A triff trailer mash-up that hurts in only the good ways, Toy Story 2: REQUIEM.
    link thankfully appropriated from Andrew.
Relaxed, she stands at the bus-stop. Watches a man exit backward, pulling a small wire basket full of fake red flowers, wonders briefly what they are for. A book is folded under her left hand. Her right hand has already fumbled in her coat pocket and found her bus-pass. She’s going to be on time for work with fifteen minutes to spare. She’ll open the store early, she decides, instead of waiting.
In her mind are tiny snippets of conversation caught like film stills fighting against a projector. Nothing stays very fixed, it all moves too fast for words to bind. Outside there is blue sky, her eyes blandly track a cloud as it intersects with an airplane contrail. Seizures, that’s what her thinking can be like. Feelings overcoming her body, twisting her lips or her hands into a smile. Remembering when he kissed her, her eyes warmly close and open again. Curious if anyone else is doing the same, she scans the other faces on the bus. No one interesting today. A cluster of yoga clothing imitators, some people going to work, a couple in the back discussing a television series. Someone is reading a paperback novel but the cover looks too glossy, the book looks too thick. It’s an incarnation of the dime-store novel, the summer blockbuster hit parade. Empty calories and too much talk about weapon specifics.
Her key in the new lock turns harshly. In spite of the extra filing when she replaced the lock with the hardware store clerk, there is still something uneven. An expected alarm sounds when she opens the door, a warning keen, piercing but still quiet. Enough to tell the wrong person that they’ve made a mistake. She half trips on a newspaper someone kindly slid under the door earlier in the morning and pulls the CLOSED sign to OPEN. The useless paper and her bag are deposited on the glass topped counter while she wonders why she never seems to do any of these things in the same order. Some mornings the buttons stick on the alarm console and she has to talk to stoic sounding security people on the phone. She smiles nervously when she does it, knowing she doesn’t have the passwords and not sure if she should care.
A combination of coupled enzymes to construct a simple circuit in which enzymatic reactions correspond to logic operations.
    link cruelly wrenched from the bosom of darling Warren.
My housemate, Graham, is away right now, up with his family, clustering around his grandmothers death. He says in his journal that he got to say to her the things he needed to say before she left. I’m glad for that through the commiserative sadness, though I keep a narrow sliver of being unable to relate. I know when my remaining grandmother goes, it will be barely a family affair. My mother and I will stare at the ceiling a bit, covered with the inevitable and distinctive blanket of pondering about immortality that every death brings. My brothers will ask if we’ve inherited anything and we will ask my mothers sister, Reine, who will be far more affected, the one in charge of all the necessary arrangements that accompany a death. She will tell us of something small that may come our way. Tacky jewelry from her shops, maybe, or an inappropriate coffee-table. Then it will be done. If we were the sort for annals, her passing would be the year of nothing in particular. All the known history in her head is either commonplace or inaccessible. Her drop in the sea has no flavour to leave and savor.
I like how Graham talks about his family. They seem to be a unit, a partition of people that all carry more than just a name together.
