We’ll collect text-based stories here. To add your text click the symbol beside any paragraph, or any of the paragraph links on the right, or email your contribution to Kate at kate [at] flightpaths.net .
Overheard in Sainsburys, Richmond
(organic baked goods aisle)
Man A: “Oh! Heeeey!”
Man B: “Yeah, hi”
Man A: “Hey, congrats on, what was it, record of the week?”
Man B: “Yeah”
Man A: “In, what was it, Music Industry News?”
Man B: “Yeah”
Man A: “Nice one”
Man B: “Yeah”
by Meg Pickard, 7 November 2005
6
I’ve been thinking about the main female character in this story for a long time, the woman who narrates the single paragraph on the ‘About’ page. For me she is someone who has been living in a fog – the cosy, consumerist, complacent fog that many of us inhabit. She can’t be blamed for this, really, it’s just life, it’s just what happens to our lives as we move through the world. She isn’t particularly venal or arrogant or thick: in fact, most people who know her would say she is the opposite of all that. She does her best, she’s kind, she’s reliable, she’s a good-enough parent, a good-enough wife. She has a dodgy past, but that’s long behind her now, and the void she feels is visible to no one but herself. She blames herself – no one blames her. And when the man falls on her car – boom! – she wakes up. She wakes up and she no longer knows who she is, no longer knows where she is. Not in a kind of Hollywood-amnesia way, but in a profound, existential-crisis-of-the-soul, kind of way.
She needs a name. She really needs a name. It needs to be an ordinary name, maybe a little bit memorable. Any names out there that come to mind?
7
Here’s a story from kathz:
An old story.
Once upon a time there was a tyrant, and a craftsman knew too much. So the craftsman lived in prison with his son, who knew no world beyond the walls. There had to be a way out. For years, the father worked and the son watched. The story says the father made wax wings and both flew from their prison, but that’s absurd. No-one flies with wax wings.
The boy’s name was Icarus. Father and son got away together. “Take care,” the father said. But Icarus had reached his teens and teenagers take risks. He flew too high, too far, too fast and fell to earth.
His father watched.
And the tales fade into silence at the father’s grief.
2 January, 2008 11:12 pm
2
From Kate: The other thing to figure out at this early stage is, of course, the name of the man who falls. In the original article the story is based on – ‘The man who fell to earth’ – the man the journalists research is called Mohammed Ayaz. I found this website, a long list of Pakistani male names , and I’m rather taken with Yaqub. I could ask my Pakistani friends what they think… Despite Marychan’s objections, I’m rather wedded to the idea that our man comes from Pakistan. Any thoughts on male names?
At Melbourne airport I was staring at some people, trying to work out by their clothes, where they might be going, when I saw a bird sitting above them. I stopped looking at the people and kept my eye on the bird.
I was enjoying myself wondering how the bird got along living in the terminal, if it felt like going outside, what it ate, and so on, when Catherine came back to the table with something from McDonald’s.
‘Jesus, that stinks,’ I said looking at her tray, ‘Do they serve McShitburgers now?’
When we’d stopped laughing I looked up again to the bird, but it was gone, and so were the people.
from lebusque, January 2008
2
When I was a girl we had an angel candle at Christmas. Each year she came out of the box a little more depleted than the last. She had three wicks, one through the centre of her halo, which I don’t recall ever seeing lit. Tiny flames flew from the tips of each wing. We would light them for mere minutes a day, sometimes only seconds. Each breath of light cost her something, a softening or drip. After the burning she was always less than before.
The lesson we learned from the angel was the same one that other children learn about having and eating their cake. You can’t have your wax wings and burn them. This was a lesson about light, but so too with flight. No-one flies with wax wings. At least…not for long.
from LauraRobs, January 2008
“…Fair mounts the light balloon, by Zephyr driven,
Parts the thin clouds, and sails along the heaven;
Higher and yet higher the expanding bubble flies,
Lights with quick flash, and bursts amid the skies.
Headlong He rushes through the affrighted air
With limbs distorted, and dishevel’d hair,
Whirls round and round, the flying croud alarms,
And DEATH receives him in his sable arms!
So erst with melting wax and loosen’d strings
Sunk hapless ICARUS on unfaithful wings…”
- Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791)
from TaylorPhillips, January 2008
2
One more for the pot:
Icarus – Poem
Literary Review, Wntr, 2001 by Tony Curtis
Out of an English summer morning’s sky
drops an Indian who failed in flight
miles short of heaven. This frozen Icarus
thrown from the wheel-bay of a 747,
splashes into a Surrey reservoir,
cracking the water like a whip.
This poor man stowed away
in the Delhi heat, curled
himself into an oven of rubber and oil,
and dreamed as he rose in the deafening take-off
of food and rain and Coca-Cola
and television where the colour never ends.
The waitress at the Granada stop
tapping in two coffees and a Danish
at the till, for no reason at all,
looked up, saw a bird, or an engine,
or a man, and then nothing
but blue sky again.
from riem, February 2008
The UK Border Agency
[from http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/aboutus/]
On 14 November 2007, the Prime Minister announced the creation of a new organisation charged with managing our borders. Immigration, customs and visa checks will be united in the new UK Border Agency.
By integrating the work of Customs, the Border and Immigration Agency and UKvisas, overseas and at the main points of entry to the United Kingdom, the UK Border Agency will have in place both the resources and remit to strengthen the United Kingdom’s security through strong border controls beginning before travellers start their journey to Britain.
The Border and Immigration Agency will be replaced by this new organisation when it launches in 2008. The UK Border Agency will incorporate all the work of the Border and Immigration Agency and UKvisas and the work of HM Revenue and Customs staff at the border. More information about the development of the UK Border Agency is available from the Cabinet Office’s border review, Security in a Global Hub.
1
High
For today, if you like, I’ll be a girl. I’ll have two hands for you, and, let me see, I’ll have brown hair, long hair that isn’t brushed and flicks into my eyes unless I hold my head to the side. If it makes you happy then I’ll be seventeen years old. I will wear icewashed jeans; I’ll carry a windproof lighter, which I stole. I’ll even have a name if you want. Why not call me Sarah. I’m not changing my eyes though; I’m keeping those.
Yesterday, and the day before that, I was a magpie, turning on thermals like a black and white kite in air. My mind was small and sharp as a craftknife tip, and red. When I spread my feathers, I could scribble poems in the air, so clever and so sad that the people in the market didn’t know that I was there. Before you made me sit and talk to you, before these pills, I was nothing but a pair of wings in the sky.
Before today I was quick as silver, and I knew the secret things that hide among the city’s pieces. When I was a bird, I was cunning and magic, and a mystery to the world. Before you gave me a blanket to wear, I was narrow like a dart; I could throw myself at people’s heads, and spin away at the very last moment and vanish.
From the top of the town hall clock, the world is flat and hardly there. The sky is a landscape, huge, invisible, made of light and music, with great empty cathedrals and mountain ranges. I knocked my head on an outcrop of nothing, smacked against the gusting morning, and I fell. If you want, we can pretend that I’m a girl, just until my wings are mended.
from Padrika Tarrant, March 2008
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Tags: fiction, main female character, main male character, names, participation, writing process
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