Filed under: Plume, Uncategorized | Tags: Alma, Movie, Mystery, Random, Sci-Fi
A friend of mine emailed me a link to this movie today, telling me to watch it. Being the obliging person I am, I did so. And I’m glad I did. My friend described it as ”subtly terrifying”, and she was right! But it’s intriguing and a pleasure to watch at the same time. As well as being cute. See what she meant?
Filed under: English I, Stories, Uncategorized | Tags: Apocalypse, English, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Stories
May 17, 2010, update: We were assigned to write a portrait of a bedroom for English and this is what I came up with. It’s hard with this kind of thing to walk the line between painfully boring and Gossip Girl dramatic and I guess I decided to err on the side of the drama. Looking back I wish that I had taken the challenge of making a boring room interesting, but too late now.
The window bangs open against the wall behind it, letting in a gust of wind which swirls through the room, ripping a few old newspaper clippings from their places on the wall. The wind subsides and as it does the curtains fall back into place and the clippings come to rest under the bed, whose sheets and blankets are twisted and hanging off the side. The clock on the bedside table flashes 12:00, though the sky outside clearly indicates otherwise. One wall of the room is occupied by an enormous map of Canada with red, blue, and green pins peppering it. The lower left hand corner of the map curls up hiding Vancouver from view. The remaining space on that wall is taken up by a myriad of yellowing and torn newspaper clippings all seemingly completely random—sports scores from twenty years before, an earthquake in Chile, the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker showtimes, an interview with the author of a bestseller, stock market reports from every month since October of 2013, a story detailing the success of a movie released November 13th, 2009.
On the opposite wall above a cluttered desk, hangs a mirror whose face is turned to the wall. Flanking it, are two framed blueprints of what look like The Whitehouse and La Défense. Thrown carelessly across half the desk is a street map of London with a bold red line traced on it in Sharpie. A closer look shows that this line follows Downing Street. The rest of the desk is mess of old gum wrappers, broken pencils, crumpled bits of graph and lined paper, torn computer printouts, several calculators, and a toppled stack of newspapers in several languages. The topmost headline blares: Nuclear Bomb D—but the rest is covered by a long cold cup of coffee in a mug which reads World’s Best Dad on the side.
The desk chair is not in its place before the desk, but instead leans haphazardly against the opposite wall, a crumpled black rain jacket on its seat. Lying beneath one of the chair’s wheels is an eighteen month calendar open to April. Every day before Monday the 27th has a neat black X through it, while the 27th bears a hurried squiggle. A note sticks out from between the pages of a paperback novel which lies face down upon the first week of April.
It begins: Jean, I am taking—
The handle turns and the door opens.
Filed under: Stories, Vocab Stories | Tags: English, Mystery, Stories, Vocabulary
“Ten green bottles, hanging on the wall, and if one green bottle should accidentally fall. . .” a little girl sang softly as she clambered indiscriminately over the grey rocks, her hair whipping about her face in the sea breeze. “There’ll be nine green bottles, hanging on the wall. . . ”
The little girl paused and gazed out to sea. Just at the point where the sparkling, deep blue sea met the bright blue of the sky there was a ship. She watched it, all the while singing the song.
“Seven green bottles, hanging on the wall, and if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’ll be six green bottles, hanging on the wall. . .” Her thin, white summer dress billowed about her legs, rippling in the wind like the waves below her.
“Five green bottles, hanging on the wall. . .” The little girl’s bare feet slipped a bit on the wet rock as she turned to watch the fluttering of a kite on the other side of the rocks. She stretched out her arms on either side of her body to keep her balance, but did not stop singing the song.
“Three green bottles, hanging on the wall. . .” She began scrambling over the rocks once more, going almost on all fours now, as the slope increased. “And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’ll be two green bottles, hanging on the wall.” She crested the rise and stood looking out over the sea and beach on one side, and the mundane little village on the other.
“Two green bottles hanging on the wall, and if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’ll be one green bottle hanging on the wall.” As she sang, she worked her way carefully forward until she stood on the very edge of the rock overlooking the sea. Her countenance brightened as she neared the top. But once there, she looked down at the waves crashing on the rocks below her, and for the first time, her song faltered. This side of the rocks was sheer, not at all like the gradual climb she’d had up the back. The waves lay some fifty feet below her, but she could not take her eyes off them. She raised her voice above the wind to sing and took another step forward in fascination. “One green bottle hanging on the wall, and if that green bottle should accidentally fall. . .”
* * *
At first, everyone inferred that she had just wandered away. No one really worried; the village was small and she couldn’t have gone far. But nobody had seen her.
When the little girl’s hair clip was found on the rocks above the beach, her parents began to panic. What if she’d slipped and. . . ? They called in the police.
A police boat set out to patrol the cliffs with the girl’s parents accompanying them, now resigning themselves to the girl’s fate.
They found her body lying broken on the rocks. Her dress was soaking and torn from the sea spray and rocks. Blood covered her forehead and seeped from her side, in harsh juxtaposition to the pale white of her skin and dress. Her father stood soberly as the mother buried her head in his coat and wept as the police searched the body and the area surrounding it.
Nothing else was found on the beach except an old green glass bottle. It was brought to the sergeant in charge and he used his pen-knife to dig the cork out of the bottle’s neck. Inside was a crisp, white sheet of paper with one sentence written upon it.
There’ll be no more bottles hanging on the wall.
The police could make nothing of it and decided that it was a mere coincidence. One young officer, new to the force, was reminded of the old childhood song, Ten Green Bottles, but he did not mention it to his superiors, for fear of being laughed at. And anyway, he told himself, it doesn’t matter.
