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BRAMBLES by Gordon Chapman There's brambles growing everywhere. They don't block all the paths, but they're a major obstacle on every one of them. Damn, I hate that. Some of the paths have more visible wear than others, but who the hell knows what that means. Who knows who has taken these paths before, for all I know, it could just be forest animals, and who knows where they want to go? I need some kind of faith, I mean, it's obvious that some of the paths are wrong choices, but I need to know that at least some of them will make it down to the sea. I absolutely have to get there. The sea. I can hear it from here. The waves crash like thunder, they're obviously breaking close to the beach, making getting in and out of the water treacherous as hell. I can practically smell the salt, but I can't get near them. Someone must be trying to tell me something in a seriously cruel way. I'm in a movie now. There's cops everywhere, sirens wailing and rubber squealing, and Christ only knows how many of them with .357's want to leave a hole in my skull. I've got the attache case full of one thousand dollar bills and a million roads to nowhere. I don't know the end to this plot. There ought to be thin, long legged women in Ray-Ban sunglasses in this movie, and they should have guns. And they'd know which way to go. Racing from the gunfire, we'd kick off our shoes, and sprint on the wet sand, leaving a contrail of spray behind us. We'd jump in our helicopter, and its pontoons would lift from the sea, and I'd laugh out the open door, as the chopper tilted forward and accelerated over the water with the bullets flying around me. I'd know that they couldn't hit me. Maybe. I bet you didn't know that I was in an airplane crash. I was. It shouldn't have been poetry. A desperate dance of steel and wind, the sea and gasoline. It was over too quickly to describe faithfully, a brief, fatal tearing of metal and breaking of glass, then silence. I had wrestled, presumably help- fully, with the controls as the pilot's face reddened and the veins in his neck bulged explosively. Then, when I looked over, the engine dead, no sound other than the rain on the rolling ocean, he was gone. No choices, no paths, and the wreck sinking slowly and quietly without so much as a groan of protest. The water moved from my ankles to my knees in a couple of seconds. Bad cinematography. Not enough dramatic emphasis. You ought to learn something from things like that, but the whole experience was no more enlightening than being under some psychedelic haze and watching the mix of oil and coloured water being projected on the wall by some long-haired sixties refugee who said, "Far Out" over and over and over at least ten thousand times a day in 1967. You'd think I'd learn. It's not like I haven't had my proverbial 'girl in a flatbed ford,' or even a dozen of them, but hell; I'll hear the sound of the rumbling V-8, and see the black shit-kicker boots, then I'll dive into the cab. It's probably another movie. She's really not from Camrose, Alberta, and there's a Kalishnakov under the seat. I'll end up in another shower of bullets, kicking up a muddy spray on a dirt road, and diving through the brambles. Maybe not. Copyright 1994 Gordon Chapman ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gordon Chapman is a Canadian writer who makes his living as a journalist and communications executive. He has a weakness for motorcycles, good scotch, and fiction. His stories, from very short to novella length, have appeared in a variety of Canadian publications as well as in the U.S.A. ============================ # # # =============================