It’s the only stone in the field, sitting in its own little crater. It looks too heavy to throw far.
I pick it up and it feels good. I can throw this.
The field is steep so it doesn’t go as high as I’d anticipated.
It lands with a thud. It makes the whole planet I’m standing on go thud!
I stride forwards for another throw.
I can’t see it anywhere. I scan the buttercup field.
There it is, sitting in its own little crater.
Engine failure and the plane starts to descend. The guy sitting next to me says, “if you get the angle just right, then you never hit the ground.” He looks out of the window of the emergency exit and shakes his head. He turns to me as the terror of five hundred people accumulate. “We’re going in way too steep. We should be aiming for the horizon.”
He reaches for the red lever and pulls it down, releasing the door and away he goes. I breathe heavily from the oxygen mask. The thought of dying in someone else’s control spurs me to undo my seatbelt and get sucked out. Catapulted into the sky, I roll out of control. I look towards the end of the land, and aim my body to the Earth’s line. I whiz over trees and grab their fruits.
“What’s this?” The old man points to a make-shift shelter of branches and leaves extending from the back of the house.
Then a young girl rushes out wearing rags and tries to flee, but the old man is flanked by his two sons who help herd her into the corner of the garden. The youngest son picks her up by the neck, unsure how to end this.
Through the boundary foliage they hear a cry as a woman forces her way through. She is bleeding and crying, and she starts climbing over the fence.
“Hey, stop that.” The old man rushes towards her.
The woman is prevented to climb over and she’s caught on the fence’s sharp barbs.
“Please help us,” she cries.
Then another face appears in the undergrowth where the woman pushed through. A young weathered boy recognises the girl writhing in the grip of the young farmer. The boy jumps the fence and runs across the grass, but a shovel is soon pushing into his neck by the eldest land-owner’s son.
Another rustle as two more faces appear in the gap of the boundary’s bush from the fishing village below.
The woman sitting on the spiky fence cries, “Please, everything has been swept away.”
Unsettled youth scrap around him with eager interaction, but he fails to immerse himself into the body blows. A voyeur to their two-way pain thresholds, he hovers to the perimeter like an uncertain elder. Then a slight kid with arms of steel puts an end to this evening’s fun.
Out2Roll by Vaughan Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
