Brilliant movie idea (Part 2 of 10)

(A few years back I started to write an odd/comedic movie idea down. Every day I would add a small scene and see where it went. It went nowhere. Now it is going nowhere again because I’m on vacation this week and need to fill up the days. Plus, there has been an uptick of Hollywood-types nosing around the website and I’d like to make it perfectly clear that I’m NOT blockbuster material. Enjoy.)

Patti couldn’t help but feel that this was Clay’s fault as she took a quick walk around the neighborhood. She stopped knocking on doors after the first half dozen and then started screaming at the top her lungs. It wasn’t a cry for help as much as frustration leaking out.

“People don’t just disappear. Maybe one person, but not everyone” she thought to herself.

She imagined an endless line of milk cartons each one featuring a picture of everyone in the world. Everyone gets a carton. If a carton is eight inches wide and there are seven billion people on the planet it would mean that the dairy section of the grocery store would need to circle the Earth thirty six times.

“Is that right?” she asked herself aloud. She was good at math but given her emotional state she wondered how a store could circles the Earth more than once.

She screamed again. She wasn’t sure if her math was correct, eight hundred and ninety thousand miles of milk cartons seemed a bit excessive, and she wondered if building a super market that was thirty six stories tall and spanned both oceans would be feasible.

She sat down in the middle of the street and admired the cloudless sky.

“What a beautiful day for everything to have come crashing down.”

Denise started packing. Hearing the sound of another person’s voice was the first comforting thing that had happened all day. She had reacted poorly upon realizing that she was alone in Chicago. Once it soaked in she had returned to her apartment and filled her bathtub with water. Somewhere she’d read that it’s important in times of crisis to have a bathtub full of water. People die much quicker from dehydration than from lack of food.

She had called her mother but nobody picked up. That didn’t stop her mother laughing at her for filling up the tub. She could hear her mom’s voice in her head and she had to laugh a little as well.

“What are you going to do with a tub full of water?”

Her sister didn’t answer. None of her friends picked up. Finally she reached somebody.

Clay.

Just hearing his voice stopped her from going crazy. She wasn’t alone anymore. On top of that, it was Clay. Things hadn’t worked out between them but they had remained close. He was the kind of guy that made a much better friend than lover. If she had to be stuck in a world with only one man she could do worse.

Adam and Eve and Patti.

She filled a bag with some clothes and necessary items and made for her car. The bathtub of water be damned, she had a long drive ahead of her. She would tell Clay she was coming when she was on the road.

Tina started to cry. It was like an apocalyptic movie without the apocalypse. The first thing she’d done was call some of her more horrible friends just to make sure that this wasn’t some religious event where all the good people were taken and all the bad people were left to be tormented by demons or their own guilt. She was almost relieved when her friend Brad didn’t pick up his phone. There was no deity on Earth that would let Brad into some eternal shindig so she checked Judgment Day off the list of possible scenarios.

Now as she got into her car for the hour long drive to the suburbs of Philadelphia it was starting to sink in. If this had really happened, which she still wasn’t sure of, what did it mean? Was reality broken?

Perhaps she’d gone crazy. She imagined a scenario where she was walking by everyone as if they weren’t there and she was suddenly nervous about driving … what if the other cars really were there and she was just going to go smashing into them?

The static from the radio added a spooky soundtrack to an already creepy situation. Finally, after some searching, she was able to find an Adult Contemporary station that obviously had been programmed ahead of time and would be spewing out soft rock until it ran out of steam. She wondered if the owners of the station would have been ashamed that perhaps the last song to be played in the Southern New Jersey/Greater Philadelphia area was likely to be “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell.

Wondering why her subconscious singled out Soft Cell for such abuse she started to hum the song. Like so many bad songs, it tries to hide its terribleness by including a snippet of a good song. Before she knew it she was humming “Where Did Our Love Go?”

And before she knew it she was thinking about Clay.

She pushed down harder on the accelerator and smiled for the first time that day.

Samantha couldn’t get back to sleep after being awakened by the loudest thunder she’d ever heard. She’d only been asleep for a few hours to begin with so once her eyes had opened she’d cursed and knew she was in for a long night.

She had interviewed for a new job weeks ago and they had not gotten back to her with a decision. She was a perfect fit and everyone seemed to like her but still there had been no offer. Usually pretty laid back, she was feeling a stress level she was unfamiliar with. The new job would be a turning point for her career and she knew it.

Eventually she got out of bed and went to the small patio that jutted out of the building six floors up. She slid open the door and felt the cool breeze against her bare legs and arms. She loved the city at night. Without the beeping of horns and sirens it almost felt like home. She sat in a worn folding chair and debated whether or not to make herself a cup of tea. Instead she leaned back, closed her eyes and enjoyed the peace and quiet.

It was quiet.

Really quiet.

She sat up concerned without knowing exactly why. Something was wrong but she couldn’t quite figure out what. Separating this new tension from the recent drama was difficult and she almost laughed it off and sat back into the cheap vinyl chair.

Still smiling she stood up and looked over the railing at the streets below. Empty. Nothing moving. No sounds at all.

Her smile slowly melted away and she felt her heartbeat growing faster in her chest. There were no planes in the sky. She retreated into her living room and turned on the TV for some companionship. The major stations weren’t on the air, some of the smaller affiliates were running sitcoms. None of the 24 hour news networks were broadcasting.

“What the fuck?”

She slid her feet into a pair of slippers by the door and decided to visit Ted on the third floor. She ran down the stairs knowing that Ted would assume a visit at this time of night was a booty call but at this point she would let him think what he wanted. She didn’t want to be alone.

She arrived at his door wearing nothing but shorts and a tank top, even she had to admit that she probably looked adorable. “What a lucky man I am” he would think to himself as he opened the door and saw her.

She knocked lightly so as not to wake up the entire floor.

She knocked harder. Screw the entire floor.

She started to pound on the door.

Nobody answered.

Jennifer had lived in or near Philadelphia all her life. Downtown most of the time with intermittent years in the suburbs. Her neighbor’s dog was barking and try as she might she couldn’t roll over and get back to sleep. Dawn was breaking  and when she walked outside she was surprised to see a cloudless sky. She assumed, given the clap of thunder during the night, that she was in for a cloudy and perhaps even rainy day.

Townhouse living agreed with her. Neighbors but not too many and none of them living over her. That didn’t make her feel any more kindly to the dog next door. She could see him at the back sliding glass door frantically pacing back and forth.

Once the sun was fully up and she had finished her morning coffee she went back outside to see if the dog was still at the back door. She had heard his endless barking and wondered why nobody had come down to let him out. Once outside the dog made eye contact with her and turned the barking up a notch. She knew the couple next door well so she thought nothing of hopping the fence and knocking on the back window. They both worked and should have been up at that hour.

The dog showed his obvious excitement at her arrival by wagging his tail with such vigor that she was surprised it didn’t detach and go flying across the kitchen. She knocked but no one appeared. For the first time a little concern crept up. In some of the neighborhoods that she’d lived she would immediately assume they had both been shot in the head as a result of a home invasion but not she was far enough away from that world that her mind wasn’t ready to add that to the list of possible explanations.

She tried the door and found it open. The dog sprinted by her and out into the yard for a much-needed pee. She called out as she entered the house but nobody replied.

At this point you can probably connect the dots.

Confusion.

Panic.

Despair.

And then she saw a flare in the sky. It didn’t seem to be tremendously far away so she grabbed her keys and jumped into her car.

By now you might also be asking yourself why I haven’t bothered to describe any of the females in any detail. The truth is that Clay had a very particular ‘type.’ His friends and family would see a girl and say to themselves “Uh oh. Clay will be chasing after this one.”

With the exception of his wife Patti, they all looked roughly the same; blonde, younger, petite, perky. Clay wasn’t particularly good looking but he carried himself with a certain confidence that allowed him access to women who from afar appear to be a bit out of his league.

I could insult your intelligence and add some little quirk to each other girls mentioned so far but eventually you’ll be able to tell them apart.

I hope anyway.

Believe me, I’d love to be able to slip in a black or Indian girl at this point and make the story look like most of the commercials these days, where it appears that every couple going out to eat or buying insurance is bi-racial. We both know that if this is ever made into a movie there will be blonder perky white girls all over the place but I’ll be forced into including one black one but as nobody gives a shit about this story so far I’m letting Clay decide who his ex girlfriends are.

Does that mean Samantha and Jennifer are also ex girlfriends?

You’re just going to have to keep reading.

As a writer, what I wouldn’t give to have one of the ex girlfriends be a transsexual. Not only would it make me look open-minded and accepting of different lifestyles but it would also open up a myriad of possible storylines and, immediately ruining any good feelings I might have garnered from the LGBT community, a few good penis jokes.

But no. Clay likes blonde, younger, petite, perky and he doesn’t give a damn about my needs. I’m not even done introducing other girls and I don’t have the slightest idea how to tell them apart. I’m going to have to start adding moles and prosthetic limbs. And don’t kid yourself, prosthetic limbs demand a back story and I’m already bored with describing people. You can’t just mention that Betty (the one girl who will not be entering this story) has a robot arm and leave it at that. Readers will demand to know how she lost the arm and I’ll be forced to come up with some dopey explanation involving an accident at the dry cleaners that lopped it off.

Not so with moles. Nobody needs any information about moles. In fact, most readers prefer that you don’t even mention them at all but as a writer it’s good to sprinkle in a few just in case somebody needs to die of skin cancer later on in the story.