It’s a snowy night, and Melissa wakes up to the sound of scraping. The ice has accumulated on her neighbor’s car. Swoosh, scrape. Swoosh, scrape. Why does he do this every night? Where does he go? He’s old. He should stay in bed. Melissa doesn’t have to look at the clock to know that it’s 2 am. She slips her cold, narrow feet into woolen socks and goes downstairs where the moon shines through the trees, flooding the kitchen with a bright white light.
For weeks, Melissa has been sorting through stacks of slides that her mother, dead for so long, had stored in the attic. Pictures from trips to Thailand. Waving from the Great Wall of China, holding chopsticks laden with odd-looking food precariously balanced. Clutching the hand of her second husband on their yearly cruise to the Bahamas. Jaunts in his rickety old Cadillac to the heights of Maine.
Now she hears the turning of her neighbor’s engine, the backing up of his car onto the street, where his tires spin until he gets enough traction to drive up the hill.
She has moved from the slides to the video taken from her days as a young mother. There’s a section on one that she plays over and over. Play, stop, rewind. Play, stop, rewind. What is she looking for?
There are her little girls, pleading for candy, to which she is shaking her head no. There is her husband with the birthday cake he made, the messily wrapped presents, the dinner plates not yet cleared, the bottle of soy sauce blocking the face of her youngest child, who is eating raisins one by one. Normally, Melissa stops the tape here and rewinds to the candy, but this time she lets it run and sees her father enter the room. He kisses her girls. It’s the past, yet there he is right in front of her, past made present, her father, whom she has not seen in thirty-odd years, alive. She rewinds the tape to see it again. Play, stop, rewind. Play, stop, rewind.
Had she really believed life would always be like that? And what of her father, whose life also underwent unexpected change, whose ex-wife was now, at the time of the taping, driving on some old Western highway with her retired railroad engineer for a husband, stopping for trinkets at roadside stands? Did her father see signs of discontent in her life as he sat down at the table to join them in the singing of Happy Birthday?
Melissa walks to the window where the moon still kindles the room. She hears her neighbor’s car coming down the hill, the engine shutting off. She sees him look up at the sky. Is he also looking for answers? Will the light of the moon illuminate these things for him and for her? Or is it all just repetition? We live, we celebrate, we forget. And then we do it all over again.
My love of writing began in high school, reading Joyce, Steinbeck, and others. I majored in film and spent much of my career in television news. The challenge in film editing is both how to tell that story and who should tell it. These questions arise in writing as well.