Thursday June 8th, 2017

The exercise:

Write about something that is: up in the air.

One last dead fish first thing this morning to finish my week off, this time at Lions Park. Didn't smell especially terrible, so it must have been relatively fresh.

To clear up any confusion, dead fish wash up on the beaches fairly often. Some get hit by boats, others are leftovers from ospreys, and others... who knows. Old age?

And with lake levels going down the last few days I guess some fish are getting stranded on the beaches as well.

Anyway. Four days off have arrived, so you get at least a temporary reprieve from fish stories.

Mine:

"Look! It's a bird!"

"Why are you so excited about a bird?"

"No! It's a plane!"

"Hold on, I'm not letting you get away with that quite so easily. You have seen a bird before, right?"

"No! It's Superman!"

"... you don't get out much, do you?"

2 comments:

Greg said...

Dead fish at Lions Park sounds like feeding time :) But it is nice to know that there's a persistent fish molester going around leaving things for you to clean up!
Hmm, well, I think you've captured exactly how normal people should react to the "Look! It's a bird" line in that story. And I agree with the narrator: the excited speaker clearly doesn't get out much at all....

Up in the air
The kids came screaming in ahead of the hurricane. The winds were already up to 120kph and the sky had turned a brutal grey that reminded me of my grandfather's anvil. The trees were bending over and leaves were being torn off and thrown around; the bins across the road had clattered away and were probably chasing unlucky pedestrians along Main Street, and I wasn't sure but I thought the neighbour's car was starting to inch its way down the street as well. Elise was finishing locking the storm shutters and Maggie was asking qustions about how we'd get back from Kansas, and then I saw the familiar flash of light and streaks of colour.
The kids were up there, storm-surfing, riding the winds like waves on specially designed boards. I took a firm hold of a telegraph pole (in the back of my mind I was wondering how long these would be around for now that the cables were all buried) and looked over to them. My eyes teared quickly with the force of the wind and the grit already in the air, but I saw them swooping and turning, carving out shapes from the clouds. The dipped down here and there, going from a swoop to a glide, edging ever closer to a plummet, but then they'd catch an updraught or a thermal and ascend again. I could see the Collins's kid executing a beautiful ascending spiral -- his pink baseball cap stood out strongly against the grey. Then the first drops of rain started to fall -- hard -- and shook my head and looked down at Maggie clutching at my trousers, and decided we'd better get inside.
Elise looked up from lighting the storm lantern when we stumbled down the cellar steps, pulling the doors closed behind us, and asked me what had kept me.
"Something in the air," I said as casually as I could muster.

Marc said...

Greg - hah, yes, you're quite right :)

Storm surfing sounds fantastic. What a brilliant idea! Great stuff here, I really enjoyed this one.