Free Fall Writing: As defined by novelist W.O. Mitches, where you fall out of a plane and write like mad to save your life before you hit the ground. We pull prompts out of a hat.
Writing prompt- Peace in the valley
One of my joys in life is having peace in the valley. The hillsides have white clover and goat tracks. No one needs to fear where they walk. The culture over in Kaffirstan was for the ladies to wear dim colours, but here my daughters wear bright gingham. They can walk without fear of falsehoods or derisions. They carry baskets.
My valley has no fear, and neither does my house. I marvel at my daughters and my son growing into something I cannot predict, not like in Kaffirstan where children fear their father, and march along a narrow path to a narrow preordained mold.
At the end of the valley there is no gate or roadblock or guard shack. Nobody asks for your papers—and if there was a house fire nobody would think to grab any papers. All you need is your drivers licence and that would be with your money in your wallet.
I am learning to walk in my valley with no regard to defiles and hidden ground, no need to look up and around. Sometimes my neck starts swivelling but then I say, “Stop. Just enjoy the here and now.” My daughters have no fear of singing on the skyline. God bless us all.
… …
prompt- Vices I admire
Smoke was idly rising from three places in Sarajevo. It was too far to shoot anyone with an automatic rifle or machine gun. A morning bird sang. Off in the blue a flight of four fighter-bomber jets growled from right to left. No contrails. They were not worth attending to, as they were clearly going somewhere else.
The guns behind me were silent, “behind” meaning on the reverse slope of our hill. I was enjoying the moment. I did a lot of that lately. Somehow, I just wasn’t able to think of math equations or the works of Kant or anything mental. I just existed. Does that make sense? But I enjoyed my existence. I suppose, if I was a dog on this hillside, I would be enjoying the scents on the breeze, enjoying life. And I was, really. But a dog wouldn’t be in a dirty blessed foxhole.
Not a round hole, a two man trench. Like the partisans must have used, back during the war. Not much had changed. Radios were lighter, rifles required more ammo, planes flew faster. Bombsights had improved: a mortar man I knew in high school had told me that. That was Charles Radislav. I wonder if he is still around?
Next to me was my trench partner, a man who hadn’t finished high school. Wars make strange trench fellows. He was Paulic Varro. He had the vices I admire: Tobacco all the time, wine when we were safe, bullying around prisoners.
… …
prompt- Nobody’s child
He was walking, not marching, with a “soldier-on-the-town” amble. Private Jung was wearing one of his two sets of uniform, in the town a kilometre from the base. To the right was a bar that surely had some fellow soldiers inside; to his left an Inn; up ahead was a precious public fountain. A few people on the streets in midafternoon. School was out, apparently, because a young girl was crossing the dusty street.
One moon was in the sky. Jung ambled on, taking in the colours in the stores, the effect of the bright sun on glass and sandstone, noting how shadows were never black, not really. He lost track of the girl, when suddenly she bumped into him. She looked so terrified that his heart skipped.
“Hey,” he said gently, “take it easy. You might hurt yourself.” She looked at him, big eyed and speechless. “I guess I’m not the only one who walks along in his own world. I was only looking at the coloured shadows. I missed seeing you.” The girl was probably about ten, and tall for her age, long legged, brown haired.
… ….
prompt- Unprepared for eternity
It was during on of their night talks, sitting with her leg cramping, their stuff hidden under the trees ready to go, that Sue asked her big question. She barely glanced out the side of her eye to ask, “Are people good? Or are most people bad?”
Jung was taken by surprise; Sue was used to him pausing before he answered a question. After a moment he said, “There’s the stars, looking down on all of us.” A beat. “I think,” he said, “most people are weak. They know what good is, they don’t want to be bad, but they just can’t do it.” Sue looked down to take this in, while Jung thought furiously. “In the army, people are a bit stronger. They’ll help you if you are struggling, give dry socks if you need them. I heard once that the officers can leave candy on their desk and no other officer will steal. But I don’t expect civilians to have that much self control.”
Sue said, “They get angry so easily. And they hit.”
Jung said, “Sometimes they are stressed, and then prone to easy anger, because they are too weak to do whatever it takes to reduce their stress. Sometimes they are too weak to look at their own faults, and what they are too lazy about…. I once got a hammerlock on a guy, dragged him to the chaplain’s office. He was too lazy to go there himself, to get help.
“Did it work?”
“Yes, after that when he got angry he went for a walk around the barracks, and the rest of us no longer had to fix any holes—he used to punch the walls.”
“Oh. Were you bigger than him?”
“No, but I guess I had God on my side. That and the rest of the barracks. People followed us to make sure he went along. The point is that if you don’t humble yourself to learn, then you are in for a very grey eternity. Very grey.”
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
The day before Remembrance Day
November
2023
Afterthought: Last week I wrote of The Iliad. Simone Veil pointed out in her excellent interpretation The Poem of Force that from hearing/reading the epic you can’t tell which side won, nor which side wrote it. No national chauvinism and glory. In the intervening three thousand years we have yet to regain such clear eyed humbleness.
