Val Takes on the Movie Business

I'm starting a new subgenre of horror movie. No more walking undead for me. Get comfortable on your couch. Make sure you have a blanket to hide under during the unbearably scary parts. You might even want to leave the lights on. And make sure you heed the warning before the opening credits: If you are pregnant, have pain or injuries in your back or neck, or have a heart condition, you should not watch this movie. Okay. Everybody set? Got the popcorn and SnoCaps and Diet Coke within reach? Let's roll it.

THE UNRESTED


A woman lolls in a cheap blue recliner in front of a big-screen TV in a dark basement. Her mouth sags open. A hideous sound emanates from her nasal cavities. The plain, school-issue-looking clock on the wall shows 12:50. The woman startles awake. She sees a local chief meteorologist on the big screen, crying gloom and doom about a wave of severe thunderstorms. "Hmm...I think I'll just stay up a few more minutes and see I'm going to die tonight."


The clock strikes four. No. It's a cheap clock. The big hand moves to the twelve, while the little hand stays on four. "Gosh! I need to get to bed. I have to get up in fifty minutes." The woman shuffles upstairs. As she rounds the newel post, objects crash on the children's end of the house. She slides her feet along the carpet, hair on the back of her neck on end. An unkind person might say her hackles are up. In the dim light of the 25-watt bulbs her husband insists on using, both boys lay sleeping. Nothing is out of place. The bathroom gives up no secrets.


The woman dresses for bed. Where she remains awake until 4:35, thoughts of tornadoes and night bumpings dancing in her head. At the alarm, she rises to begin her day. Unrested.


Objects slip through her fingers with ruthless abandon. If she was Rooster Cogburn's son, Horace, she might have broke forty cup. At work, a colleague asks if she's okay. "You really don't look good." She muddles on. 


A discussion ensues with the class that wishes for a society with no rules. "How come you say there is no smoking on school property, yet we see a million cigarette butts out back?"


"Well. It's probably from adults going outside to smoke during basketball games."

"Then you can't say there is no smoking on school grounds."

"I can say anything I want. The fact that people smoke when they shouldn't does not change the rule. What do you think will happen, the police will show up to arrest the smokers?"


"I don't know. But you can't say there's a law against smoking on school property."


"There's a law against driving without a driver's license. But you sit here and talk about driving. And you don't have your license. Does that mean the law does not exist? I think not."


With order restored, the woman abandons the sandwich she brought for lunch, and repasts on hard-as-a-rock grilled cheese, and mini ravioli. The day goes downhill from there. She bandies words over the difference between a mouse in a Big Mac bun bag, as opposed to a rat. Which requires pictorial evidence of the Foot Locker rat in the Bronx, a capybara, and a nutria. In a totally unrelated incident in a later class, she is asked if she would like to see "my skink's tongue." Well of course. For the record, the skink's tongue is navy blue. In contrast to the orange babyfood it is lapping up. The woman's day is capped off with a horrendous cartwheeling near-face-plant after stubbing her toe on the leg of a wayward chair that a student insists on shoving into the main back-of-the-room thoroughfare.


After sleepdriving home like Clark Griswold in the Family Truckster after crossing from Illinois into Missouri, but without causing a pedestrian to yank a little fluffy dog to safety with its leash, the woman whips up some sustenance for her family, and retires to her office to write a script for her new horror subgenre: The Unrested.