Light beats down on a crest of sand, creating a desert scene red in color, galactic in scope, and filled with the growls of either something magnificent above, or dastardly below, and then Avery Kitzen finishes slurping the dregs of her coffee and pans up to a garage wall lined with rakes for marginally different uses. "Looks good, like really good," says Elle Splendor, who has been peeking at her friend's work rather than her own, which she turns back to now but only for a moment. "Say," she looks up to add, "can an opening sentence ever be too long?"
"Now I just have to do the same with the rest of these," Avery grabs one of the many sandbags they had loaded into the set and hefts it up to her chest. "And no, I don't think so. This thing I read once said that you can make your first sentence as long as you want, but just make sure the last one is no longer than four words." Brief eye contact connects the two girls, then Elle dives into her screen and Avery watches little red rocks dive to the concrete form floor. It's her grandfather's garage. The flat connected to it as well. After he died, her parents put it up for sale. Quite a few competitive offers have been submitted, but they never reached Mom and Dad back in America. Avery might have something to do with that. This entire project is strung together by inheritance money and free studio rent. So if any of the victims of the events these two film students are about to set in order are reading this now, looking for someone to blame, let your eyes settle on whatever poor sweatshop worker who screwed up the tread on George Kitzen's Nikes.
The things you look for never end up being what you were looking for, Elle writes for the television program she's always looking for the chance to make since she graduated. She sits on a ten-liter bucket, and at a recycling bin laid on its side. She types at a laptop computer which whirs just like the car that should be in its place. Where it can't be seen, it's melting a hole into the forest green plastic it sits upon. The heat comes from a combination of studio lighting which Avery set up around the perimeter, and government programs running with hefty processing loads in background tabs - remnants from the pair's primary job which they will surely soon be fired from. Some of the heat must also be coming from the word processor Elle is staring at. In the middle of a line of screenplay, a cursor blinks back at her. She clicks back to one of the government pages to make sure the spelling is correct. A transcript of an interrogation which corporate had done with one of them flashes up. She parses it and returns to her script. But Lol Gimble didn't know that yet, she finishes.
She's just guessing there. They've yet to meet the star of their television series, but they've read some stuff of his classmate's. Mostly the confession; well, only that, but, well... It was very thorough. If the desk chairs are like torture instruments, Elle can hardly imagine what the District Investigatory Lab has in the back rooms. It really was very thorough. Their teacher's name was Perfax Trembelton, their classrooms built of powder-auburn cinder blocks and centered around a basic lecturing projector like the ones Elle learned math on in elementary school. Everything around that looked like a halfway reconstituted desert. Something like California. They had no concept of floors, so the floors also looked like that. Hopefully it looked something like the set Avery is setting up. The man landing in Birmingham, the one Avery and she were assigned to, was called Lol Gimble. Chances are that by the time they can wrap up the show and make contact with him, he won't be able to remember all that in such detail, so that's what they're going with. Plus the trend of saving forwards for last is both overdone and wrought.
Look, there's no saying how long they'll be able to keep this house from Avery's parents, so the scripted scenes have to be done now no matter the inaccuracies they might have. Nobody will know, less will care.
For the forward, Elle decided long ago that she would spotlight a lecture which is the forefront of many of the testimonies corporate has taken. It was the lesson which an overwhelming number of them cited as the reason they chose to come here. It was about astronauts. Elle writes how she imagines Professor Trembelton wearing glasses like the bottom of shotglass- no, she thinks, those are glasses too, t- those are glasses as well, too confusing. The backspace button shouts out as it gets mashed over and over. Trembelton wore glasses like petri dishes. Rather than biological cultures, streaks of a questionable scuzz lined the lenses. His projector has gone too long without a washing, so the picture was blurry with dust, and each of the slides had stains in their lower left corners from some sort of sludge. Shown up was a picture of some section of the galaxy, the lense of the camera reaching outward to the undulating masses of fire so far away they are only seen as stars.
"Space," she writes in quotations to denote this as something he's said. It probably is, but not necessarily. The rest of the quotation is almost certainly misattributed given the vast potential and personalization of language. "Space is often thought of as the absence of anything else. We will look at this corner over here," he gestures to his left, "and say 'well, that's quite a sizeable tract of empty space you have there' but on the molecular scale, of course, the particles which make up our atmosphere will be hovering about each other like bugs above a carcass. The space out there isn't much different, but rather than being so much smaller than us that we cannot properly observe it, it is bigger." Throughout his monologue, pictures of far-off planets and swirls of haze that hardly seemed possible clicked by and lit up the faces of a classroom of children absorbed by the images being shown, and hung on the word of a man taking subsidies from companies and moguls quite interested in having ample volunteers to explore the throws of observable space. "Think of the possibilities, my children; the places, the things - perhaps even other living things - you could encounter. The adventures you could have. It's like a dream."
It was at that moment that Elle decides it would sound best for their television series for Lol Gimble to come to a conclusion. A conclusion that was only the introduction for a new and arduous period of his life. In his little desk chair in the little red cinder room he took science in, Lol realized what he was going to do with his life. He realized so hard that he murmured it aloud before the entire class.
As the last sentence of her first script prickles at her fingertips, a great sense of dread and inadequacy roars in Elle's heart. She glances up towards Avery, looking for permission or something, but the other girl is pouring sand from burlap bags and does not turn around to notice. Four words, Elle reminds herself, and then she finishes it.
"I'm going to Earth."
