Air Lines: Short Stories to Be Read on Planes E-Book

John Power

• Herausgeber: Europa Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Drawing on his fascination with the natural world and human nature, John Power presents us with a collection of short stories that peer around the corner of life.
Each self-contained story captures a snapshot, a scene, a momentary observation to highlight both the beauty and brutality of our natures. Set in different countries and epochs, these poetic, fable-like tales are linked by a single, arbitrary thread: a reference to air travel. 

An inventor tries to gain funding for a new kind of butterfly-powered airship.
An introverted child is obsessed with leaving the ground.
An ancient landscape speaks to a hiker with sounds of growth and decay.

With sting-in-the-tail resolutions and piercing honesty, Air Lines: Short Stories to Be Read on Planes investigates the truth behind our interactions with ourselves and others.

John Power is an Australian journalist, editor, and author. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree from The University of Melbourne and a Graduate Diploma in Publishing & Editing from Monash University. 

His first book of fiction, Life Training: Short Stories to Be Read on Trains, was published by Longueville Books.

Leseprobe

John Power

Air Lines: Short Stories to Be Read on Planes 

© 2023Europe Books | London

www.europebooks.co.uk | [email protected]

ISBN 9791220146272

First edition: December 2023

Air Lines: Short Stories to Be Read on Planes

For Francesca, always planning the next adventure

A CERTAIN ALTITUDE

Five thousand feet – what a borderline figure. Is it a ‘height’ or an ‘altitude’? A little or a lot? A mountaineer is comfortable at five thousand feet; it’s nothing special. Or are they still called ‘hills’ at that height (altitude)?

Mace was strangely reflective as his small Cessna 150’s altimeter edged towards, then drifted past ‘5’ on the dial, like a fast-paced clock hand on its way to bigger and better things. What a ‘nothing’ figure, he thought. It’s something a pilot usually breezes past on the way to ten thousand or twenty thousand feet. However, just for the hell of it, because time did not matter and because it was such a non-descript height (or altitude), he thought he would cruise along at five thousand feet for a spell. Just to do something different. Why not?

Mace found the world from five thousand feet uncannily unfamiliar. He must have powered through that grey, nothing barrier a thousand times, but as he leveled off and put some miles behind him he noticed subtle novelties – the plane seemed louder, heavier, and even a little bit faster than usual. And the endless forest looked darker and denser, as if he could see the thicker air closer to the ground pressing against the thickset canopies. Pressing pointlessly, because the primordial trees are immune to external pressures.

‘I quite like five thousand feet,’ he said to himself, noticing fresh details like the salt-smooth skins of intermittent dead trees.

Mace was a recreational pilot. He flew as a diversion, much as a jogger will go for a run to clear the mind. He wasn’t wealthy; the plane had come to him unexpectedly as an inheritance from an uncle who had lived on a rural property. He liked to tell acquaintances he had his own aircraft, just to see their reactions, before bursting his own bubble by admitting that the machine was probably worth about the same as a modest secondhand car. It was the aerial equivalent of a Volkswagen Beetle. He even had a toy dangling from the cockpit roof, as well as a small sticker on the windshield that read ‘My Other Plane is a Lear Jet’.

He tried to enjoy an hour or two in the air every weekend, weather permitting. It wasn’t always convenient, but as a single man largely uninterested in changing his circumstances he was a reliably frequent visitor to the airfield.

Life at the southwestern corner of the State was isolated but pleasant. He knew the handful of other pilots in the region, though he was not particularly friendly with any of them, and he was content to let most of the local community’s affairs float past him.

In the early days flying had been a passion, but now he was less curious about the wonders of the world from above. He flew with an increasingly fixed stare on the horizon; the breathtaking attractions of yesteryear now gave way to idle searches for odd-shaped trees or strange clouds.

His domain was a wilderness of uninhabited lands – some unexplored – cloaked under empty airspace. He had a radio, of course, but rarely used it except when taking off or landing. Fellow pilots did not see the sense of flying over this region; those who did had long since given up trying to make small talk over the air. They left Mace alone and respected his loneliness.

As the small engine droned its unimpressive hum Mace settled back into his seat and checked the instruments. All the needles on all the gauges looked normal. No surprises. How liberating to see the green terrain rushing towards him while the sky remained still.

‘Hello Cloud, you look like you’ve become separated from your buddies. Where have they gone?’

The sky was never ‘completely’ blue in this part of the world. There were always tiny wisps of vapour that politely wafted upwards from banks of trees, even in winter when the temperature barely nudged past five degrees. The forest was always heaving and breathing somewhere, its breath fogging up the world. He respected its privacy.

His flights always took him in a southwesterly direction, which meant deeper into monotone terrain and away from any links to civilization, but the expansiveness and dankness of the trees always left room for doubt – ‘certainty’ had never taken root in the wilderness. Once Mace thought he had passed a previously undiscovered waterfall, a feature both gigantic and delicate, layered with gossamer-fine rivulets weaving uniformly down a black rock face; however, a second fly-past revealed a massive hardwood tree smothered by white flowering creeper vines. Similarly, a distress flare was invariably a flash of lightning. And unmistakably human figures at the edge of escarpments were not people, but shadows or bogs or decaying tree trunks or dust devils twirling into vortices of leaves.

And then there were the clouds of smoke: manmade smoke. Every couple of months Mace saw the clean trail of a column of smoke in the distance. Whereas cloud formations could adopt any shape and colour, smoke was comparatively viscous and sharper in outline. Natural fires were impossible due to the endless rainfall, which for 10,000 years had moistened the entire region and suffocated wildfires in their infancy. Smoke, therefore, had to be human handiwork.

On every occasion he saw smoke (or thought he saw smoke), Mace changed direction to investigate the scene, but the smoke trails always vanished before he could get close. Were there people down there extinguishing fires, alerted to his presence by the sound of the aircraft? He always believed the wilderness could have been home to large villages of anonymous, unnamed people.

Were there really any people down there? There were always rumours of souls with one-way tickets entering the forest, never to be heard from again. Mace suspected he had even met one. Just two years after gaining his solo flying licence, a wiry, leather-skinned man had been hanging around the airfield looking for a pilot who could take up a parachutist. The man had a far-horizon gaze and had no explanation for his lack of camping gear and provisions. Mace thought the poor fellow was planning to either live off the land or, it must be said, leap from the plane with no intention of opening the chute. Mace wanted no part in either scenario and declined the job. But within a day the man had disappeared, having found a pilot who would ask no questions.

This was the kind of shadow-human Mace looked for on his weekend flights. Men who were extinct, more phantom than missing person. Like ghosts they left ambiguous smoke trails and signs, forever offering suggestion rather than evidence of their existence.

When Mace looked to the horizon he was aware of his spiritual kinship with these people, who saw nothing of value in the immediate, up-close world. These were people who took no interest in the differences between hills and mountains, or heights and altitudes. Their domain was a crisper reality of life and death, which was either worth living or not. They were people who realised that the wilderness offered not sanctuary, but privacy.

Mace adjusted, then unbuckled his safety belt and flexed the muscles of his thighs. He had forgotten to feel the cold, which was now clawing at his skin like an abandoned cat. As the sun reached its apex he could see layers of new luminous grass-coloured shoots atop vast areas of trees, like light green netting over an orchard. But all that was far, far away. He did not look left or right. A distracting murmur buzzed through his headphones every few minutes as other pilots swapped coordinates, recipes and girlfriends’ phone numbers. He switched off the radio, which he knew was a sin, and listened to the engine as if he had never heard it before. This was the machine that turned the propeller, which in turn gave the world beyond the nose of the plane its milky white circular haze and peripheral red stripe. Such a simple machine, really.

Mace relaxed his legs and splayed his feet so the joystick was jammed hard against his knees. He felt the vibrations shudder through his bones and enter the seat. He held his breath for a few seconds at a time and fixed his eyes on a single point on the horizon, waiting to see how long it would take for the aircraft to veer left or right of the point. Even if he was as motionless as a statue the plane moved slightly off course within moments. Nothing is certain, he thought, either below or inside the plane. Everything is ninety-nine per cent at best.

How many parachutists have jumped without pulling the cord, he wondered? And how many hermits are living below in perfect anonymous treehouses? Or midway between life and death – corpses dangling from tree limbs somewhere between earth and sky, more alive than many of us who take beating hearts for granted? Mace kept his head steady.

In the far distance he thought he glimpsed another straw of smoke rising sharply against the pale blue, and then it was gone. Or was it a mini cyclone, its funnel appearing from the heavens and then disappearing after touching the earth’s surface, like a child dipping a finger into water? There was no wind, he thought, as he saw the stillness of the millions of tree branches beneath him, but what did that prove? What if it was smoke? A person living down there cut off from the rest of the world. Or not.

Mace closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

‘Five thousand feet. It’s not high or low, big or small. I don’t like five thousand feet. I want more. More. More.’

He powered up the throttle, lifted the nose of the aircraft, and began to rise higher and higher and higher into the unchanging blue.

AIR LINES

The valley’s voice is husky, as if coarsened by centuries of smoke and dirt, heat and cold. Inexperienced listeners hear leaves chattering amongst themselves, the occasional rub of twigs, of course, and think they know it all. But those of us who know the weight of the rock, the pressure of the water, the agony of the tilting trees, understand darker sounds. The noise of the valley is more than its surface exertions; even when wind is absent, barricaded by unseen walls, the one sound you will never hear is silence.

Some landscapes are parts of broader tapestries, connected by subterranean veins to other features, their valleys holding hands comfortably with partnering hills and mountains. But our valley stands alone, a ship on a heaving sea, constantly justifying its different language.

A mile-deep layer of rock makes sounds you can see on the surface. At dawn, before air has had time to warm up and move, when everything is as still as it can be, look at the surface of the lake. Is it a perfect mirror of the distant clouds and hills? No, there is no perfect stillness – the earth below, its muscles warm with the heat of tug-of-war stresses, is forever flexing its joints like a light sleeper and sending deep-breath shudders to the surface. If you had a sufficiently sensitive microphone it would reveal arthritic baritone cries and spasmodic whispers.

The valley is a mostly rocky place, lacking soft blankets of soil. The rocks, exposed like fractured bones, have a sensitivity that belies their steely-tough skins. They have low self-esteem because their surfaces, grainy as sandpaper, can never be touched by anything but the most inanimate objects: other rocks, hiking boots, fallen trees, archaeologists’ hammers. No wonder these rocks turn in on themselves and shun the sky, refusing to reflect images of clouds or stars and only grudgingly absorbing the air’s heat at the end of the day. The deep rocks underground, so shy, use a whale-speech of echoes, clicks, and trailing whistles that have no ends or beginnings. There are sentences in the landscape, none of which make complete sense: Look About, Hard Knocks, Search the Pool…

The scalp of this terrain is full of prematurely ageing shrubs and trees, all embarrassed to have ended up in this infertile rocky valley. They are undeserving of rich flood plains, too knotted for gardens, inadequate. Like parasites they cling to the backs of boulders, sending wiry roots into improper fissures that could never sustain a healthy life. These twisted scraggy trees are tough as criminals, obstinate and stubborn; they let the breeze misshape their foliage and it doesn’t matter, they make sounds like snakes hissing when they grudgingly release their eucalyptus scents into the air. There are always individual reformers who rise above the shale and shatter their rocks into fragments. But they rarely stand upright. They lean sideways as if curious to see what lies on the lower slopes of the valley, straining and craning so every fibre of their trunks is stretched and pained. Their canopies are deadweights, constantly suggesting suicide, particularly in strong winds. They are far more fragile than you realize; climb a tree, even the most massive grandfather tree, and shake your body from side to side – the tip of the tree will sway as if made of the softest rubber, while the outermost branches, so elastic, will swill left and right like kelp in surf. Meantime, the all-suffering trunk carries its tons of weight in selfless obstinacy. The roots become crippled with torsion and clawing, never asking for help but always needing it. The bases of the trunks are jammed into the scaly ground, fearful that the slightest lapse in concentration will lead to a slippage, a slide, which once started cannot be stopped. The strains – between limbs and trunks, trunks and earth, earth and sky, earth and black substrates – are unyielding and choked with the violent potential energy of a trillion tons of rocks and trees all desperately seeking to fall towards the earth’s core. Amid sounds like Lock a Shout, Stick the Rock, Thump and Fuel…

So many mobile lives are witness to these never-ending groans. Insects and animals are as afraid of silence as the landscape. Spiders, their drumbeat legs smacking stones, scurry from place to place looking for an audience; crickets, their castanet wings playing Latin songs, are content to sit in one location and let other insects come to them; dragon flies hum to themselves as if no one else is listening. They land on trees and assume their tiny masses will not be felt, but they are wrong. The trees always release a fussed leafy complaint at the slightest disruption.

Larger animals don’t distinguish between trees and rocks; they treat all open territories as danger zones, unprotected battlefields. And they are right to prefer quietude to loudness. Predators are everywhere, waiting and daring and threatening to transform stillness into lightning speed. Every overland transit is a race against death for possums, bats, mice and rats. At any moment a tree, no longer able to maintain its grip, could un-ball its fist and come crashing down to crush anything in its path. Raptors riding the air currents could duck-dive in a heartbeat to snare an unwitting body from the earth, leaving nothing but a whoosh of leaf litter smashing against rusty dust. These are the surface sounds of visitors travelling through, of noisy neighbours on uncaring holidays, of opportunistic revellers casting obscenities at passers-by. These animals scratch and creak and peel and gnaw, so inconsiderate of the subtle straining of the fixed world.

They burst through grass and thickets, making pulsing sounds like Hook the Trout, Bits of Shock, Muck and Stool…

Nighttime is the noisiest time, when the trees snore, their shoulders crack and ligaments pop. The rocks shiver with the onset of sunless cold, shrinking and splitting, one grain at a time, as they shed sandy particles like a human shedding skin. Every dewdrop causes damage, an avalanche of atomic debris falling into crevasses or swept away in a gale. Storms at night are when the landscape loses all inhibition, shouting its loudest taunts at the enemy sky. It dares another lightning strike, another thunderclap, another rush of cyclonic hail from tornadoes that twist like crazed ballerinas. Nighttime harm in the valley resonates jerkily through its amphitheatre like the corrective surge of a jet engine, sending communiqués to trees and rocks to watch out for more imminent strikes. When the landscape is talking this way the leaves and twigs chatter louder to make themselves heard, but the animals and insects take cover and hide, too afraid to compete with the rumbling yelling. At such times you can hear phonetic messages: Water Spout, Tick Tock, Blunt Tool…

How egotistical for humans to lower their voices in this blend of feather-soft hushes and monstrous shrieks. As if our voices could split rock or topple a tree. We are capable of destroying a valley, to be sure, in a maelstrom of engines and implements, but as animals alone we are less meaningful than the smallest landslip. People in the valley are mostly wanderers in search of peace, peaceniks in search of an easy fight. You can hear the squelch of their socks as they walk gingerly over pebbles and mud, occasionally treading accidentally on a small fern and cursing their own carelessness with an abrupt shout – shit – piffling as an air rifle puff. Each step is an abrasion of material against material, strap against pack, leg against leg, arm against pocket. The leaden thud of boots on rock vibrates through the air and the land and makes even the deepest tree roots fasten their grip in case of oncoming thunder or storm. Hikers’ aluminium pots tinkle in a way that nature never heard before, because there are no aluminum vessels in the valley’s repertoire of minerals and ores. Every so often a mobile phone bleats a strange rhythm as alien as a first baby’s first cry. It fills the air with foreign curiosities like Torch and Clout, Take Stock, Too Cruel…

Hold your breath and listen for the landscape’s conversation. If we could stop our hearts at will for just a few seconds and cease the thumping of our bodies, we might approach the noiselessness required to hear the valley. It makes the unrehearsed sounds of a person dreaming. Or suffering a nightmare. It panics and pouts, flaunts and taunts, and ages in its performance of tasks that have no masterplan. It is an outsider that knows its isolation is unavoidable, that its moaning is mostly unheard and irrelevant.

There is another person in the valley – the campfire smoke, whiter than the mist, is rising quickly towards the ridge. And, of course, as humans do, the person is shouting at the top if his voice. The sounds ricochet off the rocks and trees, which treat this invasion of sound with contempt. Sounds that have no place in this self-absorbed valley where humans do not belong. And I ignore these manmade insults, these uninvited vibrations, and hold my breath and try to stop my own heartbeat as I strive to become one with the valley, until I finally understand the words, too late, which sound like: Watch Out, Falling Rocks, Run You Fool…

ANTS IN SPACE

The Master says our probability of success is one. That means the odds of success are 100 percent. Our unity and tenacity are our strength. Our uniformity of purpose is our salvation. Together we ants are unstoppable. We act together as an individual, and individually we act together. We cannot fail.

Of course, our success may not happen for a long time, but we are patient.

‘Together we will succeed.’ That’s what the Master said. And we all understood the certainty of that statement.

‘Do you know how many humans have ever lived?’ the Master said at the beginning of his speech. ‘Thirty billion. That’s how many of them have ever existed since their species evolved. Do you know our number today, right now, right here? Two trillion! We are small individually, but together our mass is greater than the sum of all the humans’ bodies. We are stronger, more committed and more patient. We will survive – the probability of our success is one – but we must be patient and work as a single organism if we are to achieve our goals quickly.’

Luck united our team, or to be more accurate, our segment of a much larger team that has lived in the same zone for countless generations. Our expansionism was more inevitable than strategic, driven more by instinct than design, but the appearance of the rocket machine, as the humans call it, was a temptation too great to ignore. Within an hour of its appearance we had climbed the foot of its tower, examined the whiteness of its fins, ascertained the force of its mobility, and divined its purpose of exploration. We took up position in its crevices, succumbed to poisons, and then resumed our occupation with fresh numbers. We never surrendered.

‘Do you know what the humans call us?’ the Master said when it was clear the rocket would soon be ready to begin its journey. ‘They call us pests! They try to exterminate us in every conceivable place, in every zone across the planet, at every opportunity. They despise us, they think they can kill us off one at a time, but so long as we are united we are strong. We will rise up to replace the fallen, and we will grow fat on the flesh of the humans we conquer.’

Our probability of success is one. One of our colonies might reach space, only to perish if the man-rocket explodes. Another colony might reach space in an intact rocket, but then perish from the cold. Another colony might reach space in an intact rocket, find warmth in an internal cavity, but then dehydrate. Another colony might reach space in an intact rocket, find warmth and water, but then die from asphyxiation. Another colony might reach space in an intact rocket, find warmth, water and atmosphere, but then perish from radiation. Another colony might reach space in an intact rocket, find warmth, water, an atmosphere, as well as a shield from radiation, but then perish from a contagion.

We know that every failure is nothing more than a delay – one day the right events will occur in the correct sequence to allow a colony to survive on another world.

‘Does any ant here have experience of flying machines?’ the Master asked. ‘We know from the smells, the sounds, the resonances, that this machine is designed to fly, but who among us has experienced such travel?’

It was then that I raised my antennae – my first and last non-collective action – and I admitted that I had been on an aircraft, albeit a smaller machine, and travelled vast distances through the air before returning to the site of departure. I admitted my fear, I admitted my awe, I said how I trembled to be unexpectedly alone and without my companions. I said that my sense of life waned in my solitude, that my sense of purpose trailed behind me, like the delicate clouds that collapsed in the wake of the craft. An ‘airplane’, it was called. I said how I feared for my life as I clung to a rubber seal in a door frame, and that I saw many comrades fall from less secure stanchions, perhaps to die from cold, perhaps to die from drowning, perhaps to die from falling, perhaps to survive from landing in a soft tree canopy. But I survived.

‘When the rocket departs you will serve as leader of the new colony,’ the Master said. ‘Your knowledge will be useful, your experiences will save lives, your guidance will contribute to our success.’

And it was then that we observed that the rocket’s departure was imminent. The declining noise, the slowing activity, the sudden evacuation of humans from the base of the craft, and then the silence.

Head for the interior, I shouted. Do not seek shelter on the outside of the hull or you will perish. Do not hide in the lower cones, as they might be engines that will incinerate you. Do not mistake height for safety, as the tip of the craft is more dangerous than its trunk. Do not cling to exposed metal, as this material can become so hot that contact will lead to instantaneous death. Be disciplined and seek out food, waste or any other form of organic matter, even if you have to take refuge on the body of a human. Our survival depends on speed, dispersal and courage. Remember what the Master said: ‘Our strength is our uniformity of purpose.’ Resolve to communicate promising pathways to your comrades, share your insights as they come to pass, make sure dead ends are sealed to prevent wasteful activity. I sense we may only have a few minutes to locate shelter once the craft begins to move…

An amplified voice – a droning human voice – uttered a succession of quipped messages across the air. As the announcement ceased, the rocket shook as violently as a falling branch in a storm. The vibrating hull became hazy in a layer of its own dust, and rivers of steam and vapour erupted outwards and then, so suddenly, downwards as the craft heaved itself towards the stars.

I saw many of our kin lose their hold and plummet earthwards, lost in a red-yellow plume of heat and flame. Splinters of debris and dirt crushed others, and still more of us were flattened as gaps closed unexpectedly under the strain of the massive metal frame.

Our diverse locations proved fortunate. For every group that perished, another found serendipitous safe haven. We were everywhere: in door panels, locks, sealed food wrappers, pockets, shoes, everywhere.

We must be patient and work as a single organism, I shouted over the roar. The probability of our success is one, but stand fast and do not be afraid of the shuddering or the heat.

Weightlessness arrived quickly, the sensation almost unnoticed until it was absolute – our attentions were elsewhere: the noise, the shaking, the heat and cold, the immense forces pressing so hard against our bodies.

Many of our kin lost antennae and legs in the furore, which meant the onset of weightlessness resulted in a drift of body parts floating through all the major cavities of the craft.

Stay resolute, remain patient, I growled. Do not count losses; assess opportunities and safe havens. Our mission now is to locate the humans – their habitat is bound to have a greater probability of safety than other parts of the craft. Send a message down the line: Locate the humans and report back to me at central command.

The message was half-lost in the maze of struggling, kicking bodies floating in all directions, but a response several minutes later was promising: ‘Sir, there are two humans at the far tip of the structure, and they have air to breathe.’

In unison, and without panic, our remaining network clung to hard surfaces and made their way slowly in the general direction of the narrow tip of the craft. Occasionally one of our number would lose grip and float off into the dark expansiveness of a room or storage space, only to reappear some time later after crawling around the sides of the cavity once again.

Casualties continued to mount. When a nest of differently coloured wires blocked a slim vent, ruining our passageway, successive members from our party used their pincers to snip away the offending material.

When one of us touched a yellow wire, his body exploded in a cloud of sparks. Then the next member crawled forward and clasped a blue wire. Same outcome. And again and again we sacrificed brethren – red wire, black wire, white wire, purple wire, until we struck success with the green wire. Safe.

Persist and be brave, I said stoutly. The probability of success is one – do not give up; we know the humans are nearby; we can use their habitat, their food. Our unity is our strength.

As we crawled and grappled our way in common direction, with a common goal, we could hear the humans in a nearby room. They were flicking switches and crunching what sounded like paper wrappers. There was the unmistakable sound of human speech, not amplified like the last voice we heard on land, but softer and more harmonious. There were mathematically precise beeps and hums, which sounded alive, and the occasional erratic bump of a limb against steel.

‘How will we get in?’ asked several kin in unison.

‘The humans are on the other side of a sealed door – we can see them through a glass portal – but we have no way of making them open the door. We will die here.’

At last the craft became silent and quiet, though the weightlessness persisted and caused great hardship. Many of us were succumbing to a lack of air, and others were beginning to feel numb from the cold. It was clear that time was not on our side.

Our uniformity of purpose is our salvation, I said. Together we are unstoppable.

In the blackness I could half see, half sense another wire-filled opening above the doorway to the human-room. The matted wires were like colourful animal hair.

A solution presented itself.

I require one volunteer, I called out to the 70 or 80 members of our immediate group.

I want one of our brethren to crawl up to that opening, cut one of the non-green wires, and create a spark. The damage might cause one of the humans to open the door to investigate.

In the blackness of our small room there was complete silence. Slowly one antenna rose up, then another, until all I could see was a shadowy haze of small upright limbs.

You there, third from the end, the honour is yours.