1. “By the cool blue light of our television screens”
2. “Drone”
I finished up a zero-draft this evening. Banged out the final two paragraphs:
The man next door, who’s name is Todd, has been over twice to borrow something. Once a measuring cup, which Simmons couldn’t find while Todd stood in the living room and the next time flour. Got some chick baking me cupcakes. Gonna eat her cakes when I’m done eating her cakes, if you know what I mean. Simmons knew exactly what he meant and forced a laugh. “I hear ya,” he said. It was not that night he first started with the cats. It was not while he sat in his bedroom and listened to the antic sex from next door, nor was it the next morning when the girl slammed Todd’s front door and jogged down the driveway clutching her shoes and some other clothes to her chest. It was not after Todd emerged from his apartment wearing nothing but boxers and a pair of sunglasses and scratched at his chest before lighting a cigarette and standing on the slim front porch as if he owned it and all that surrounded them. It was not after Todd said, Chicks and Simmons forced a nod as if he understood, and it was not after Todd returned the flour nearly empty and left not long after in his shiny silver BMW. Simmons didn’t stat with the cats until the next night, when the silence and absence of his next door neighbor allowed him to think, when he wasn’t able to lose himself in the books, and he wasn’t able to sleep. It was only then that he went out in the late night and patrolled his neighborhood by bike, finding cats and noting the locations of fenced dogs. It was only then when he patrolled the neighborhood and found cats with collars and tags and noted the addresses, and only then that he picked up his first cat and hurled it onto the asphalt. And it was only when the cat tried to crawl away, unable to see, it’s front legs barely working that Simmons picked it up and slammed it again to the concrete, over and over until it stopped moving. And it was only then that he hid his bike and cradled the dead cat in his arms and found the house listed on the cat’s collar. And only then, when someone finally came and opened the door that he sank to his knees and confessed to accidentally hitting the cat with his car, and only then that he cried and laid the cat on the doorstep and begged and begged for their forgiveness. It was only then he could sleep again.
“Do I dream?” He asks his friends, the food, the air around them. “Nah, man. I don’t dream for nothing.”
It’s about war.
Tomorrow I’ll print it, read it through and see where I stand. Then it’s time for the real first draft.
