Somehow, this not much of anything filled up a whole day.

Friday

I got to work early this morning, but I got to leave early too, thanks to the long 4th of July weekend.

In between, I had a pretty typical day.

Stay hungry

My parents came home from Ireland this afternoon, after two weeks of touring the country on vacation. They came home bearing photos and stories and gifts, although I think the dog was unimpressed with all three, disappointed they only returned with a single dog toy.

Me, I spent the day at work, as one does on a Thursday. My train this morning was delayed by about ten minutes, and then the connecting train they told us would be waiting…wasn’t. Nor were any of the other trains to the same destination they kept announcing (on track mumble mumble mumble) at Jamaica. So after going up and down the stairs, I finally decided to catch the next train to Penn Station, and either walk or take the subway from there. I’ve had bad luck with the subway from Penn Station before, spending my $2.25 to climb up to a platform where I couldn’t even stand, much less get onto a train. But today I managed to arrive at work only about fifteen minutes late. And since I’d been planning on arriving about fifteen minutes early, I guess it all worked out. Although there’s no love lost between me and the Long Island Railroad.

Other than that, it was a pretty average day. I finished reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which I really liked. Very minor spoilers follow. It’s not brilliant, and maybe sometimes a little inelegant, but it’s a very readable and at times even thrilling book. It’s also a YA novel about teenagers being forced to fight each other to the death, in sometimes graphic(ish) detail, so it’s not hard to see why it’s given some people pause. But overall, I liked it, and I went ahead and bought the sequels. The first book comes to a reasonably satisfying conclusion, but it definitely feels unfinished.

And that was Thursday.