The News

The focus this week is on plot and the challenge is to allow your character take a journey , however short, and have an insight on route. Use monologue.

The News

“Not romance or drama. Not Robert Redford.”

What’s left? She hates thrillers and loves Redford. What’s up?

Scrolling across the rent-a-movie screen in Spar he considers her lapsed appointments: dental, hair, eyebrows; lapsed gym membership; couch potato evenings; cancellations; fixation on cat, dog, the lives of their adult children, and the Six One News; and her pallor that is becoming habitual. She’s binned her DVD collection, most of her books, says it’s called the KonMari method of clutter-busting, that she’s in a desert island what would you bring with you mode. The cat, of course, they say.

 Is she ill or clinically depressed? She’s eating, walking, at least as much as ever, and cleaning the house. Cleaning, in fact, has become her default modus operandi. She did that when the son went to New Zealand, compulsive cleaning for six months, and again when her mother died. Redford is still alive, as far as he knows. She’s talking of getting in a professional cleaner and they all wonder what she will do all day. She’s started singing. Hymns. And going to mass again. Her responses, she says, are circa 1973; even the church has moved on. He saw her crying at mass the one time he accompanied her there, just to try and figure out what the big attraction was. She never cries anywhere anymore, but he’s heard her whimpering of late. He thought it was the dog at first or the neighbour and when he went to investigate it stopped, but she was sitting in front of  Caitriona Perry on the box complaining of hay fever. In January? 1973 was the year he jilted her at the altar. What was his name? Jimmy or Joe? Her childhood sweetheart, her Redford lookalike.

 He’d scroll through the obituaries when he got home.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2019