We're lying in bed and my small toe hurts. Brian is watching "Law and Order" on his laptop and I've put down my reading because there's something about lights and moving pictures that make it impossible to look away. Outside the door, Hope's cats are running up and down the hall, thumps and gallops and half-Siamese yowls. The yowls are all Phoenix. Theodore is the Harpo of the two.
"Am I in trouble?" a suspect asks, and the camera cuts to a technician taking fingerprints off a paper cup.
The flowers on my nightstand have wilted.
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3 comments:
This is cool. I like the in the moment quality.
the power is in the last line.
"petals on a wet black bough"
I concur with Momeester.
For me the "in the moment" quality peaks at the moment of grand suspense located in the cut from the suspect to the technician, making the petals a fortunate anticlimax, a looking back in sorrow, as it were, to the scene of the possible crime.
And then we're left hanging. Always a fine narrative trick.
(So, "off the record," WAS he in trouble? Sympathy for the Bad Guy is easily elicited in Crime Dramas like this one. Although I did catch myself asking if in addition to whatever the fingerprints may have also implicated him in, could the poor fellow have, while using being on tv as an alibi, snuck in and poisoned the flowers as well?)
Confidential to Tom: the Bad Guy was found not guilty by reason of mental defect after intrepid detectives discovered that he had lead poisoning from having chewed on 'made in China' toy cars as a child. This apparently made him prone to bashing in skulls when frustrated.
The flowers died peacefully in their sleep.
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