What's on the telly!

I walk into a room. There's a television. On the screen a woman is crying, her face all creased and wet and the ink in her eyes dripping. She's saying something vague about life. She appears to be at a turning point and the camera is there to witness the revelation. The shot cuts but her voice continues weak and relentless. The next shot is of her again, a wider shot, a different time and place. The eye of the camera is at her back as she shuffles through a department store. She's wearing a skull cap with wires attached to a box that looks like a car battery at her waist and a gaudy waistcoat. She grabs at clothes, every item spasms with colour as she lurches amongst the racks. The wires move oddly atop her head, responding to her irregular gait. Like branches. The shot cuts again. Her voice has stopped but I hadn't noticed, I notice now as a it is replaced by a more demanding intrusive one. Assertive, this voice asserts itself. Graphs appear; a parade of science. A line representing her brain activity, like earth quakes. The shot cuts back to her face, a daughter is resting a supportive hand on one sloped shoulder. The daughter looks like her mother but younger, but only just. The daughter watches her crumpled dishwater mother weep and smiles because at least now she's realized. What an awful waste of space she has let herself become. The camera cuts back to her lost amongst the racks of clothes, the skull cap apparatus, the bewildered face.

HOT.

Hello.

nice.

McCARTHY.

"The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was."

oh yes. McCarthy.