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Nik PerringTHE BARGE MANI remember thinking that the Barge Man was brave. The last time he’d been in the pub he’d been thrown out - physically. He’d intruded, sat at our table, insisting on performing magic tricks (which consisted of getting too close to the women and intimidating them). I did not think he was not much of a magician. That’s why, when I saw him in there again, I thought, that’s brave.  I was in the back room, playing darts with myself - it was something to do - when a man walked in, oldish, lean and wearing a flat cap. A traveller. He offered me a game of 301 and I accepted. And a few minutes into the game I was winning. That’s when the Barge Man, broad and dirty entered. He was the traveller’s friend. They must have known each other from the canal. The Barge Man shuffled over to the table upon which I’d left my belongings: my phone, my wallet, my house keys, jacket and beer. It takes a brave man to go back into a pub he's been thrown out of Suspicious, I moved over to the table and for a moment I thought I was going to have to concede - maybe he was a decent magician: My pint had disappeared; glass and all. It was a lucky coincidence that at that moment the barman, let’s call him Wayne, entered the room. He heard me ask the Barge Man if he’d seen my beer; if he’d taken it. Wayne pulled the Barge Man’s long jacket open. Hey presto! There it was. My beer! In his hand. Not hidden under his jacket any more. Slight of hand? Shite of hand. It takes a brave man to go back to a pub he’s been thrown out of, but to steal on his return must be something else. Again, he was barred. -o0o- My thoughts, when walking home, were of revenge. Not for me to exact; rather, I was wondering what he might do. Burn down my house, maybe. In bed I thought of him. I saw him in the shadows of a starless night. I saw him with petrol, forcing it through my letterbox. I saw the spark, heard the hiss of a match struck. I saw the petrol burn. The carpets melt. The walls char. I saw the smoke rise, curling, strangling the light fittings. And I saw the flames rage orange. I saw the smoke crawl under my bedroom door and felt the heat on the other side. I choked on thick fumes, wheezing and desperate. Drowning. I felt the panic, the terror of death. And then I wrote it down. Unmadeup contributor and children's book author Nik Perring lives in the north west of England. He writes short stories and poems and is a workshop leader. His blog is here... and he also wrote this story. 9:38 PM - 10/2/2008 - comments {0} - post commentWilliam ShawI'm looking for someone who can do some subbing for me for a publishing project coming out in May. Email me for details. Any takers? 11:47 PM - 26/1/2008 - comments {0} - post commentEmma J. LannieMOTHHe's kissing me and I'm kissing him back. We're completely tangled up in each other. We've only ever been friends. Before now. Before this. We would confide crushes and listen to records and stay up all night, never once letting anything like this happen. Until now.  Things hadn't felt any different. He'd driven me home like he's done a thousand times. And he came in and we talked for a while. And just as he was leaving, as we stood under the hall light, a moth fluttering against the bulb, he kissed me. And I kissed him back."She was pregnant," he says, as if that explained everything... And I'm caught in the moment, but I detach my brain long enough to note how really amazing this all feels. It's such a new thing for us, but it's good. It feels really okay. And I don't run away with any ideas of long term or anything. We're kissing and I am thinking that maybe this will definitely be happening again, perhaps even on a regular basis. And the moth flutters hard against the light-shade, tries again for the bulb, and underneath it, we're a frenzy of lips and tongues and hope.He pulls back, stares me deep in the eyes, and I'm waiting for what I think will be a joke about us leaving this so long, or maybe even words of love, an admission, but what he says is "I'm married." And I blink. And I mouth the word "What?" and he hears even though no sound comes out. "I got married." And I sit on the stairs and try to think when that could've happened. And I wonder how long I've really been away, and how that could have happened without my knowing, how could I not have even been invited. "She was pregnant," he says, as if that explained everything, but it kind of did. He's always been the good guy. Until now. "Why?" And by this I mean all of the above and why kiss me, and why now. Crying, he tells me he's always loved me. And that he couldn't help it tonight. And I tell him it's not okay, and I open the door wide. After a silence of ten or so minutes that feels like an hour he eventually walks out into the night, both of us knowing everything we had before is dead. I watch him until he's a dot. The moth scorches itself against the lightbulb and drops down into my face. By instinct I snap my hands up and it crushes between my palms. I look at the mess it's made and I don't even care. Emma J. Lannie blogs here. She has been published in Tripod and online at The Beat, Six Sentences, and Straight From The Fridge. She is writing her first novel. 9:47 AM - 4/1/2008 - comments {2} - post commentWilliam Shaw
Inspired by the French critic Félix Fénéon, whose "Nouvelles En Trois Lignes" column appeared in Le Matin in 1906, I have created a new site called In Other News. It's a collaboration with the brilliant illustrator Steve Larder who writes the fanzine Rum Lad. Please go and take a look at it. 2:25 PM - 18/12/2007 - comments {0} - post commentNik PerringTHAT LIGHT, THAT NIGHTThe flowers made me suspect it, gave me reason to suspect it, but the illnesses confirmed it. And I have to tell you, I’m a little worried; things haven’t been the same here since that light, that night. I think I’d like to blame it on the smoking ban. If that hadn’t been passed then I’d have known no different. It wouldn’t have stopped it happening but at least I wouldn’t know. Ignorance, bliss and all that? Summer 2007. August to be more accurate. I’ve tried to get an exact date for you but the sites that Google spews out are confusing and meant for people with a more scientific interest in these things than me, and meant for people with more brains. Sure, I’m a writer but that doesn’t mean I’m clever. On two small bushes were (I counted) at least fifty spiders So, at some point at the beginning of August 2007 I’d gone to the pub with my girlfriend. It’s a cosy little place at the top of our village, not all that far from the lights of Manchester which, on a clearish night, you can see from it. Behind the pub, up some steps, backing onto fields and hills, is the smoking area. There’s a wooden shelter there now, with lights and heaters, but then there was just grass, fences to keep the sheep out, and half a dozen benches. And one of those benches was where my girlfriend and I were sitting. It was dusk and we were just taking the tops off our first drinks.We could hear sirens wailing; there must have been some accident on the dual carriageway a mile or so down the road – and when we saw the light in the sky we assumed that it was in some way connected to it. It was an odd light, unusual and striking enough for me, when I saw it, to exclaim, “What the fuck is that?” I thought initially that we were looking at a helicopter’s search light, though a second later I knew that’s not what it was. It looked like a star. A little more orange than a typical star and much, much closer than one ought to be. It was certainly more mobile than any star I’d ever seen. And it was moving towards us, in a line as straight as if it had been guided by a laser. It was fast, it was purposeful and it passed straight over our heads. It was absolutely silent. And it was flying under the clouds. We watched it disappear beyond the hills and then we went inside, both feeling oddly unnerved. Of course, as would happen in a pub where you know people, you tell them what you’ve just seen. And when the barman said, “Meteor. It’ll have been a meteor. Meteor shower tonight, bud,” we felt relieved. Both me and my girlfriend had read about that. It was true. “It can’t have been a meteor,” my girlfriend said emphatically a few seconds later. “It was below the clouds.” I was less relieved on hearing that; the clouds that night were low and I knew that meteors barely tickled the fingertips of earth’s atmosphere. What followed were discussions of weather balloons, Roswell, tricks of light, optical illusions, shooting stars, aliens don’t exist, meteors and the like, and more of that odd, unnerved feeling before conversations moved on, back to jobs, football, TV and the weather. Until the barman went outside for a cigarette and saw it. He said it was just as we’d said it had been...  Later, when the sky was night-black, and I was outside smoking a cigarette, I saw it again. I rushed inside and ushered out a couple of witnesses. The light was on a slightly different course to the one it had been on when I’d first seen it, it was a few miles north though still travelling roughly west to east. It still looked more like a star than anything else, it was still tinged orange and it was still absolutely silent. Nobody knew what it could have been. And living not that far from Manchester Airport we’ve all seen plenty of flying things.Although no-one else saw it again that night, the story does not end there. The following week, on the bar and on every ledge and sill in the pub, vases filled with the most striking and unusual flowers had appeared. They were orange and fiery and round and strange and looked like shiny plastic baubles. I asked, with a view to buying some for my girlfriend, where they were from. “Some bloke,” said the landlady with her chewy Manchester lilt, “never seen him before. Just came in and dropped them off. All for free. Lovely, aren’t they?” The following week, while in my girlfriend’s garden, I noticed something else unusual and new. On two small bushes were (I counted) at least fifty spiders. (Seeing spiders in a garden is not unusual, living in the country; seeing that many is though.) They were not anything like the sorts of spiders I’d seen before. These were half as big again as garden spiders and had large jaws and those predatory front legs. The most striking thing about them, what made them stand out as being very different, was their colour; they were fiery orange and yellow. They remained in the bushes constantly for two weeks, and then, very suddenly, they were gone. -o0o- We’re now in October. Plenty of other unusual things have occurred since: reliable cars have become faulty, people have suffered odd month-long colds, strange sores have been found on the bellies of previously healthy family cats, the birds do not stop singing, the landlady’s husband has suffered a stroke and one man has had to have a toe removed. And do you know the worst thing about it? As I was driving home last night I think I saw it again. That fucking thing; that strange orange light. What next, I wonder. That Light, That Night is Nik Perring's first contribution to Unmadeup. 9:13 AM - 4/12/2007 - comments {4} - post comment"Working Girl"FLOWERS I went into her room having already gotten the scoop from her previous nurse during report. She'd been married for years with two kids, one in elementary school, one in junior high. Labor was being induced at 38 weeks because the baby looked (on ultrasound) like he might be a big guy. She was petite and pretty. Her husband had already gone home for the night to take care of the kids. But here's the kicker: Her husband was not the father of the baby. Not only that, but he knew! And whatever had happened before they came to us, they had made their peace with the situation. She had, after years of marriage, had a brief affair that resulted in this pregnancy -- which she discovered after the affair ended. She and her husband would raise the child, but the FOB (father of the baby) would be involved. For a scruffy little guy he had really shelled, out big... Wow, how mature! I thought. These people were really dealing with this very difficult situation in a very constructive way. Then I met the rest of the family and the FOB. I won't elaborate on specifics here, but the patient and her husband were a biracial couple - and the kids were just gorgeous. But the FOB was clearly of yet a third race.Hmmm, maybe she confessed because she knew that once that baby was out, it was going to be pretty obvious that her husband wasn't the daddy. Oh well, whatever. I met the FOB as he was coming out of her room. He had visited for several hours. After he left, she pointed to a huge arrangement of silk flowers that the FOB had brought. Could you find a place for that at the nurses' station? I just can't have that here when my husband comes back in the morning. It would be too upsetting for him, she asked me. No problem. I hefted the arrangement up, impressed by the size and weight of it, if not the tacky silk flowerness of it. For a scruffy little guy, he had really shelled out for a big, if hideous, arrangement. Not bad! As I was walking up to the nurse's station, a patient care tech who was sitting there looked at me sharply. What are you doing with that? I started to explain the whole complicated, delicate situation. No, no, no, she said. That arrangement is supposed to be on the table right by the door to the call room. It's been missing for hours. I put it back in its place, noticing that it was sort of dusty -- and it did sort of match the carpet. Later on the patient asked me if I'd found a place for the arrangement. I said that I had. And it looks like it's always been there... "Working Girl" writes, frequently exteremly funnily, about her life as a nurse in America in Mostly True Stories. Artificial flower photographer merlinprincesse is Québécoise. 9:39 PM - 8/11/2007 - comments {0} - post commentWilliam ShawApologies for being away so long. Life is busy. But there is a great big pile of stories waiting to go up so it's time to get going again. UNTITLED When people are young, having limited resources and money, living space has to be compromised. Roommates are sometimes necessary to keep up with bills. These roommates can be friends, family, or people who need to save money. Sometimes this living condition can lead to parties, fights, and police intervention when things go wrong. I speak from experience since I’ve had many roommates, most of which led to those problems. During 1993, I moved into an apartment in Manchester on Hanover Street. My friend Mike and I shared this home, with fewer of the problems found in shared living than usual. Although we had many parties, we kept ourselves out of trouble while having fun. Out of all the parties we had, one uneventful party quickly turned into a strange night.  The apartment on Hanover Street was on the first floor of a three-family Victorian house. The ceilings were high, and there were belt lines in some rooms. Cabinets with glass doors adorned the kitchen, and old cast-iron radiators heated each room. The living room had bay windows wrapping it on one side. Our modern furniture and appliances looked out of place in such an old-fashioned environment. Our dress styles also contrasted with this home; we were more party animals than conservative. Everyone who knew us loved this apartment, as if they were attracted to it like a moth flies into the light. Some people thought our apartment had a personality about it, an almost living quality that spoke to all who entered it. Mike and I had a good friend named Doug who came to our place often. He called us one night, and said he was coming over. Mike asked me if Doug was bringing beer, because we had none. Doug said, “I’ll have to get forties, because I only have five bucks.” Doug was the kind of friend who shared what he had with us, so I told him, “That’s fine, man. We got the food if you bring the beer to wash it down!” He arrived in ten minutes. Once Doug showed up, I began bringing out some food for us to eat. Just as I sat down to drink my freshly poured beer, someone knocked on the door. I peered through the peephole in the door to see a female face. It was Natalie, a friend of ours who frequently came over. I let her in, and within ten minutes she and Mike disappeared into his bedroom to watch a movie she brought with her. Doug and I listened to music for a while, and until someone else knocked on the door, it was an uneventful evening. This man was going to die soon, if he didn't stop bleeding... The knock came around eleven at night, and by this time Mike was back in the living room with Doug and I. Natalie peeked out from Mike’s room to see who was knocking. I got up to answer the door once again, only to see an unremarkable male face on the other side of the door. I assumed someone would know this person, so I opened the door. Our front door opened inwards, so I didn’t have a chance to see him in full until he was inside the apartment. The first thing I noticed about this man wasn’t visual; it was a feeling I had. Since both Doug and Mike had the opportunity to see this man before I did, their expressions made me uncomfortable at once. I stood there behind the door momentarily, looking at both of them, as they looked at each other with confusion. I stepped back to see a man in his late twenties, with a medium build and height. He had brown hair and eyes, and he was obviously drunk. In his hands he carried two tall Budweiser beers, and his coat pockets overflowed with four more. His presence in our home and his level of drunkenness was strange enough to raise concern about our safety, and stranger still was his silence. The man swayed like a small boat in the Pacific Ocean.Finally, after a few moments which seemed like minutes, Mike asked the man harshly, “Who the fuck are you?” The man replied, “I did something I think I’ll regret in the morning.” Blood dripped from his hand generously, and his jeans suddenly stood out in my eyes, for they were soaked with blood. I immediately assumed he murdered someone. Doug stood up and asked him whom he had killed. I asked him to leave, and mike returned to his room to get a weapon. With a Scuba knife held in his hand behind his arm, trying not to be obvious, Mike closed his door in Natalie’s face, telling her without words to stay inside. Mike walked up to the man and told him, “Get out.” “I need a place to stay for a while,” the man said without reservation. “I did something I’m going to regret tomorrow.” I reasoned with him, “You can’t stay here. We don’t know you, and why the hell are you all bloody?” The man continued his silence while he took off his jacket. “Didn’t you hear us?” Doug added. “We don’t want you here.” I could see Natalie peeking through the doorway again. She mouthed the words, “Who is he?” I walked up to the door and shut it again. The man finished taking his jacket off, and with it came a towel that looked maroon in color. Soon I noticed that it was soaked with blood, too. “What did you do?” Doug asked. “I had a fight with my girlfriend,” the man replied. “I was drinking all night, just don’t call the cops or the hospital and I’ll show you what I did.” We agreed not to call the authorities, so he pulled up his sleeve to show us one of the worst wounds I had ever seen. I asked him if he cut himself. He said, “Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I just wanted to kill myself.” Mike walked into the kitchen to grab a plastic bag, and put the towel into it. Then he got a new towel from the bathroom and returned to the man. Mike told me, “Go pick up that bag in there. It’s heavy as hell. You couldn’t fit another drop into that towel.” I examined the heft of the used towel, and mike was right. This man was going to die soon, if he kept bleeding. We fixed the towel to his wounded arm, and told him it was time to leave. The man put his jacket back on and grabbed his beers. He said, “Thanks for not calling the cops, guys. You’re cool people.” I told him, “You’re lucky you didn’t go to a different house, guy. Anybody else would have left you for dead and called the cops.” Mike wrote our names and address down on a piece of paper, and placed it in the man’s pocket. “Call us tomorrow and tell us how it turned out.” We watched the man leave through Mike’s bedroom window, all four of us. Natalie asked us why we didn’t want her in the same room as the man who was now walking past the window. Doug said, “That’s why we hang out here. Mike and Will were looking out for you. That guy could have killed three people for all we know.” “I wonder where he’s going?” Mike said. Just then he fell in the street. The man struggled to get back up and fell again. We started betting on if he could get up at all, but he surprised us once again when he got up and stumbled across the street. A car pulled up ahead of him and opened the door. The man who arrived in our lives so quickly disappeared into the night, never to be heard from again by us. William Shaw hails from New Hampshire. The photo was taken by Suvi Korhonen who found the blood on a street in the middle of Helsinki. 9:36 PM - 28/10/2007 - comments {0} - post commentWilliam ShawIf anyone in the Brighton area wants to put Oct 11 in their diaries - several of the people whose stories are featured in 41 Places: 41 Stories will be reading their story at Waterstones, North Street, Brighton from 7.30pm. I'll be there too. It should be fun.11:46 AM - 12/9/2007 - comments {0} - post commentWilliam Shaw
I've been away a lot this summer, but I'm back at it now and will be posting a couple of nice/not-so-nice stories that have been submitted while I was away in the next few days. Thanks for them. 9:10 PM - 10/9/2007 - comments {2} - post commentWilliam ShawThis is the afterword to 41 Places: 41 Stories, the book that I published to go with 41 Places. Partly it's a kind of manifesto for what I'm trying to do with UnMadeUp.It was in Los Angeles, writing a book of true stories set in South Central, that I first understood the power of linking narrative and geography. West Coast hip hop was all about place. Rappers depicted their South Central with an extraordinary geographical precision. When someone like Eazy E rapped about, “ridin’ on Slauson down towards Crenshaw,” I could picture him there in his car, bottle of Old English 800 at his side, driving past the street vendors and Nation of Islam evangelists who populated the intersection with Crenshaw Boulevard. Geography made the stories they told real, making you realise that this wasn’t some entirely other, fantasised world of violence and transgression they were talking about. It fixed these stories in a shockingly concrete, physical space at the heart of one of America’s richest cities. 41 Places is all about finding new ways to tell true stories – new ways to write them and – in its original form at Brighton Festival 2007 on the streets of Brighton – new ways to read them. Here in the UK, non-fiction remains an under-rated genre, ghettoised as biography, history and occasionally reportage. Apart from the usually overlooked Samuel Johnson prize, all the major literary awards are dedicated to the art of fiction writing. It’s a shame because non-fiction has such power. For myself, there’s little that tops the frisson I get when reading an In Cold Blood or an Akenfield, thinking, “this actually happened.” More than that, too. Viewed up close, the reality of everyday life can have such a strange and moving texture: the drunken conversation at a kebab shop at two in the morning, the breaking of a boot heel on a date, the sudden mysterious disappearance of a back-pack… The mundane becomes the marvellous. This is a quality that, for me, has a particular relevance to Brighton. It was in Brighton that I first discovered the Mass Observation project – housed in the University of Sussex at Falmer. As an idea Mass Observation was quickly co-opted by sociology wonks and market researchers, but for a brief moment in the late 1930s it was also a madly heroic attempt to create a new type of imagist literature. Mass Observation was the creation of poet Charles Madge, surrealist painter/film-maker Humphrey Jennings and ethnographer Tom Harrisson, who took literally surrealist André Breton’s injunction that, “poetry must be created by everyone”. Harrisson, Madge and Jennings encouraged volunteer observers “to collect a mass of data without any selective principle.” What they achieved was an extraordinary collection of apparently random close-up visions of everyday life. One of the group’s earliest projects was Worktown, a study of workingclass life in Bolton. On one level Worktown allowed a few arty middleclass men to indulge in slumming it. But it was also a celebration of how extraordinary the everyday can be. At one bar in Bolton, an observer noted: “Large, tough guy with masses of hair held down by a hairnet … suddenly takes a small live tortoise out of his overcoat pocket and threatens woman with it.” Threatening a woman with a tortoise?  Before the group’s artistic ambitions started to fall away, to be taken over by a drier methodology, they also produced one great book, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by Over Two Hundred Observers. May 12th was the day of the coronation of King George VI. It too was full of small haunting moments. Jennings noted, “In the Park behind the stands there is an area of black mud strewn with pieces of torn newspaper. A woman sits alone in the mud surrounded by the paper, her head in her hands.”Of course, their disingenuous claim to a “lack of selective principle” was equally an excuse for removing the focus of the day from the stuttering King, putting it instead on the rest of us, the new mass society. Jennings imagined he was kick-starting a new literary form; in fact May the Twelfth led nowhere, baffling and irritating critics. I’d like to believe that Jennings was just ahead of his time. Maybe he’d have thrived more in the age of the blog, a genre which is creating a new style of short-form, observational literature, (albeit – so far – a generally narcissistic one). The devil, as the Mass Observation experiment showed, is in the detail, the tiny miraculous facts of everyday life. The crucial peculiarity of individual existence. The tortoise in the pocket. The what, and – especially in the case of 41 Places – the where. 11:48 PM - 20/7/2007 - comments {0} - post commentHitch-hikingI'm off today. I arrive at Land's End at around 5pm and set off from there hitch-hiking to John O'Groats. I have no idea how long it's going to take to travel the 875 miles, but hopefully I'll be back home in about a week. Take a look at hitch-hiker.org.I'm no longer in the category Auden aimed this at: Kids... and I don't have any Hesperides on my mind either, but I'm hoping - at least - to find a few good stories 12:43 AM - 9/7/2007 - comments {0} - post commentFound Writing No 6 Thinking of 41 Places, my colleague Adrian found this a couple of weeks ago in Oxford while he was waiting for a train there, and photographed it with his phone. What I like about it is it's gone straight for a fragment of narrative. "...I didn't want anyone to see me cry." A project after my own heart. It turns out to be the work of Penelope Davis, who created 10 of these plaques for her final project at Oxford Brookes University. 8:15 AM - 6/7/2007 - comments {0} - post commentLands End to John O'Groats
6:59 AM - 28/6/2007 - comments {0} - post commentSara OhlinDISAPPEARING SENSESYears ago in the first quiet of a winter morning, before the house awakens to warmth from the fireplace and movement of its inhabitants, my sister, brother and I sit at the top of the staircase in our fleece pajamas and fuzzy animal slippers. “Is it time yet?” my brother asks. “We have to wait for dad to get up,” I say. "Comanche 2, we need your help... Receiving fire!" We snuggle next to each other and wait. My mom, up before all of us, has put the sweet crescent rolls in the oven and the delicious hint of sugar and cinnamon reaches my nose. We peak outside from the upstairs windows and watch the puffy white snowflakes blanket the neighborhood. Enough snow to silence the entire world into peace, I believe.We giggle with anticipation and try to guess what presents await us under the spruce tree. Secret presents, praying for snow, and the glorious anticipation of waiting while our bodies warmed and the scent of cinnamon sweet-rolls sidled up the stairs and teased our noses. I see them now, the Christmas traditions of my childhood, sealed up in the glass snowball one shakes upside down to set the flakes in motion. With each new Christmas that approaches, those traditions get buried deeper in the rooms of memory I begin to doubt. One Christmas a few years ago I returned to Ohio to visit my family. Christmas Eve we sat eating dinner together. My dad looked worn down and tired. I focused on my steak, not wanting to see loneliness, and loss smudged into his hollow eyes. “Hey,” he said as dinner ended. “I have a story I want to tell you.” Worn down and tired, I thought, but still telling those stories. I sat on one of the matching loveseats across from my brother and mom. My dad sat next to me. Without even realizing it, I began my tune-out. I looked around the room. A huge stark wreath, made of dried baby’s breath branches, hung on the wall. Photos decorated pine coffee tables and shelves. Everything seemed colored in shades of nothing, barren.  “It was one of the craziest days in the war,” my dad barreled into the scene. “I was the Air Mission Commander, the link between the Scouts and the Cobra gun ships. His face took on a glazed look.“Over our radios we heard this call for help from Damage 5-1 Alpha. I answered, ‘Damage 5-1 Alpha, this is Comanche 2, over.’ ‘Comanche 2,’ he yelled, ‘we need your help…Receiving fire from three directions!’ ‘Damage 5-1, we see the tracer fire. We’ll see what we can do.’” My father spoke this dialogue between himself and another man as if auditioning for a masterpiece. “I ordered my gun ships to make several passes, but it was really dangerous. Each time my men got close they received fire too.” A dull ache from my cold feet ground its way into my body. A pain that was dense and almost numb at the same time. Just like the numb I had built around my body over the years. “We refueled twice that day. It was the longest day of my life,” my dad continued. “One time the fuel guys threw sandwiches in through the window of the cockpit.” I heard my father’s words one by one. I tried to process the story, but it did not reach into my bloodstream; nothing was clear. Men, frantic and yelling above the roar of the helicopter walked into my imagination. The sound of gunshots in every direction left a muffled echo in my head. Like the static of a needle on a record with no songs. “Finally it got too dangerous so I said, ‘Damage 5-1, enemy fire is trailing our choppers, and we’re losing daylight fast. We have to leave you’ ‘Please don’t!’ “We’d been flying for over eleven hours in such an intense situation and we knew the outcome would be horrible. But we had no choice. It was awful.” I drank my tea to warm me, but I can’t remember the flavor and the heat did not reach my feet. My body stayed chilled. My father kept talking. “A month later I was in Long Binh eating dinner with a visiting officer. He told me about this intense situation he’d recently been in, how he didn’t think he or his men were going to make it out alive. They were on the ground; fire came at them from everywhere, even the army choppers had to pull away. Amazingly, the Air Force jets came in, tore up the place and got them all out. “I said back to him, ‘Jesus, we had this crazy situation very similar to that down around Cai Lay a few weeks ago.’ “The officer got this shocked look on his face, then said, ‘Oh my God! You’re Commanche 2! You saved our butts; I’m Damage 5-1 Alpha. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here!’ My dad slammed his hand down on the arm of the couch and laughed in excitement. “Oh I couldn’t believe it!” he said, “Damage 5-1 was alive.” A happy ending, I thought. For a moment I wished I had listened more closely, to all the nuances that really make a great story. Tracer fire shooting back and forth, the smell of sweat and fear, the haunting panic in a man’s voice over the wires. But I was trying so hard not to travel backwards. I no longer looked forward to my father’s stories. Anymore I didn’t even know why. Was it that he was always re-living instead of just living in the present without regrets and ghosts trailing him everywhere like automatic weapons fire through the dark of night? There is not one scent, not one odor or tiny whiff of anything I can connect to that Christmas. I rubbed my feet, the cold pain made stronger by my damp skin It was a dense, throbbing ache; it hurt to touch them, but I rubbed them none-the-less, purposely feeling that unyielding pain, because all my other senses were disappearing and I needed desperately to hold onto something. Two days later my dad and I sat at the airport waiting for my flight. After a few moments of familiar, uncomfortable silence my dad said, “Hey, I should tell you this story about Damage 5-1 Alpha.” I looked at him in awe and wondered, can you hear yourself? Don’t you remember telling this the other night? I looked out the enormous airport windows towards the glaring gray monotonous winter sky of Ohio nothingness. “Do you know?” I wanted to ask my father, “Do you know your senses are disappearing?” Sara Ohlin lives and works in Everett, Washington. Her work has appeared in ImageUpdate, an online companion to Image, A Journal of The Arts and Religion; Full Circle, A Journal of Poetry and Prose and Anderbo.com. She is on the review board for Trillium Literary Journal and she has recently completed a memoir about growing up listening to the stories her father told from his experiences as a Vietnam helicopter pilot. Photo: Vietnam, ca. 1965. Helicopter and soldier approaching target. Viet Nam Photo Service. NARA via pingnews. 10:48 PM - 22/6/2007 - comments {0} - post commentHappy Birthday UnMadeUp
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A new venture. The week after next, I plan to set of hitch-hiking from Land's End to John O'Groats. My excuse is that I'm writing an article about hitch-hiking. Here in the South-East of England you simply don't see hitch-hikers any more. It's been years since I've seen one. 
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