Every image has a story
Small images trigger pain, thoughts drive feelings knowledge insane, calling one thing some thing sets thing for nu thing, breathing automatically feeling flow head losing brain acting dyspraxic, so another mission finding self leading mind into vision so lost so lost needing permission… step back sit tight Simple nature take flight.
‘Right we got seven minutes.’ Sean said as they walked purposefully through the maze of shelves, using the light from their phones to illuminate their path to the counter. They jumped over and entered the office closing the door behind them. On a wooden desk they saw the safe perched precariously on top, a large dial and lock on the front. Sean handed Biola the scrap of paper and put the key in the lock.
‘read out the numbers’
Biola responded.
‘clockwise – 18’
Sean twisted the dial so the number 18 was in line with the red marker at the top of the dial where 12 would be on a clock.
‘Anti-clockwise – 33’
Again Sean twisted the dial, but this time in the opposite direction. ‘clockwise – 46’
The dial make a click as if something had released behind the door, they looked at each other and then Sean turned the key with the red tag in the lock. It ran smoothly, and there was a louder click as the heavy door swung open with its own weight and the angle of the desk the safe was sitting upon.
‘Boooom’ Biola cried as he peered into the safe, there were wads and wads of cash, it seemed like more than they had anticipated, it looked like something out of Ocean’s Eleven, it felt like Ocean’s Eleven, maybe they had more than they were expecting? Maybe they could all go home with 5K Biola thought.
‘Shhhhh’ Sean interrupted. ‘Pass me the bag’ Biola paused
‘The bag’ Sean demanded raising his voice a little.
Biola looked around as if he had dropped the bag, but he knew straight away that he had forgotten it, it wasn’t even in the car, he knew exactly where it was, he knew it was back at the flat on the sofa in Sean’s living room.
‘Sh*t man, sorry..’
Sean looked up at him, ‘you kidding me? You chump. F**k man’
But this was no time to despair, The clock was ticking and they needed a solution. Sean was thinking quickly.
‘Get some X-change bags’
‘From where?’ Biola replied
‘F**k knows, behind the counter.’ Sean guessed
Biola quickly responded walking out of the office to the area behind the counter. He started looking through the cupboards, nothing in the first, then he looked into the second, just a load of random stationary and plastic figures from cartoons and computer games that mostly came as freebees when new games came into the shop to help promote the new releases. Biola opened the third door and there was a stack of plastic bags neatly folded.
‘Yees bruv’ he called out to Sean, ‘How many do we want?’ ‘Bring two’ Sean estimated.
They stuffed all the notes into the plastic bags, the wads mainly in tens, a few twenties and some blocks of fives. The denominations low to reflect the value of the sales that the shop made to its customers.
‘Pikeys’ Sean murmured under his breath as if he was justifying the robbery to himself by creating a Robin Hood type of persona.
‘Right, lets go, check Tyrell is cool.’ Sean indicated as he pushed the safe door shut turned the key and picked up his bag.
Melissa hurried to the back of the shop, picked up a scrap of paper and placed it in the front pocket of her bag. From the safe door she turned the small key with a red tag three times to the right, withdrew the key and placed it in the same pocket of her bag as the scrap of paper. Her nightly lock-up complete, she then walked out from behind the counter and in-between the rows and rows of DVD’s to the light switch. She looked back into the shop her heart rate increasing, she paused with her hand hovering over the switch looking in and out of the maze. Had she forgotten something? Had her colleague definitely left earlier or was he hiding behind one of the sets of shelves? She dismissed the thought, flicked the switches and the room immediately fell into darkness. She opened the door, stepped outside, out from the warm island created by the heating system above the door and into the cold damp air of winter.
She pulled the door shut and out of her bag took a large set of keys flicking through the set to find the one that fitted the lock. Her hands were stiff and her heart was beating quickly, she found the correct key, raised it to the lock and as she did her fingers faltered and the set dropped to the floor. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but there was no-one who cared, so she bent down and picked them up.
‘Not after a show… tomorrow maybe, but not now, not just after we performed.’
I felt guilty, I hadn’t meant it in a bad way, in fact the way I worded it was to complement his performance, to show perhaps he should make a break from the group and go his own way. But as he walked back to the stage to pack up his equipment I thought about my words and cringed.
We all sat there listening, but the day had been long and the workshops tiring. It felt like the heat from the sun had been bottled and poured into the room, the doors sealed, windows locked, suffocating our minds. But we tried. The content of the lecture was interesting but concentration hard. As I looked around the room I saw many yawns growing and eyes shutting, but I scolded myself and listened.
It is interesting when you start to think, words and sentences connect to your experiences and thoughts and then you start to make sense of a conversation you are having in your head, but then, something in the explanation doesn’t add up or there are words you don’t want to hear, so you change the narrative to make it fit. I suppose you will always see what you want to see, but the difficult part is to know what you are looking for.
I kept listening trying to come to a conclusion, but in the end it seemed like the lecturer was offering a silver bullet, the answer, he made his thoughts clear and told us the truth. I felt anxious, it wasn’t the truth I wanted to hear, but in made a lot of sense. Was I willing to listen to it? I suppose only time will tell. Are we all so similar that we can analyse behaviour and find the answer, or is life a little more individual than that. I hope we are more individual.
The lecture stopped and they opened the doors, a rush of cool evening air poured in and my mind immediately felt refreshed, time and thoughts, time and thoughts I said to myself. But not too many thoughts.
The car passed through the gap in the mountains and then they saw it, in all its vastness, the ocean, drawing the eye away from the rugged, arid landscape all the way to the horizon, to the blue. To the edge of the earth where you where unsure what was sky and what was sea. It was magnificent.
They continued along the coast road for ten minutes hoping for a glimpse, hoping that the stories heard for years over countless numbers of pints would be true. The story of the dragon. How when the winds changed direction and blew up the side of the cliff, out from his cave would come the creature, out from his hibernation to stamp his footprint back on the earth.
Up and down the valley they searched, their eyes desperately following every movement in their view and then… they saw it. The air changed, became cold, the sun brightened piercing the eyes of the travellers making them squint for a moment. The Dragon roared, the sound boomed across the valley and out to the sea, the cliffs shook with the vibration and the Dragon soared into the sky, twisting, spinning and stretching its every limb. Then it was gone, as it crossed from one blue to another, it vanished, gone… as if it were just a cloud.
Lights, give the people what they want, give them everything, let them take it all.
‘Pame ligo’ they screamed
It’s yours the earth and you are not here for long, so take and keep taking, the quicker you take the better…
‘Well better for us’ they laughed, and the station kicked into overdrive. The next years P&L account would look even healthier than the last.
They ran, they ran and ran, they couldn’t stop, not to think, not to look, not to pause for thought. They were making all the wrong decisions, they went right instead of left, they tried to scramble when they should have stuck to the path. They called to each other when they needed silence. But they tried. They both knew that there was a way, they both wanted to find a way, but every decision they made ended in a clash and because of this, they stopped. They stopped trying to escape and were caught.
And here only when hope was gone, when captivity was inevitable did they see each other, they felt each others touch, the pain and friction between them melted away, they looked into each other’s eyes and their hearts beat together. Despite the desperation in their situation, they smiled and felt the warm glow of each other’s love.
They turned away from each other, away from their captors and looked out across the countryside, the landscape was wild, unkept, the terrain uneven and the fauna sharp and aggressive. But there was a peacefulness to the energy, an acceptance from the couple in their fate. They smiled together and looked up to the clouds. As they stared towards the sky the autumn leaves rose up above them swirling, spinning, drifting, bouncing like a butterfly… sometimes leaves go up.
Things moved fast, life didn’t change much, but there never seemed to be a moment to pause. There was always someone to chat to or laugh with, and you were always close to them, parked up next door or across the road. You could drive somewhere else, but inevitably someone would turn up and then play would resume.
The funniest times were when crews with children turned up, two little rat-bags running around the wild, covered in dirt, but beaming with smiles. It was great to see them play, their imaginations were alive, their toys broken but ingrained with evidence of many stories.
It made me think about our own family, maybe we were all just a bunch of big kids and moving fast wasn’t such a bad thing, maybe it kept our own imaginations alive.
The boys hid in the reeds watching through the mist. They were pretty certain the hunters had gone, but there was no guarantee that they would not return.
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘We need to get the shotgun cartridges.’
‘How do we know where they are?’
‘We don’t that’s why we have to go and have a look.’
‘So they might not even be in the hut, they could have taken them with them.’
Joseph and Andrew had been set another task, this time however it wasn’t part of the initiation it was part of what they did, causing chaos. Out on the lake there were a series of huts on stilts for the duck hunters. The lake wasn’t fenced so the boys could get to the hut without ‘trespassing’, but out in the open, on the lake, there was a high possibility of being spotted and perhaps shot at, deliberately or by accident.
‘Why do we need the cartridges anyway?’
‘Look it’s not our job to ask questions, you have to wait a few years before you can ask questions. Robin will have a plan.’
‘You think he has a gun?’ Joseph asked, Andrew paused letting the words bounce around in his head.
‘I don’t know’ he answered honestly, thinking about the repercussions of getting shot gun cartridges for a real gun. ‘That’s not for thinking abut now, we got to get what we have been told to get and then… Well then we think about the next…’ He trailed off.
Joseph frowned unsatisfied by the answer, but wasn’t brave enough to challenge any more. ‘Shall we swim?’
The boys took off their shirts, trousers and lowered themselves into the water. It was August, but the lake was still cold, the cold ran through their bodies as they tiptoed into the water, clay oozing up in-between their toes. Taking one last breath Andrew lowered his chest into the water and started swimming. Quietly Joseph followed.
It didn’t take them long to arrive at the hut, they circled the building weaving in and out of the pillars in the water looking for some steps up. The poles were slippery, coated in green slime, but at the back Joseph found some steps, he beckoned to Andrew and they hauled themselves onto the platform.
Shivering the two boys scanned the lake’s perimeter, the mist was thick and their movements seemed to have gone unnoticed. Andrew knelt down by the entrance, pressing his ear to the door checking for signs of activity inside. Joseph flicked his head toward Andrew as if to ask if he could hear anything. Andrew shook his head in response, stood clasped the handle, paused, twisted and burst into the room.
It was empty, well, uninhabited at least. There was a sigh of relief and the boys set to work looking for shotgun cartridges.
‘Anything?’ Joesph asked
‘It’s all fishing stuff, bait, rods, tins of meat, look at this’ Andrew held up a tin of smoked sardines, ‘this box is full, I think whoever comes here has a bit of an addiction. You?’
‘Nope, petrol cans, blankets and cooking stuff.’
‘Any shot guns?’ The boys laughed. ‘Joe hold on, come here.’ Andrew had pulled back an old tarpaulin revealing a crate. Joseph crossed the room.
‘What you got?’
‘Shot gun cartridges’ Andrew replied looking at his mate and then back to a red box with ammunition written on it and a drawing of shot gun cartridges. Joseph reached down picked it up and opened the lid.
‘Lara croft?’
Life From the Dirt 