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