Tracey S. Rosenberg

Lindia slunk across the departure hall, clutching the notebook in her overcoat pocket. She struggled to block out the cheery customer service agents behind the Sunshine Air check-in desks. One of them would be crushed when an eighteen-wheeler smashed into her convertible; another’s undiagnosed stage three ovarian cancer would fail to respond to treatment.

Lindia had stayed awake all night, after taking speed to ensure she didn’t doze off. She started walking to the airport at dawn, in her battered shoes, because buses were intolerable. She arrived just after noon, frantic in case she’d miscalculated. Within a few hours, she’d been moved on twice by airport security guards, who threatened to arrest her if they spotted her again.

She had to deliver her message to Balcan Dobbs before he boarded Sunshine Air flight 647, scheduled to depart at a quarter past eight.

The evening news hour finished a few minutes before seven, always ending with Balcan’s solemn trademark sign-off: “It’s been a long day. Good night.” Add ten minutes for talking to his producer, another ten for wiping off makeup and changing from his professional suit into his velvet jacket, and five more to get from his dressing room to the late-model limousine which would speed him to the airport. Balcan always flew Sunshine Air because of his promotional obligations—only a month earlier, he’d renewed his lucrative contract in spite of a massive loss posted by the company that quarter. The only route to the Sunshine Air departure gates was the corridor where Lindia was pacing.

Her path was suddenly blocked by half a dozen slim teen girls in pleated skirts, laughing their way into the terminal. She nearly crammed a fist in her mouth as their futures flashed like a slideshow of despair: one, pregnant though she didn’t yet know it, would die of a botched abortion; another would topple off a hotel balcony in the Caribbean after a three-day bender. And then there was the head cheerleader, with her cherry-red lipstick and 36-DDs...

Lindia stumbled forward and punched her on the shoulder. “Your leukaemia’s coming back. Do you think I like seeing these things? I can’t stop seeing them!”

The girl shrieked and recoiled, raising her manicured hands to protect herself.

Across the terminal, a tall man in a black velvet jacket was waving to the Sunshine Air customer service agents as he strolled towards the departure gates.

Lindia leapt over the feet of the cheerleaders, ignoring the squeals of protest and a cry of “crazy bitch!” Hurtling after Balcan Dobbs, she grabbed his elbow just as he passed the newsstand. With her other hand, she yanked the notebook out of her coat pocket.

“Don’t get on the plane,” she gasped, waving it at him. “I have all the proof here.”

Even up close, without layers of studio makeup, Balcan was coolly handsome. With no greater expression than a raised eyebrow, he jerked his arm free from her grasp.

“Take the train, or tell them you’re sick,” Lindia insisted. “But don’t get on the plane!”

That made Balcan pause. “It’s no use,” he said in his dignified news anchor voice.

“It would save your life. If you get on the plane, you’ll die.”

“Oh, I’m fully aware that Sunshine Air 647 will crash thirty minutes into its flight, resulting in the loss of all lives on board.”

“You can’t know that,” Lindia spluttered. “I never told you!”

Two bored sales girls watched them from the newsstand. The head cheerleader was talking to a security guard, gesturing towards Lindia.

“The plane will drop without warning,” Balcan said, wearing the same plastic, irresistible smile he displayed every night on air. “The result of mechanical failure due to cutbacks in Sunshine Air’s technical services department—ironic, since they doubled my promotional fees. The pilot will scramble to recover, but he’s addicted to Seconal and his reactions are too slow. The co-pilot is going through a divorce following the death of his only child, and will be grateful to take the easy way out. The total casualties will be six crew members of Sunshine Air and twenty-three passengers, including news anchor Balcan Dobbs.”

Lindia hurled the notebook at his chest, smacking him with the scribblings of the disaster she had foreseen every night when he appeared on her salvaged television. “How do you know all this? Who told you?”

Her curse had grown steadily over the years, until she could barely keep from drowning in the sea of impending tragedy and blissful ignorance. Malls, buses, parks—any place where people gathered became congregations of death that only she could witness. Her attempts to escape her overwhelming knowledge led her into misery; she barely scraped by, living in a sublet dive, slinking on the outskirts, struggling not to shriek from the deaths of an entire city, all alone.

Not alone. Someone had warned Balcan Dobbs. If they could find each other, maybe they could survive together.

“Tell me who else lives with this curse,” she pleaded. One of the Sunshine Air customer service agents? The cherry-lipped cheerleader?

Three security guards were approaching. The black woman in front, calmly trying to coax Lindia to step away, would be killed in a shoot-out.

Balcan’s face was a terrible mask. “Let me tell you what even you cannot see. The guards will eventually release you because you’re too crazy for them to deal with. When you return home, all your possessions will be gone—stolen by the junkie who sold you that speed. Tomorrow, while searching for food in trash cans, you’ll find a discarded handgun with two bullets in the chambers. You’ll make a mess with the first one, but succeed with the second. And your curse will be done.” Balcan flashed a brilliant smile just as the guards pounced. “But mine ends tonight, on Sunshine Air flight 647. I’m sorry we didn’t meet sooner. It’s been a long day for both of us. Good night.”

……………………………………………

Tracey S. Rosenberg is from the USA and lives in Scotland, where she is continually reminded that she sounds American. She has run out of sarcastic retorts. She’s been published widely, including Best British Short Stories 2015, and is Bookstalls Manager for the StAnza Poetry Festival.

We Have Magnetic Trees

Ian Hunter

Heading home we came to Little Gasko, our closest village, straight into a traffic jam caused by a group of ‘Free to Be Fatties’ demonstrators. Some of them were walking around in their underwear, others wore wobbly fat suits, a couple looked like orange sumo wrestlers.

“Who are these people, Dad?” Mark asked, on one of the rare occasions he looked up. While beside him, Nick’s head was still lowered, lost in a game.

“Just a protest group,” I told him, frowning as we slowed to join the queue of cars, my mind doing calculations. Take a right, then a left, then another left. Would that bring us out beyond the protestors? I cursed myself for not bringing the satnav but that was in Ali’s Car.

Two people were waddling down beside the line of cars. One handed out leaflets, another had a tray of nibbles. I rolled down the window and sniffed. Somewhere up ahead there was a barbeque. I pulled down my sun visor and changed its mode, lens zooming down the main road.

“Shit,” I muttered, flipping up the visor. Someone had pointed in our direction, faces were turning towards us. A couple of guys with long hair and faces dotted with piercings started to jog closer as quickly as they could in their fat suits.

I looked in the mirror, signalled and swung across the road just as a hand beat against the roof of the Land Rover.

Ali let her window down an inch. “Hey, we’ve got children in here!”

“Why are you letting your land be experimented on?” a man with metal hoops round his nostrils asked, breath close enough to mist the window.

“Because the world needs food that can survive our lousy weather!” I shouted back, turning the car round, and having no choice but to mount the pavement. No way was I going to attempt a three-point turn. They’d lie down behind me in protest. Force me to run over one of them and burst their suit before they farted off through the air to land in a tree or the pond in the village square.

The other one pulled at the door handle on my side. “This is just the start!” he yelled. “Crops that can beat the rain can be modified to warp your thinking! Free to be Fatties!” he shouted, again and again, hand slapping the car in time to his chant. “Free to be Fatties! Free to be Fatties! Free to be Fatties!”

“You’re not even fat,” I snarled at him, feeling hot and angry as we headed out of the village and the start of the maze of country roads we would have to take to get back home.

✥

“I’m really sorry,” Ricky said, his image scratchy, shrugging into the webcam as we connected on Skype. “They say the skies won’t be safe for weeks.”

What could I say? Ricky was employed by WEErd Wonders as project leader, to make sure they harvested the hybrid plant we called the Clingers, the new crop that was being trialled on our land. He wasn’t working for me. His dad had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, smashing into a pile-up on the Great Ocean Road, as he headed north from Melbourne on a business trip. I couldn’t blame the kid for wanting to leave and fly across the world to check on his father who was in a bit of a state. Broken limbs and tangled innards, to use one of my technical terms. Now Ricky was in the wrong place at the wrong time, stuck in Australia as flights were grounded all because of a volcanic eruption further away from Cairns than my farm back in Scotland.

“Nothing you can do about it, except maybe take a slow boat to China,” I eventually replied, half-joking. “Just get back here in time for the first leaves to appear.”

We said our goodbyes and the brightness died on the screen. I stared at my own slightly warped reflection, my own ghost curving away from me. The room behind was full of “stuff” as Ali called it, belonging to my father, or my grandfather, all sheep farmers, and I was the last sheep farmer standing, or sitting—or at least I used to be. I reached out and closed the laptop, thinking. Nothing can go wrong, so Ricky had said, but that didn’t allow for cars slamming into each other above miles and miles of beautiful beaches on the Great Ocean Road, or passengers stranded by volcanic ash. I turned my head listening to the wind racing around inside the chimney, loosening stones. Sleet was falling outside the window. This was supposed to be Spring, but it isn’t these days. Spring is a moveable season that sometimes doesn’t happen at all. For WEErd Wonders this project is just one of several, but for me and the family it is everything, our livelihoods, maybe even our futures.

✥

We used to get our sheep stolen. There were organised gangs on quad bikes, sometimes with a van, or a lorry, sometimes bearing crossbows—or a gun if they really meant business. If a drone showed me someone carrying a gun then I didn’t try and intervene. Then there was Joe Bloggs out in his car, who looked over a hedge into a field and suddenly decided he would like some lamb. If I was lucky I would get a fence alert, and one of the drones could capture the registration number of the car, and the police would be waiting for them when they got home. More often than not, these people weren’t organised criminals, not like the gangs, but still smart enough to clone a number plate when they drove into the countryside, maybe even from the same model of car. Right car, wrong number. Private drones aren’t allow to follow any vehicles on to the motorway, for fear they cause an accident. All of that—the organised gangs, the tourist rustlers, as I call them, and the weather—adds up to the fact that we aren’t a sheep farm any more. It’s too dammed hard. The weather is unpredictable. Seasons come when seasons shouldn’t. Incessant downpours, even blizzards near lambing time, burying sheep about to give birth in feet of snow.

So hundreds of years of sheep farming has more or less stopped with me. Insert guilt here. Sure we keep the odd lamb, and the odd calf. The kids look after them. We tried having a farm shop, but couldn’t get the range of products and they are too expensive compared to the supermarkets. Times are hard and people can’t afford things that are double the price, not in the volumes we would need to sell. We even tried to make our own ice cream for a while, still do, occasionally, but the novelty has worn off. Holiday cottages? You name it, we’ve tried the lot.