Fortune, 2

The rain was cold and the leaves were wet, they clung to the chain link fence with their hard stems, tenacious and soggy. Lucy pulled one off to study it – it still felt alive somehow, the stem tough and hooked from its clinging. Deformed by it’s struggle.

She was craving Chinese food, warm and saucy and remembered eating in a restaurant without a mask. The rain conspired with this memory to make her think of fish tanks, bright fish swimming amongst tall green weeds and underwater castles and then, like digging a corn kernel out of a tooth, she remembered a blue haired “person” with a Planet of the Apes t-shirt. Staring at her, was that it? With an intense, unrelenting gaze. Annoying and weird.

But yeah, Cornelius was on the person’s shirt, that’s right. Cornelius, played by Roddy McDowell was able to retain his open mindedness about humans even though the society he lived in, run by Gorillas and other Apes, hunted humans and locked them up. Humanity somehow loses the power of speech. As a degraded species? She couldn’t remember how that happened.

“The CGI Planet of the Apes movies were good too,” Lucy thought. For her that bleak desert landscape of the 1960’s version symbolized “the future” for her and would always feel like an “important movie”, one of the many influences that colluded to form this future woman who exists today, living in a present state of dread of other people, a fear of harming others without meaning too and a curious, nagging doubt that whispered, “is any of this even real?”

Lucy looked forward to watching an online performance of Romeo and Juliet when she got home. She wondered if 3:30 pm was too early to eat dinner.