writing

I go back to work in a couple of days, which I still find rather difficult to believe. I haven’t been in the office since December 14, which on the one hand seems like just yesterday. It’s going to be a strange transition going back.

But that’s not until Wednesday, a whole new year from now. Today, I mostly just did the crossword puzzle, went with my father to Lowe’s to pick up a couple of space heaters — dear lord do they work — and joined my weekly writing group. This is what three short prompts, two of which I didn’t even work in, netted me:

I don’t remember where I was the day the world first ended. I’m lucky I even remember who I was.

I couldn’t have been too close to the blast radius. Scientists, the few that are left, say the epicenter was somewhere a few miles north of Moscow, where most of the changed men have been found, where most of the dead were first risen. I woke up, after it first happened, someplace in Finland. I didn’t remember how I’d got there, or much of anything, really; I only knew I wasn’t Finnish myself, judging by my inability to read any of the road signs, or decipher the map I found folded in my jacket pocket, or make sense of the panicked shouts that accompanied my stumbling approach to the nearest town. The townspeople hadn’t been changed, not from what I could tell, but we must have still been well within the path of the first shockwaves, since they seemed even more disoriented than me.

There are symptoms of the blast, telltale signs. Those of us who have, as it were, survived have been warned in the year or two since the event that we must always be watchful. The changed men and the dead who walk are not the only dangers in this new world, and there are few places, if any, that are still safe. The closer you get to the blast radius, where the worst of those things first fell to Earth, the more you have to watch.

I didn’t know that in Finland. That was still only just days, or for all I know just hours, since the event, and I’d been close enough to still feel shaky on my feet. I knew my name, and what seemed like a few central facts, even if none of those involved how I’d got there, or what exactly had happened to us all since. I didn’t know about the change then, or about the dead, and wouldn’t still for days, but if I’d known even half of what I do now, even guessed at it, I’d have turned and run from that town without a second thought.

It’s not quite a story, but there could be something there.

Then tonight, I watched (or re-watched, actually) the surprisingly well-executed Tomorrow Never Dies. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but in the ways that a Bond movie should be. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite that much fun, even if I did remember liking the scene with the remote-controlled car.

And that was Sunday.

Today was my regular free-writing group. This is what a few writing prompts and forty minutes netted me:

“I don’t want to alarm you,” says One, “but I think the planet is talking to us.”

“It’s not a planet,” says Two. He adjusts a flashing green knob, then another, on the small console in front of them both, then flips a series of switches in what might be carefully timed precision or might be random (and meaningless) choice. He stares up at the screen pinned to the wall above them, gray and crackling with static, then throws One the sort of look usually reserved for the village idiot.

“It’s a moon,” he says. “That’s what Three has always been. We’re on a moon, in orbit of the planet below, not the other way around.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it’s talking to us,” says One. “A talking moon isn’t any less strange than a talking planet, you know.”

Two stares at him again, although this time his anger is tempered with might be concern or compassion, or maybe just mild surprise. In the dim light of the control room, One has trouble reading the other man’s face. Two flips another series of switches — the console is a jumble of levers and switches and gauges, none of which make the least bit of sense to One — then whacks the side of the console with the back of his hand. He throws his whole weight behind him as he pushes against a heavy dial that doesn’t budge, and One has the sudden image of a man trying to paddle off from shore, his boat run aground in the rocks of the riverbed, all his efforts wasted and exhausting just to watch. The screen on the wall is still nothing but static, but One thinks there might be a shape underneath all that gray hiss, some kind of image trying to resolve itself, come into focus; but he also thinks Two is likely to collapse from exertion before either of them have any clue what that shape is supposed to be.

“You’re saying you really don’t remember?” says Two. There’s sweat on his brow, and he mops at it with the back of one hand. “You don’t remember coming here a year ago, or anything that’s happened since? You don’t remember when I got here, or when Three downloaded himself into the moon?”

One just stares.

“No,” he says. “Am I supposed to remember that? As far as I know, I just got here.”

Now Two is obviously worried, and seems about to say something, but suddenly the dial spins around madly, a bank of lights starts flashing on the console, and the shape on the screen becomes a large and grinning face.

And there’s no time to explore any of the things One is curious about.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

This evening, I watched Carrie, which I’ve been meaning to watch for a good long while. It’s a strange movie to be watching in 2012, almost forty years after it was first made. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a little dated, occasionally silly, and frequently way over the top, Brian De Palma style. Or that it’s so entered the lexicon of film, particularly of horror, that it’s all but impossible to be surprised by anything that happens in the movie. Its most indelible scenes and images — the opening in the girls’ locker room, the prom, the ending — are so familiar even to those of us who’ve never seen the film, that sometimes, watching it, it can feel like we’re just filling in a few of the lesser missing pieces. And yet…there’s no denying that some of those images are incredible, or that Sissy Spacek is really great as Carrie White. (She and Piper Laurie were both nominated that year, for this film, for Academy Awards.) The film is far from perfect, and I think the decades since have maybe only helped to underline those imperfections, to turn it into a few effective clips rather than a full-length movie. But it’s still, maybe surprisingly, worth watching.

And that was my Sunday. Is it really the Sunday before Christmas already?

Oh, and the dog is obviously feeling much better. He’s maybe a little put out by the fact that my sister’s dog is suddenly here — will apparently be here for Christmas, of all things — but he’s otherwise back to his old self.

Yesterday was a bit of a wash, really. I watched the disappointing James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only and just hung around the house, still kind of recovering from Friday afternoon. Today, though, my weekly writing group started back up again, at least for a little while, and I cobbled together this:

When the hurricane came through, the dead wizard came back to life and the ghost hunter was finally released from prison.

You probably have already heard this story, or at least a part of it. The governors of Eld were quick to classify what they could, to quarrantine the northern hills where the storm did its worst, but the basic facts escaped their net. There are few across the great expanse of worlds who have not heard about the wizard, Dead Man Jack, or about the woman, Maribel, the would-be hunter who was forced to kill her father twice.

And yet it’s a story that deserves to be re-told, I think, and this time told beyond the basic facts. I can’t pretend to any special knowledge; I wasn’t on the hills that day, and I wouldn’t even make planetfall on Eld for another week, by which point Maribel and Jack both would be long gone. I was not called here to investigate their crimes, nor to root out the cause of the still as yet unexplained storm. I was just another constable, young and naive and fresh from basic on Eld’s sister moon, Brahms — and yet, as a constable, I did have access to reports I might never have seen otherwise. Reports the governors have long kept secret. I know Jack’s real name, for instance, or at least the one that supposedly brought him back to life, and I think, after all these years, I know where he and his daughter disappeared to. The answers have been there all along on the page. It’s just that so few of us have been encouraged to look at those pages.

Dead Man Jack. He was called that long before the first time he died, long before he had even registered himself as a wizard. The official term, of course, is “technomage,” but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound even sillier than “wizard,” which is what everyone on Eld knew Jack to be. He wasn’t much of one, from all accounts, either not given to show or incapable of it. If it wasn’t for his daughter, and the strange circumstances of her birth, it’s almost certain no one would have remembered Jack before the year of the hurricane.

Then I came home and watched The Stuff, which was interesting but also pretty disappointing.

And that, plus the crossword puzzle and some dreary rain, was my Sunday.