--I'M A LOT STRONGER THAN YOU THINK

…I have two new stories up at Solarcide and one more Friday:

…I saw “Argo” yesterday and it was about as I’d anticipated: a strong movie with great acting.  B+.  Ben Affleck has turned into a quite a director and he pulls off an appropriately restrained acting effort.  See it.

My guess is it’ll be up for an Academy Award but that Lincoln will win Best Pic and Best Actor.

…I watched a disturbing program about child/teen abductions.

One girl was taken inside her home and no one knows how or who and it’s been years.
Another was a college-aged girl who went missing after bar-hopping and seeing some friends.  The last people to see her have lawyered up and refuse to talk any more than they legally have to.
Perhaps the most disturbing was about a girl, twenty-something, who’s been missing for a few years now.  The girl’s parents get all kinds of prank phone calls.  One person called and just kept repeating, “Mom?  Mom?”  Who does that?  Why?  Other times, people called up and just screamed or said, “I killed her!”  It’s hard to fathom how any human could do such a thing to another person.

…A friend sent me an article about this man with cancer who was only supposed to have six months to live.  He moved to some Greek island to be with his family in his last days.
But his cancer disappeared and it’s now been 30 plus years since his fatal diagnosis.  I borrowed the idea and the article’s title and wrote this:
 

                                          The Island Where People Forget To Die

 

            She wanted to be forever young and so she moved to The Island Where People Forget To Die.  It was in the tropics with brightly flocked macaws and squirrely little monkeys that laughed at you for no reason whatsoever.

            Before this the cancer inside her felt like a large bowl of steel, invisible yet heavy filling her gut, making walking difficult, causing her to rasp if she spoke.

            But on the island paradise melted the cancer.  She knew this because she felt spry and light.  For a few weeks her urine was dark, coffee-colored yet she did not become frightened because she understood that she was merely, and literally, pissing the cancer out of her system.

            There was no electricity on the island and the last call she made with her cell phone before the battery died was to her family back in the states.  They’d been worried about her, but became elated when they heard the news of her recovery.  They called it a miracle, and she agreed.

            In time, boats arrived, stuffed with all sort of maligned and diseased people.  Each of them—the blind and lame and infected—were cured.  After a while, perfectly healthy folks showed up, greedy to live beyond their allotted years.  Condominiums and Hotels were erected.  Roads were paved.  Shops built.  A localized regime was established with a constitution.

            In a short span, The Island Where People Forget To Die became so massively congested that new inhabitants were turned away dismissively.  Then a fleet of warships arrived, looming shore-side like large walls of steel, blocking both sky and sun.  

            Using homemade catapults and roughhewn spears, the island’s tenants fought back.  But it was no use because the enemy was the Federal Government.  Naval vessels fired missiles and bombs, so many that the island at once went up in flames and those who did not burn to death were forced into the ocean where the current caught them, if not many of the menacing sharks.

            In the water the woman floated on her back.  She drowned out the cacophony of bonfire noises and screams, drowned out the shrieking pleas for help and violent cursing.

            It’s better this way, she thought.  The end of something means all that came before is real and of value.