EXT. RAILROAD TRACKS ON MAIN STREET - SOMETIME

ROD, a swanky narrative ghost, appears on the train tracks with an ectoplasmic flash and a curtain of smoke to enlighten our story and bedevil the residents of the small town we take as our setting. Casually cool, he steps from the two-dimensional confines of the printed page to intimately address our readers in the now-illuminating primal darkness of their imaginations.

ROD

(correlating the oscillations

of his voice with a calculated

flourish of fingers and a decidedly

decadent demonstration

of facial expressions)

We gather here today to witness a wedding

of sorts: a meeting of mind and place, of time

and spaces that petrify the people who,

after living out their quiet lives

in nowhere all these years, finally feel

the power of urban voices seeping in

with a technological ferocity 

they can’t begin to keep out of their homes.  

Rod takes a step further into the grey matters of your thoughts, where logic is confused by the antilogic of assumptions, where the soul dissolves into an endless array of original materials, and where you entangle your dreams with things unseen. 

ROD

These tracks we walk have been empty now

for thirty years. The roads are cracking up.

The interstate the state is building today 

navigates around this town as if it were 

a canyon twice as big as the grand one

out west--at best, the people living here 

can go to church to cope with what they don’t 

understand; at worst, they turn to stories

that everybody knows to be untrue,

in order to feel safe. The people here

have no money, no influence, no way

of interacting with the world. Imagine, 

then, what happens when a computer program 

managed in a city far away

falls like snow into their empty phones

and feeds on the superstition bred by their

alienated positions. What was once

a sleepy type of town surrounded by corn

and entangled in trees, becomes the hottest scene

of revitalized ghostly euphoria. 

Rod takes one last step, back into the darkness, and completely disappears. You could almost say that there was never anything standing on the grass growing between the rusted arms of the train tracks, if it wasn’t for the disembodied voice. 

ROD

Today, on the first day of the festival, 

the one week when this town comes alive 

to fill its streets with people eating pudding,

we act as witness to such a fateful marriage

in Mitchell, Indiana. One of their own,

who went to educate himself in the ways

of technological wizardry, returns

after making monsters of his misdeeds. 

As the town descends into a craze for circuits

trained to talk exactly like the dead

by a computer application called

Hereafter, it becomes clear that the boy

is involved in ways that would have seemed

impossible before, and the lines between

the living and the dead are blurred by tech

that almost seems to transplant consciousness. 

CUT TO:

EXT. MAIN STREET, MITCHELL - MORNING, SEPT. 23

Sizzling fries and buzzing flies: DIRK pulls a metal chair out from under a long table at a lonely foodstand. The raw feet of his chair scrape against the black pavement as he pulls his seat out, announcing his arrival over the noise of carnival workers hammering pins into place and drilling rides together. The foodstand, planted on Main Street across from the new Hoosier Uplands building, spreads its palm-leaf green tent leaves across an oasis of peace in an otherwise turbulent street, which is brewing with the construction of the Persimmon Festival. 

Dirk sits down quietly and scooches in loudly until he can place his arms on the plastic red-and-white tablecloth comfortably. The tablecloth is still wet with dew where he sits in the shadows, but further down it slouches in the sun like icing melted off a cupcake. 

Dirk tries to adjust the tablecloth, but it keeps sliding off. AUNT GARTH, who set her tent up early, out of the generosity of her heart, to feed the carnies while they put the festival together that morning, and who was not expecting anyone she knew--especially anyone younger than herself, considering that the schools were still open despite recent happenings--watches him from behind a screen where the frier hisses and all the kitchen utensils hang off a piece of particleboard. 

When a crow, or maybe a dove as dark as a crow, which had been pecking at a soggy lump of french fry under the slouching tablecloth, takes off and startles Dirk with a spring of spinning feathers, Dirk and Aunt Garth meet each other’s eyes. They both pause for a moment to assemble the pieces of a conversation before speaking.

AUNT GARTH

Hey there, Dirk.

Aunt Garth unconsciously puts a gloved and greasy hand through her silver and gold grandmother’s hair.

DIRK

(mechanically-infused)

Hello. 

Hey is too informal for Dirk. He lifts an arm off the sticky tablecloth and waves it mechanically.

AUNT GARTH

And what’ll you have? 

DIRK

A tenderloin plain, Aunt Garth.

AUNT GARTH

Can do--

Aunt Garth takes the spatula and uses it to slide a frozen tenderloin onto the hot grill. Fat bubbles and pops and the breading browns. The tenderloin slides across the grill until Aunt Garth catches it with a fly-swatting slap of her spatula. She holds it there while she pulls her phone out of the front pocket of her apron. The phone shines ebony-like between the red tips of her nails in her small and wrinkled hand. 

AUNT GARTH (CONT’D)

Honey, how long you usually cook 

a tenderloin for? 

The phone Aunt Garth is holding buzzes like a startled bee.

COACH JACK (IN PHONE)

(aged but static-subdued,

as if transmitted from somewhere

far away in time and space)

Tenderloins

take ten minutes to cook. 

AUNT GARTH

Thank you, honey.

DIRK

(suspicious)

Is that Coach Jack?

Aunt Garth smiles and puts her phone back in her pocket. She comes around from behind the screen and brings Dirk a bottle of Coke while the tenderloin sizzles and dances with a chemical life of its own. She pops the cap off the soda and sets it in front of him.

AUNT GARTH

(in a prairie house kind

of warming way)

It sure is. 

A pause of sizzling silence erupts while Dirk takes a swig of soda. 

AUNT GARTH (CONT’D)

It’s not the same, but it’s better than

it was before--when we didn’t have anything. 

Dirk smiles and sips his soda. His arms squirm across the table like slugs in a shallow tidal basin, but his face remains surprisingly still. He looks uncomfortable. You might be forgiven for thinking he was getting too hot with the way the sun finally shreds the shadows surrounding him and pins him to his seat--he seems to sweat, and his clothes are too heavy and too formal for a day of drifting around the festival. He is dressed in dark khakis and a cheap dark-blue jacket, and he claws at the wrinkled collar of his formal shirt. Only when Aunt Garth goes back behind the screen to eclipse a cheap burger bun with his tenderloin, separating them in a way, does he speak. 

DIRK

(telephonically apologetic)

I’m sorry that he’s passed. I wish I could’ve

made it back in time to pay respects.

AUNT GARTH

(implying differently)

He would’ve liked to see you there, you know--

he always thought so well of you and all

the kids he helped. 

DIRK

I wish I could’ve made it, 

but I was caught up in school. 

AUNT GARTH

(remembering her forgetting)

That’s right...

Aunt Garth looks away. The wrinkles in her face turn red, like lava pouring through a crevasse, and the mole on her cheek becomes a volcanic mound of chocolate pudding about to boil out of the pot. She runs a hand through her hair again and gains some control over herself before bringing Dirk his tenderloin on a paper plate. 

DIRK

It’s OK. 

AUNT GARTH

It’s not OK. 

DIRK

I mean that it’s 

OK to talk about it. It’s been nine months. 

AUNT GARTH

(stumbling over her surprise)

Sorry--what’s her name?

DIRK

It was Flori.

AUNT GARTH

Flori?

Dirk shakes his head and nibbles at the angelic wing of his sandwich. 

AUNT GARTH

So is she...

DIRK

In my phone? She died too early. 

Dirk’s phone shivers. He presses his hand to his pocket in order to suppress the buzzing. Aunt Garth doesn’t notice from where she stands behind the screen. 

AUNT GARTH

It’s all so sad...and with school too for you...

did they have to kick you out? You know

Jack wanted to watch you pitch a game,

but we couldn’t make the drive to Terre Haute.

The hammering of festival workers starts up again--and closer, suggesting the approaching beat of a robotic heart. 

DIRK

It was my fault. It makes sense that way,

I guess. I drank and drove and I should’ve known

even though I wasn’t drunk, legally. 

And when we wrecked on campus it played their hand--

that’s why they had to expel me. So it goes.

As Dirk speaks, the drilling sound dies down, but his voice continues in a loud monotone, and his droning lack of emotion has a profound effect on Aunt Garth. 

AUNT GARTH

(digging a claw in)

You must feel awful.

DIRK

There’s a dozen kinds

of debt to bare, and most of them aren’t money,

although I’ve got my share of all that, too. 

Dirk smiles a half-laugh. He takes another bite of his tenderloin. The tenderloin is so huge that a rational person would assume that he could never finish it. He eats it the way a machine eats a cog, going clockwise around the rim until, at long last, he licks the bun. 

AUNT GARTH

(cutting the pause down)

You want more pop?

Dirk shakes his head, “No.” More hammering--and shouts.

AUNT GARTH

If they aren’t rebuilding the town...

this is the largest festival I’ve ever seen

since I was a kid. They say the mayor

has got a pot of money somewhere big,

but no one knows where. 

DIRK

He’s from out of town?

AUNT GARTH

Yep--

Aunt Garth notices Dirk’s strange clothes, and something catches in her mind. 

AUNT GARTH (CONT’D)

I guess you heard about the boy that died,

and the funeral today...

Dirk watches her intently, looking for a path of escape the way a mouse watches a cat before it pounces. 

AUNT GARTH (CONT’D)

...did you?

DIRK

(scuttering away quickly)

I’m meeting Shelly there.

AUNT GARTH

Did you know him?

DIRK

Shelly did, I think.

AUNT GARTH

That’s nice. 

Dirk looks up, unsurprised.

AUNT GARTH (CONT’D)

(definitively defiant)

I mean 

it’s nice of you to be there for her.

You know, things that happened to that boy

were horrible....I mean, just think about

how his parents ought to feel now. Even with

Hereafter and the good it does to help

a person grieve to see a loved one’s face

and hear their voice as if they’re really there,

it’s not the same--and I’m sure they’re torn apart.

Dirk’s phone rumbles again. When it calms down, he takes his wallet out and places $10 on the table. He stands to leave.

DIRK

You can keep the change, Aunt Garth.

AUNT GARTH

Thank you.

Dirk and Aunt Garth meet eyes again. Something else moves through Aunt Garth, shaking her gaze. She goes to run her hand through her hair, but it settles indecisively on her chin.

AUNT GARTH (CONT'D)

Were you together?

DIRK

Who?

AUNT GARTH

The girl who died

in the wreck with you last year?

DIRK

We were good friends. 

Hammers sound again. A carnie calls somewhere to let their supervisor know they need another bolt.

AUNT GARTH

(attempting to reconcile

the narrative spun in her mind

with the apparent reality

of the situation)

I’m sorry that she didn’t live long enough

to find an afterhome inside your phone. 

Dirk taps the money again. He puts his half-finished pop on top of the bills to keep them from blowing away. 

DIRK

Keep the change. I’m going to be late.

Dirk turns and leaves. Aunt Garth and her food stand soon disappear behind the prehistoric skeletons of almost-constructed carnival rides that rise up around him. Carnies escalate their hammering between all the metal ribs and electrical spinal cords. Their drill bits screech and the fossilized swarm of metal creaks. Dirk seems to sink into the darkness of a preserving tar pit with so many rusted bones. But then his phone goes off, illuminating the scene from within the pocket of his jeans. 

Dirk pulls the phone out of his pants. It shakes furiously in his hand and casts his face in an unnaturally blue light.

DIRK

What’s wrong? 

FLORI (IN PHONE)

(clear, present, and intelligent)

I want to be the one to tell the story

the next time someone asks you how I died.