personal

During the middle of the night, the rain rolled in and melted almost all of yesterday’s snow. And while it wasn’t necessarily warm out today, it was a stark contrast to yesterday’s winter weather.

I’m feeling much better today, although all the more convinced that I should take it easier with the drinking, even if it is only once a year, and even it was only four watered-down drinks.

I spent the day like I would most any Sunday, though I threw caution to the wind and decided not to trim my beard, like I usually do each week. I think that’s how I know I’m actually on vacation, by allowing myself to get grizzled. I don’t think two weeks is enough time to go full mountain-man, but there’s definitely a certain pleasure in not shaving. It may be the sole reason I have a beard in the first place.

With all the snow gone, driving wasn’t any problem, so I had my weekly writing group again. I’m not entirely thrilled with what I came up with, spurred by a random prompt picked from online, but mostly because I have no idea where it’s going:

The shop had been closed for a week, maybe more, locked tight against vandals, though there weren’t likely to be any. The rest of the stores on Main Street had seen bricks tossed through boarded-up windows, ominous warnings graffiti’ed on the walls outside, but the antiques shop was curiously untouched, almost pristine, as if the gangs that had done the rest of this damage were somehow frightened of it, had decided to steer clear of the shop and the narrow alley that adjoined it and the Chinese take-out place next door. The books and lamps and jewelry that normally filled the front window display had been removed, a thin metal grate pulled down in their place, but the glass behind that was all in one piece, one of the few windows on the street that had survived this past week, and the only storefront that looked like it might just be closed for the night. Already the Chinese restaurant’s door had been pried open, the interior ransacked and the spray-paint leading a trail of angry words down the street, and the rest of the town felt also abandoned and already crumbling from neglect and decay.

But not the antiques shop. Sam watched it from the shadows of the small park across the street. Its proprietor had left with everyone else, a panicked flight that had left little time to do more than lock doors and slap boards across windows, and in that flight there had been nothing to distinguish the antiques shop or Mr. Barlow from the rest. Just a kindly old man forced out of town with everyone else by forces that none of them could understand. If he hadn’t been stranded here — hadn’t been left here with them — Sam might have believed it, too. But Sam had been here when the gangs arrived; even if he didn’t yet fully understand where they had come from, even if he had spent most of this week running and hiding from the gangs, there was one thing that he knew for sure: it had been Mr. Barlow who’d come out to greet them.

The gangs weren’t quite human, though they seemed to speak English well enough, and the markings they had left around town were crude but legible enough to Sam. From a distance, the gangs — who were never in a group smaller than four — appeared almost like men. But closer up, and especially in the light of day they seemed to most often shun, it was clear that they were not. It had been their arrival that had forced everyone else in town to run, but everyone else were the lucky ones as far as Sam was concerned. He could make it to the border, or the police station, or any of a dozen other places, but there were few spots not under the watchful eye of the brutal gangs.

Sam hadn’t been the only one trapped here in the town, but he was determined not to end up like the others.

The first thing he needed to do, he thought, was to get inside that antiques shop.

I’m making much better progress on a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It got a little sidetracked this week by editing I needed to do for Kaleidotrope, but I’m hoping to get back into with the next two weeks wide open.

Tonight, though, I think I’m going to watch a movie. I was very sad to hear that Peter O’Toole had passed this weekend. He was a phenomenal talent, and Lawrence of Arabia is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time. (Its one fault, which may be a fault by design, is that there is not a single female character in it.) I’m thinking of watching Becket, which I’ve never seen, but which promises to be quite good.

And that was/will be Sunday.