Chase Scene

“No more guy movies,” she said. “Pop pop you’re dead. Big boys playing cowboys and Indians all over again and getting mad when the guy who is shot refuses to lie down.”

“You forgot the chase scenes,” he said. He wasn’t listening, not really. The game was on, Super Bowl Seven Hundred and Twenty or some such thing.

God, the chase scenes. He was baiting her, pretending to listen while he watched grown men fight over a ball, all of them destined for the Alzheimer’s ward before they were fifty. She’d read the Malcolm Gladwell article. Gladwell had certainly never struck another man and probably only went to foreign films. She thought of mentioning that to Roger, but he hated Malcolm Gladwell, not that he’d ever read a word that brilliant man wrote, didn’t have to. The title was enough. Blink. Who the hell wrote a book called Blink?

“Every chase scene is the same,” she said. “Screech, crash, roll over, screech, careen, an improbable gun shot out the side window, a tunnel, a train, an old man pushing a cart of apples, apples up in the air.”

“You're wrong," he said. "They're not all the same."

The TV went dark, and he was out of the chair, across the room, after her.

She was halfway to the kitchen by the time he was up. She hit the table running, knocked the bowl of raisins soaking in rum to the floor, and kept going. He lunged, missed her. She headed upstairs.

“Why do they always go up?” he shouted as he hammered after her. One of her complaints. In on-foot chase scenes the pursued always goes up, up, up until there’s nowhere else to go. So predictable. She flattened herself against the wall at the top of the stairs and whipped down just as he lunged past her. Down the stairs and out the back door. Where to hide?

Gloria was on her patio next door watering the tangle of vines that engulfed her house. She didn’t look up. Mavis ran to the side of the house, listened for the thump of the door that meant he was out in the yard looking for her.

Waited.

Waited.

Waited.

Nothing. She could hear him in the house, pounding from room to room.

She smiled. Her breathing was almost normal. She’d won. At last she’d won.

He grabbed her from the other side. “Came out the front door,” he said. “Tip toed out. More than one way to choreograph a chase scene.”

“You win,” she said.

“Again,” he said.

Gloria looked up as he carried her over his shoulder into the house.

Next scene: X rated.

© 2012 Kathleen Coskran