writing

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.

I don’t quite know what happened to today. I woke up pretty early, did the Sunday crossword (on my iPad, which is nice if not quite the same as on paper), and the rest of the day is kind of a blur. Oh, I bought a couple of small oscillating fans, having thoroughly failed to get the air conditioner working again. I found an owner’s manual, which might even be the owner’s manual, but it didn’t suggest anything I could easily check that I haven’t already. (The filter is clean.)

This afternoon, with my semi-regular writing group, I penned this (also on the iPad):

High in orbit, out of range of most of the ground crew’s instrumentation, but near enough to keep the top floors of Central’s main offices in a perpetual semi-shade, the Candle sat tethered in dry-dock. If you wanted to, you could call it a ship, although there was nothing nautical about its design or function, and it held no crew beyond its on-board computer, and it ferried no passengers save one. This passenger you could have called anything you wanted, and no doubt the records of Central were full of its many official designations, but the one thing you would not have been tempted to call it, despite a passing (and unsettling) resemblance, was a man.

Lopez had been a man once. Buried beneath pages of schematics, Army blueprints bequeathed to Central in that moment when the project first seemed to turn sour, you would have discovered not only his name and vital statistics — age, height and weight, hair and eye color — but also the rank and serial number he had held before being volunteered for the project, and long before the Candle had ever taken flight.

Now he was no one. He was half-jokingly called Mean Mr. Mustard among the ground crew, although they rarely saw him nowadays, and they were almost never called to service the computer that sustained him, the computer that, in years past, would have connected him to what some of the higher-ups still hazily remembered as the Net. Both he and it were now seldom glimpsed relics. It was true, his skin was jaundiced and sickly — a side-effect as much of the project’s early pharmacological stages as the now half-decade he had been integrated into the decaying (and itself yellowing) hull of the Candle — but it was surprising how quickly the nickname had stuck and how long it had lasted.

But there was no great fondness in it, and everyone knew Lopez had outlived his usefulness — if the abandoned Army project could ever have been called useful. So it was with only a little shock, and almost no rush to act, that the ground crew noted the sight of the Candle, sinking from its geostationary orbit and drawing closer, burning at both ends.

We decided to give Green Lantern a miss.