found drama

A variation on the dining hall scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien. The characters aren’t the cast from the film. (They’re familiar from somewhere though.) There’s a lot of running up and down stairs. It’s not a matter of multiple takes so much as we keep needing to retrieve items from the deck below where the sleeping quarters are. Those decks are done up in cheap wood paneling like some kind of bad nightmare 1970s house. What ruins the suspense though is that we all know it’s coming. We all know its gestating in someone’s gut. We just don’t know in which gut. We even go so far as to joke that it’s already loose. That no one’s chest will burst. That we’ll get through dinner just fine with nothing more than each others’ bad jokes to be terrified of. Someone even says that they caught a glimpse of it already, running wild below-decks. Everyone but me thinks this is a joke. I get tense and start to refuse to go down there. I’ve seen it eviscerate folks before. Only waking is protection.

About Rob Friesel