Scorched Earth, Alien Wonders
Chapter 22: Happy Endings

Moore and I arrived back at the ditch project and took up positions under the umbrella to talk with Daisy, while Brown, Doc and Davis, headed to the lab for a break. It was almost a comical sight as I gazed down the length of the ditch to see high-flying dirt land on an increasing pile along one side.

“Are you going to open the Community Center for entertainment tonight?” I asked Daisy, as I took up a position next to her under the umbrella.

“No, it wouldn’t be fair to the ones working on the project,” she responded. “As mayor, I’ll co-ordinate teams of workers and rotate the ones who are getting too exhausted, so I’ll be going back and forth from here to Suburbia.”

“You need to take a break yourself, mayor,” I said, knowing that Daisy wasn’t a young prairie dog anymore, and life expectancies on this harsh planet were far lower than they used to be for any surviving creature.

“Oh, I will,” she said, with a long sigh.

“So, what have been the best and worst movies, you guys have seen on entertainment night?” I asked, just trying to make conversation.

Daisy thought about my question for a minute, then she started talking about her favorite subject.

“Well, I think the most popular has been the Princess Bride and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And an early classic called, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a lot of fun, too. Especially, when the cowboys kept riding horses around ancient prairie dog ground on the Great Plains...which we imagined would put on quite an amusing show for the local town-folk back then.”

“Groovy,” I said, trying to visualize the thrill of peeking out the entrance of my burrow to see a bunch of massive, four-legged beasts, with humans on their backs go thundering by... leaving me to cough and spit out dirt for an hour.

“And for worst movie?” Daisy continued. “Well, my personal least favorite was a movie called Message in a bottle. I love romance movies, but it was a total kill-joy when Kevin Costner’s character died at the end. I was so mad...that movie would have been much more successful with a romantic, happy ending. We don’t want to see movies that hit us in the face with a big mud-pie of reality...we want to feel good when it ends.”

And Daisy had more to say about her pet peeve.

“I mean, really...even if horrible things happen in the middle of a movie, the very least a writer and director can do is have the decency to give it a happy ending.”

I could tell Daisy felt guilty about innocently unleashing The Walking Dead on unsuspecting town-folk, who depend on light-hearted entertainment to escape their brutal, daily lives. It was one thing to laugh at the fake, foibles of sharks, but watching terrified people run from the serious, and inevitable likelihood of having their brains eaten by a hoard of the undead, without any prospect of survival, was not what town-folk wanted to see.

“Anyway, I should head back to Suburbia now,” said Daisy, who seemed to realize my thoughts had wandered off.

“I’ll walk with you,” and I signaled to Moore that I would be gone for a while.

Daisy and I were heading back to town when she took a detour in a different direction, so I followed along.

“Speaking of movies, did you ever come across our movie cemetery?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“It’s just across this field.”

Soon, we came to a place that had about a dozen markers in the dirt to signify places where unsuitable artifacts of entertainment had been laid to rest, never to impose angst on the town-folk again. Some markers were standing askew in the grimy, landscape like they had endured many sand storms and shaker-quakes.

A freshly installed marker read, “Here lies The Walking Dead aka Bite Me”.

I glanced at a few more before we ambled off toward town. One read, “Here lies Fifty Shades of Gray aka Fifty Shades of Red”. And another one said, “Here lies all the Jurassic Park sequels aka They Never Learned.”

I didn’t see those movies, but I got the jest of why they were rejected as family entertainment by the colony. We walked along in silence for a while then I asked my mayor friend a question that had been on my mind.

“Daisy, what do you think it means that I’ve been having all these re-occurring feelings of profound uneasiness. Do you ever feel like that? Like sensing when danger is about?”

“Not me,” she replied. “I mean, we all have a good sense of smell, hearing and eyesight for sure and I do remember hints of some ancestors being more alert to other sensations, but it’s pretty vague.”

“Maybe what I’m experiencing is a hybrid of my Rosenian and prairie dog sensory-abilities, because I can be walking along minding my own business when a little breeze drifts by and for some unknown reason the hair stands up on the back of my neck.”

Little did I know at the time, the danger I was sensing would be from places impossible to imagine during times impossible to predict.

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