An Instant - To sleep, perchance to dream by Alicia

To sleep, perchance to dream

It would be cliché to say that it was all a blur; to say that all the instruments seemed to flare to life at once; to say that he, Richard Finn, could not respond.  

His hands were before his eyes, fluctuating in and out of focus as he pulled his screaming spine backward. Heavy grey shapes clung to the windows, pressing down, leering at the two men. The darkness clogged his eyelids as Richard tried to eliminate the echoing flash of lightning that blinded him. Everything was drained of its correct colour, the flashing emergency lights an eerie pink, the four stripe epaulettes upon his sleeve a diminishing vanilla. He sank against the cool hard leather back of his pilot’s seat, and tried to breathe through his nostrils.

The distant echo of his daughter’s laughter tangled with the muffled silence in his ears. Nothing connected.

Faintly, the flickering altimeters reminded him of something he saw in a textbook once.

He felt the soft smile of his wife lingering in the sunshine as she chattered to the neighbours, the Almantises from Florence. Nothing connected.

Faintly, he could see the strained face of his first officer, a freshly qualified young man called Stephen, speaking to ATC. But Richard could not hear the words beyond a blur of sound.

He smelt the memory of an Irish tea, sweet, with a dash of skim milk, the faint press of flush crimson lipstick painted on the lip of the teacup. But that didn’t connect either.

‘…one.’ Something from a textbook.

‘Captain…’ A textbook about aeroplanes, ‘…hear me?’

The other man’s hands were everywhere, assessing the damage, his lips moving silently but rapidly. Another blinking red light winked into existence, and Stephen swallowed, taking a deep breath, as Richard watched, and his lips moved slower than before. Slow, but fast - URGENT.

‘Cabin crew prepare…emergency...’  Richard closed his eyes tightly, wincing at the exhausted pain behind them. A faint green echo shone in the blackness. His heartbeat quickened. There was a dull ache in his forehead. Richard’s hands crept forward reflexively.

‘I have control, Stephen.’

The darkening clouds rumbled, the deep resonance rolling a depression in the atmosphere. Richard watched as the carburettor indicator fired into action, joining the cacophony of recorded warnings. They were rapidly losing altitude.

‘Sir, we’re flying one-engine.’ Plummeting. Yet the clouds did not thin.

Richard pushed the A318 into preparations for emergency landing, cursing the two useless turbine engines dragging them down hard. He needed to see the ground. Chaotic sensors screamed. But even on the ground, Richard was not in control. The clouds wouldn't move.

A cyclone battered mercilessly against the hull of the smallest Airbus member. The yoke jerked beneath his white knuckles, shuddering. The jolts ran along his body, rooting to his toes, forcing him to struggle, to scream, to MOVE.

“Get out of my house, Richard.” She turned her back on him, as if equal and opposite forces would push him away, out the door.

No, no, it didn’t connect to anything.

The recorded warning was no longer intelligible above the noise of the jet’s shuddering. Stephen had gone pale beside him, frantically requesting weather reports, weather reports, weather reports on approach. ATC, a bloke named Kevin, his voice was quiet. He calmly told them about the 58 mph crosswinds on approach.

“Look out, mate, she’s gusting to ten. Sure you want to brave this storm?” Carl was saying, standing in the driveway with his car keys hanging loosely from his index finger where it swung back and forth like a pendulum. Hypnotic in its deceptive uselessness.

An instant in the wind, suspected multiple bird strikes, hydraulics malfunction, multiple engine failure, carburettor failure, altimeter failure, anti-icing failure, failure, failure…failure… fail…ure…

“Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.” The recorded warning announced cheerily, carelessly.

An image of a sharp woman with a clipboard, sighing, as he stared at a point above her head, vanished. It seemed to connect, but then it didn’t.

‘Flaps 30, full reverse throttle, Stephen.’

‘Roger.’

The runway was too far left. The ground reared up like a snake poised for attack, wondering if it would allow the pathetic little white mouse to touch it before it struck. A heaviness caught Richard unawares, his grip faltering.

‘Landing gear, sir?’

Of course, bloody landing gear. He nodded drowsily, hoping his FO’s frightened, intense staring at the senior pilot-in-command was paying off.  

Concussion - another failure. The 34L loomed slightly off centre as he slumped heavily. The rain drummed on the metal casing of the flight deck, hollow like the cavity in his chest…low…quieting…darkening…  

‘SIR…’ The first officer’s protest fizzled out with the last lights in the cabin.

Richard’s hands slipped from the yoke.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

***

Flight 8122 smashed into the tarmac, but Richard Finn was already senseless in the darkness. The gentle smattering applause of a drizzling rain resounded in the emptiness, trailing after the last spindles of that instant. The wind was still.  

~OvO~

Author's Note: 831 words. I wrote for 50 minutes, sorry! I have been damned waiting to write about planes! A lot of this is probably wrong though, in terms of emergency procedures, plane malfunctions etc. At first, I had about 300 words written like a disaster movie, and then I remembered it had to relate to belonging hahaha that's why it's sort of terrible.

Definitions & technical terms:

• Epaulettes for pilots are stripes that you wear on your uniform to show what qualifications/rank you hold - four stripes is Captain. I hope that explains a lot, Maggie. 
• Altimeters measure the altitude of the plane. 
• ATC is Air Traffic Control, it's the dude that sits in the cool towers at the airport and direct planes, give permission for landing etc. 
• Carburettor - I think our engineers might know what this is? :) It determines the amount of fuel drawn into the airstream based on speed and pressure of airflow. For engines. I think.
• A318 - the smallest member of the Airbus family. I was so proud to have remembered this random fact, but I checked it up just in case. 
• Airbus is a big airline company, like Boeing. 
• Yoke is the new modern term for joystick basically. 
• A crosswind is any wind that has a perpendicular component to the line or direction of travel. In aviation, a crosswind is the component of wind that is blowing across the runway making landings and take-offs more difficult than if the wind were blowing straight down the runway. (copied from Wikipedia)
• Hydraulics control the plane. Engineers, take over for me for this one. 
• Anti-icing is basically that; it anti-ices. It's this liquid that's put on the plane to prevent it from icing over - different to de-icing which is used to get rid of ice. 
• Flaps 30, full reverse throttle - Creative licence. I sort of stole this from a book about Qantas' failures, and I'm definitely not sure if I'm using it right. It's a type of prep for landing. 
• FO is First Officer 
• 34L is one of the main runways (the East-West) at Charles Kingsford Smith airport - not sure if it would actually be used for emergency Airbus landings... creative licence! 

If anyone's curious about the intertextual references or just plain fandom references in this story (which I doubt is any of you at all), I'll put them up on the Alicia page. 

Please criticise my story. No one's been criticising my stories lately. :( 

An Instant - the stimulus!

Thanks to Maggie! :)

No aspect of belonging specified: instead the almighty Maggie has commanded we include layers of belonging.

Orchids- The Brown Bench by Selina

The Brown Bench

The gentle wind brought the fragrance of blooming pink lilies growing from the lake along and caressed her wrinkly face to smear the silver tear that glistened in the corned of her eye away. The chirping of the birds and the rustling sounds of leaves echoed in her ears as her vision began to clear. The lady is here again, at Centennial Park, sitting on this isolated brown bench covered with bits of dull red leaves, holding the pink orchid with its pedals that once felt like soft velvet, that once symbolised their eternal love. Waiting.

The pure white orchid attached to the little girl’s silky black hair caught her attention. The girl scampers along the lake and hummed a peaceful melody with the ruffles on her pink velvet dress flowing with the wind, forming a nostalgic image in front of the lady's eyes. A strong gush of icy wind blew the white orchid on her hair into the lake, forming ripples on the still water.

Beside the little girl, a middle-aged man was kneeling down on one knee and handing a bundle of blossoming pink orchids to a woman. The woman’s face shone with happiness. They gazed at each other with tender affection and shared a vision of the future that no one will interfere.

Watching them was like watching her past flashing before her eyes. These memories surged her emotions like a tempest. The voice of his unachieved promises echoed in her head, “Wait for me, I’ll be back for you.” So she waited, and waited, for 5, 10, 20 years, everyday she sat on this bench, holding the pink orchid he once gave her but long withered. Waiting…

Author's notes:
- White orchids symbolise innocence
- Pink orchids is the gift for 14th wedding anniversary

292 words. A rather short creative, I'll try doing my prison creative some other day. Hope you'll enjoy it and please point out any problems with my grammar, especially with my expressions. Thx!

Orchids - Teangmháil by Alicia

Teangmháil 

Charlotte delved into the darkened corner of the library, fingertips brushing the spines of the books, imagining their leaves shivering in the dusk. There was something beautiful about diving into the deepest bookshelves with only the whispers of thousands of men and women to guide her in the pitch black. She wondered why the lights had gone off so early in the evening; it wasn't closing time for another hour, give or take twelve minutes. 

Eventually, she dusted herself off in an area she couldn't recognise by the bumps in the carpet. For there were none in this section; the feeling of well worn thread had been left behind in the overhanging gloom. Beneath her rubber soles, she sensed the hard flat surface of a lonely Constitutional collection or a Gaelic realm beyond her translation. Charlotte could hear the valiant cries of kings and knights, hushed between the uncracked pages of the heavy volumes. She could almost see the jumble of legality which was almost a different language in itself.

Charlotte wanted to know, wanted to see. She withdrew a book at random, and retraced her footsteps. As the uneasy glow from the fluorescent lights of the children’s section peered from behind the anthology shelves, she looked down to the precious specimen she had retrieved from its companions of the night.

ADTIMCHIOL AN CHREIDIMH COMHAGHALLUIDHEDAR AN MAIGHISER, AGAS AN LEANAMH

The words made no sense. Charlotte set the book down on a study desk, and opened it.

Ages – she wondered if it could possibly be centuries – of dust and heavy compression indicated there was something lodged. Something left behind.

Between two entrenched pages of rich Gaelic text titled Teangmháil and the crunch of yellowing paper, was a bookmark. A bookmark which from the first glance appeared to be not much older than Charlotte was. It was a slim strip of cardboard, as wide as two fingers and long as her hand. On closer inspection, there was a date, firmly written in a flowing signature – 20^th March 1887 – which definitely made it much, much, much older than Charlotte.

She flipped it over, and on the back, was the faded outline of a flower. It was an orchid. A white one, its pure albicant petals barely visible, but quietly luminescent. Charlotte recognised it from the thousands of delicate illustrations of passionate botanists in the Botany section downstairs. Her father gave her mother one last year, to commemorate their fourteenth anniversary. It now lay preserved, behind a thick glass case and enveloped in solid resin.

But what was it doing in an original Gaelic translation?

Charlotte rose from her seat, with the book in hand – and bookmark safely pressed inside - and asked Ms Lima to lend her a magnifying glass. The faint folds of the orchid revealed an inscription in dim black ink which had diminished over time to a scrawny blue.

My darling Violet, please accept this orchid. My affections for you have only begun and bear not the inkling of a conclusion. They will never end alike the tales we both do cherish. - J.H.H

The young girl, fond of books for reasons she had never quite been able to comprehend beyond the companionship of their friendly whispers, smiled. Charlotte returned to the comforting shelves of abandoned old men with wigs, wondering how many of them really were just dashing young and noble Victorians.

She replaced the last living relic of these two long lost souls whose bodies had perished with time, into the vessel which fulfilled the mysterious J.H.H’s everlasting promise. 

~OvO~

DON'T READ THE AUTHOR'S NOTE IF YOU'RE ON A TIGHT SCHEDULE. IT'S ~20CM LONG.

Author's Note: 592 words. I will take this moment to say I really can't write soppy romance - not even indirectly. I actually did Googling whilst writing this, to substantiate the Gaelic and flower inferences. A few reasons and explanations which I feel entitled to give as disclaimers for my carp: 

•  Teangmháil means Encounter, and is an Irish (not Scottish, and I'll explain why this is bad) Gaelic love poem about someone whose loneliness and silence is touched by this other person's (the love) loneliness and they kiss. But this moment lasts only a short while and goes away again. The kiss however, hovers and becomes a cloud which sometimes descends in that moment of silent silence at night to rid of the loneliness again. :) So i thought that was an appropriate page for that bookmark to be on.
• However, Adtimchiol an chreidimh comhaghalluidhedar an maighiser, agas an leanamh is an ancient SCOTTISH Gaelic text written in 1631 by Jean Calvin, and I don't even know what the book is about because I just can't find it on Google, but it's the oldest book held by the Scottish National Library. The inconsistencies keep coming. I'm pretty sure it's not the type of book that has Irish love poetry in it.
• 20th March 1887 is the date of the spring equinox - YES I checked - and somehow that seemed romantic in a spring-y kind of way. Don't ask me I am not a sentimentalist. 
• Originally I was going to set this in Victorian England (hence the 1887 date), with Charlotte as a young lady being wooed, but I just can't write in Victorian so I gave up and set it in a library with the orchid as a bookmark. It's not even a living flower. I'm really crying over this story. 

Alicia Being Reference-y: 

• 1887 is the year Arthur Conan Doyle started publishing Sherlock Holmes
• Yes, I really did almost put J.H.W but changed it to J.H.H so it isn't as obvious 
• Yes, Violet is a reference. To purple. 
• kings and knights - come on Jennifer, what do you think of? 

This story didn't have to be Gaelic, or any of it. It could have been simple. But I had a mental breakdown and somehow wrote Gaelic - a word that I can't help thinking says "garlic". I'm so sorry. 

Please take it and leave me to cry in this corner. This author's note is probably longer than the story. 

TL;DR - I can't write romance. I'm sorry. 

Prison - One Who Got Away, and One Who Didn't by Alicia

One Who Got Away, and One Who Didn't

It is with a sense of apprehension that the sole is lowered on the top step. The weight is deposited with a steady creak from the old timber. Although the time has been practically inconsiderable from the moment of her passing and the moment the officers called, the aged spokes which protrude from the banisters, streaking yellowing varnish to the ground, tangling with dust motes, barely breathing – they are the ones who tell of how much time has passed.  

‘Please come this way,’ one of many men in uniform, leaving his heaviness in the dust, leads the way.

Amelia can hardly remember the last time she heard the cautious creak of the top step beneath her feet. Sometimes in the depths of the night she will think the white paint of her darkened bedroom in Johannesburg melts to the ground, to be replaced with the garish flower wallpaper of her youth... of the room beyond the police officer’s sharp blue cap. But in the morning the memory vanishes on the white wings of day.

The dust is everywhere and it threatens to layer upon the black trench coat she specially chose for the executive meeting with Penelope Branson in the Eighth Quadrant. Instead, the dull ebony seems oddly appropriate for the situation at hand, dimming the hopes Amelia had secretly been harbouring for a transfer to the Eighth. It seems wrong now; she should have worn the grey office suit jacket.

Even as her thoughts drift her away from the crime scene – because that is a more accurate description than she could ever give herself credit for – the detective inspector draws her forward, the steady thudding heartbeat of his rubber boots tugging at her short cloth heels, as if the unseen strings which bound her to the walls as a child had remained all this time, dormant.

Now it returned, compelling her forth like Aunt Clarisse with the cough syrup. Globules of deep oozing plum red which dribbled from the edges of the spoon to flood down her throat.

‘You said she left a message for me?’ Amelia registers the pity on the detective inspector’s lips, and almost smiles in return, to tell him to save the pity for a child who is not already lost.

He reaches into his pocket, past the gun which whispers. A thin piece of white paper, folded in half once by the faint crush of a nail along the crease, with an unexpectedly neat scrawl on the front, is presented. Amelia accepts it, refusing to acknowledge the dark crimson cough syrup which has coagulated inches away – silently it froze in a trickle down the walls, as if tree sap in a room of muted spring blossoms. And opens it.

Amelia, I’m bored of not being you. Sometimes, I can hear them downstairs, screaming, but then you always drown them out with that bloody voice of yours. I want to stop listening, but even Aunt Clarisse has stopped coming with the syrup that sometimes stopped it. Stop it. I know, I can’t get out. I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die. The flowers, they wilt. Eventually, I think I’ll realise when. Just stop.

‘Could you identify the body for us, Miss Richardson?’ His voice is gentle, in a way that is practiced and textbook. Amelia mirrors his body to face the decomposing flesh on the ground that was once a woman, who was once a girl she knew.

Its limbs are oddly spread, angling towards the bed post. It almost appears as if invisible spider threads were wrapped around the body’s wrists and ankles, and shackled to the long worn wood. It seems as if the spider had died before it had the chance to consume its last insect. Or perhaps this is just the carcass that remains.

‘Yes, it’s her.’

Amelia calmly ignored the gentle tug below her thumb, and turned away. 

~OvO~

Author's Note: Hey guys! I wrote a thing! A week late, I'm so sorry I'm a koi carp at deadlines. 

Anyway, this piece was 657 words and not my best work ever (not even close) but I hope you enjoyed it! :) Practically unedited except for some quick end-of-writing-time stuff. I am now going to hurry up and write my Orchids story!!! AAAAH I really want to read Jennifer and Katrina's prison story and Jennifer's Orchids story but I can't because I have to write mine! There are a lot of references in this to things that aren't academic, and it's generally a terribly un-academic story. 

The title, I really couldn't think of anything because there is no dominant theme or motif in this story, and I decided to go with a little Katy Perry. 

Seriously now, point out my grammatical errors and all the other errors and faults!

Orchids - Outgrown by Jennifer

Outgrown

It has only been 6 years, but today the group of young girls I remember in my graduation photos have transformed into the beautiful ladies seated around this coffee shop reunion.

Braces removed, pimple marks faded and the stress of the impending HSC absent in their eyes, it hits me how they have all grown. Long gone are Theresa's signature Nike joggers, replaced by the black stilettos whose glinting tip taunts any approaching stranger. She turns to me and flashes her perfect smile, beckoning me over to her table.

'Hey, how have you been?' The lingering keenness in her musical voice reminds me of who I must be, of the desire to rebuild that past intimacy which had existed between us.

I wear a foolish grin. 'Just as usual. You?'

'Yeah, around the same. Isn't this a great idea? How'd you manage to organise this reunion so well?'

An insignificant primitive instinct falters for a moment within me at her praise. A great idea. That was what I expected initially as well. It strikes me that the strained smile I pull performs poorly against their immaculate complexions.

'Well, it's great that we're here together now, isn't it?' 

Her wavy, mahogany hair glints with the fluorescence of the cafe light as she nods enthusiastically. 

I dare myself to take a long look at these women around me, these people who had accompanied me in a stressful but rewarding high school life. And it becomes clear that my perceptions had been far outdated ... my immature teenage narcissism being stripped of me painfully.

Torn away from my egoism, the story of the ugly duckling happens in reverse. What had happened to the sense of security and superiority many years ago? I pinch the back of my shin under the table until it goes numb, casually stealing another glance at the gathering around the table. Once I had thought that I was the elegant white swan, maybe not the best but fine nonetheless ... but gradually the ugly ducklings of my herd bloomed and, caught up in my own vanity, I had failed to realise that it is now I who is the ugly duckling.

I pull my shoulders back, chin up, in what I know is a futile attempt to live up to these ladies around me. In a final, exhausting effort, I try to laugh sincerely as the outgrown grass in a garden of orchids.

Author's Note: 405 words. I am getting less and less creative judging from the shrinking word count haha. There are so many aspects of this creative which I would not write in something that I actually have to hand in (haha 'pimple marks faded') but this is a half hearted attempt at writing something which 'I know about'. Not really, since I haven't done the HSC yet ...