Magnetic force
Ann is reading a piece in an environmental magazine. It’s saying that the magnetic poles are switching, and changing over, and it could mean trouble for people and animals in the world. It set her thinking whether this has got something to do with Whales, Sharks, and Dolphins getting beached. She asked herself if they are getting confused and lost because of this. “What’s wrong, mum?” her daughter Debbie asked.
“Oh! I’ve just been reading about the magnetic North and South pole switching over. I’m thinking this could be why so many sea creatures are beaching themselves.”
Debbie gazed up from her homework. “It’s strange that you should bring this matter up, Mum. Our Teacher has been talking about this in class. Miss Evans is trying to find out more about it.”
“Well done, Debbie, please remember me to Miss Evans, and tell her that I’m interested in this. If she finds out more on this subject, will she share it with me?”
Ann walked across the room and spun the world globe that they owned. “Nature is like a set of scales, Debbie. It keeps a balance. If there are too many of one creature, it will cause chaos to take some out, so that some will survive.”
“Mmm,” groaned Debbie thoughtfully. “This could be the reason for this pandemic. We all know that there are too many people in the world and Nature is dealing with this problem. It’s a bit like cancer, so many have this dreadful disease, and unfortunately not all can be saved.”
The two women grew quiet; both had speech bubbles forming in their heads. However they were blank, they had both thought and said enough.
Debbie got up from the desk and went outside to feed her tortoise. The animal was nowhere to be found. Debbie looked for it and hoped it hadn’t got out into the road. Debbie then checked out there on the path and the grass verge. The little animal was hiding. The girl went back inside and said to Ann, her Mother, “I can’t find Hercules anywhere, Mum.”
Ann commented that he was in the garden earlier. She could sense Debbie was upset and told her that she will help to find the tortoise. “Did you check the pond, Debbie?”
“No! I didn’t think to look in there. I do hope he hasn’t drowned, Mum.” Ann and Debbie checked around and also checked the small fountain they have. Ann then checked around the water lilies. This is a hopeless chore, as the leaves are large and strong and cover one end of the pond. This part of the pond with the fountain is a place that the lilies don’t like. Water lilies don’t like moving water, so they grow at the end that’s still. Hercules is not to be found anywhere. “I’ll go and ask our neighbours, Mum.”
“Great idea, Debbs, and I’ll come with you.” Ann had heard her neighbour cutting his grass earlier and she did wonder. They knocked the door and Liam’s wife answered.
“We are so sorry, and Liam has taken Hercules to the vets. Liam was strimming and accidentally caught the tortoise. We are so sorry, Debbs, and I’m waiting to hear from Liam on how the tortoise is.”
Debbie began to cry and Ann did her best to comfort her. “We’ll get another one, Debbs.”
Debbie sobbed and said, “No, Mum, it won’t be the same.”
“Oh! Debbs! Liam didn’t hurt Hercules on purpose. He is doing his best, as he has taken him to the vet.” Ann felt for Liam’s wife, Shirley, as well as for Debbie.
The phone rang and it’s Liam. He spoke to his wife. It’s bad news.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell Debbie that the vet has put Hercules down, he was so badly injured.”
Shirley put her head down and turned to Ann and Debbie. “The tortoise didn’t make it, and Liam’s very upset. We will try to make it up to you Debbie, we are so sorry.”
Ann said to Shirley, “We will pay the vet bill and it is good of Liam, and he did his best. It’s nobody’s fault, accidents happen.” Debbie’s distraught, but she nodded her head.
Shirley made Ann and Debbie a cup of tea, and waited for Liam to come home.
Ann and Shirley talked about different things until Liam arrived.
Liam sat next to Debbie and asked her if she wanted Hercules’ ashes, or should he be buried?
Tearfully Debbie decided that she wanted his ashes, to bury him in their garden.
Ann spoke to Liam and thanked him for what he had done. Ann offered to pay the vet bill, but Liam wasn’t having any of that.
Ann, Debbie, Liam, and Shirley, held a funeral for Hercules, and they enjoyed a nice Buffet afterwards.
Liam isn’t finished making it up to Debbie and he decided it might be nice if they all go on holiday together, adding that it’s his treat.
They went to Cornwall and Debbie loves it here. Liam mentioned he wanted to go sky diving.
Debbie looked up and was excited. “Oh please, Mum, can I go sky diving?”
Ann replied that she thought that Liam wanted this for himself.
“Not at all, I’m hoping that you will all join me.”
Ann and Shirley’s eyes grew wide. They both said together, “You want us all to go sky diving? Wow. I’ve never done anything like this before and I’ve had no practice.”
“Well, that’s settled then, we all go sky diving, and we start our training at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Shirley had butterflies in her tummy, but felt excited at the same time.
They began training and quickly learned how to jump and roll. This is it, time to put the Parachutes on and climb into the plane. Up they went feeling anxious, and praying their ’chutes will open.
One, two, three, four people, jumped out of the plane and all are spell-bound. They can see a castle with a turret, and then a bridge with a river running under, and birds. It’s a feeling of real freedom and the fear has left them, and they are in awe. Debbie’s so glad she came on this holiday as now she can tell the friends at school that she went sky diving, and all about her time on the fun fair and all of the things they did and also surfing. She made them feel hungry as she mentioned the fish and chips that are excellent, also a meal they enjoyed at the Three Shires Restaurant. She summed up by saying, “I love Cornwall and I want to go back there next year.”
Josie Smith
STOP
The drive down the hill to the town was familiar. The road curved slowly, gently, giving you the illusion that it was straight. You angled your hands slightly on the wheel, held it loosely, and the car did the rest. It left you free to enjoy the view. The hedges on the other side of the road weren’t low, any more than they were on this side, but you were above them, all the way down. You could see the fields, the trees, sometimes single, sometimes in clumps, enjoy the seasons of the year, the plough ridges losing their sharpness with the autumn rains, the green fuzz of hope, the individual blades in rows, all at slightly different heights, the massed bushiness of a growing crop, the daily change from green through a pale brown to golden fullness, the startling shock of a reaped field, clouds of dust blowing through stubble and crumbles of chalk showing through white like bone… and then you were used to it, the faint marks of the old plough-ridges like acne pits on a middle-aged face, and the features wore away until it was time for the ploughing again.
But today, this very second, there was something different which dragged your eyes, which normally looked forward, encompassing the uncurling road and the unfolding view, sharply to the right, because what fixed them was in the sky, and although it wasn’t perfectly still, but swaying and bobbing, it was, with respect to the panorama of road and fields unrolling before you, effectively stationary, and therefore dangerous.
You find yourself jerking the wheel, to make a correction which you shouldn’t have to make, and it’s an over-correction, and you have to brake, too sharply, and the car pulls to the left, but you catch it, more gently, and you’re back on course, and what you saw is only in your mind, now, though you glance in your mirror, but it can only be a glance, and there’s no point really, because the road’s twisted round, and you can’t see now what you saw before, and anyway what you saw was descending and will be on the ground by this time, so you have to ask yourself what it was, and the answer is: a parachutist. Not one of those paragliders you see sometimes, gliding to and fro in big, gentle arcs, weaving a loose-meshed fabric from the air with their bright-coloured multi-winged ’chutes, but a proper parachutist, descent controlled by use of the lines, spilling air as necessary, zeroing in on a very precise target area, which is, of course, invisible.
Your memory tells you there’s nothing there that the parachutist could be aiming for; but your mind cautions you that you don’t really know, because it’s an area that’s hidden by the slope as you’re coming down the hill, and hidden by the hedge as you’re going back up. Farmland, you say to yourself, no buildings, they’re all on the other side of the road, towards the village.
At the foot of the hill, there’s a roundabout with four entrances and exits. You’re coming in from the east, aiming to go straight over, and then over a bridge across a river which flows south, not a big river, but more than just a stream, and it flows on beside the road that runs south from the roundabout, but then veers south-west, away from it, avoiding the houses of the straggly village-cum-suburb.
The road that carries on to the west goes under a railway-bridge, a low one, and its lowness means that there’s only space enough for one high vehicle at a time to go through, so you’re used to there being hold-ups there, and the traffic backing up for a considerable distance, up the hill, sometimes past the first possible turn-off to take another route. But then, that other route isn’t altogether helpful, since, if you follow it logically and thoughtlessly, it only leads to the same roundabout you’re approaching now, and the more traffic there is on that road, coming at you from the right, the less likely it is that you will get the chance to turn out, and so the queue going backwards up the hill will get beyond the first turn-off, and reach the second, which only leads away from the town that everyone’s really trying to get to. There are, admittedly, ways, by country roads, if you know them, to get back to the town, but they go round and about, and always have to join another big road to get in, and all those big roads debouch onto the ring road and end up throttling one another at roundabouts, so the whole effect is of one enormous cardiac arrest, with every blood-vessel blocked, the pressure building and all the engines throbbing and going nowhere.
So you come down to the roundabout, and you can see, as the traffic slows in front of you, that the road on the far side is at a standstill, in both directions, because the traffic from your right has entered the roundabout but can’t get off it, and the traffic coming from town wants to go up the hill where you’re coming from, but can’t get through the traffic coming from its left which is refusing to give up its place… and nothing seems to want to turn up the road that comes in from the north, towards the place where the parachutist, who is only just still there, on the edge of your mind, must presumably have landed…
And this is the moment when, as you see that nothing is going to move for quite a while, you put on the handbrake and turn off your engine, and don’t quite turn off the ignition, because you need power for the electric window, and you open it full, as the first stage in a process of relaxation, and you realise that everything is amazingly quiet.
There’s a bit of chatter, and some door-slamming, partly angry, partly resigned, but not a single motor is running. One or two tenacious, stubborn or stupid people are opening their bonnets, ready to tinker, but the majority have used their eyes and their ears, most without even bothering to get out, and have concluded, rightly, that whatever force has stopped every engine they can see or hear is not something on which they can have any effect. So they just sit there, waiting to see what will happen.
Just because it’s the next thing to do, you turn your key a little further, but nothing new lights up, let alone turns over. The simple electric circuits still seem to be working – the window responds, but you leave it open. After all, there’s no risk of exhaust fumes. Something magnetic, you reckon, that’s fried the CPUs, or just put them out of action – though in that case there ought to be some old bangers still running, the ones you repair with cold chisels and bent paper-clips.
Out of curiosity, you try the radio, and it still works. Normally, you’d listen to Radio 3, for the music, but under the circumstances you press the button for traffic news – and wish you had a drink with you, to settle your nerves. You know there’s a plastic bottle full of stale water that rattles to and fro under your seat on sharp corners or steep climbs, but that really isn’t what you want as you listen to live reports from around the world. Countries and continents – or at least those in daylight – seem to be competing with one another for length of jams and number of cars involved. You’re relieved to hear no news of air-crashes, or train-crashes. Whatever’s done this is clearly targeted, very precisely. That’s good to know – in one sense, anyway. It’s certainly better than something indiscriminate, even if it indicates a sophisticated level of expertise on the part of whoever’s responsible.
After the first twenty minutes of traffic catastrophes, you turn over to Radio 3 for relief, but it’s not long till that wavelength, too, gets commandeered by official announcements interspersed with three minute classical lollipops that you’ve heard too many times before. Slowly, in the absence of information, the airwaves are filled with chattering voices, talking heads and vox pop, drivers from all over the world, complaining, complaining, complaining. Two minutes of baffled grumbling in a kaleidoscope of languages and accents was more than enough. Silence was a relief.
But that didn’t last, either. It wasn’t impatience that drove you out of the car. It was partly the need to loosen your limbs, and partly the creeping sense of powerlessness manifesting itself in nervousness and restlessness. Walking down the middle of the road, without bothering to look out for traffic, was liberating, as an assertion of self. After all, nothing was going to come along and kill you unexpectedly, not even a police-car or an emergency vehicle.
You carried on down to the roundabout itself, and over it, onto the bridge. Whereas all the other people who were out of their cars were standing around chatting with one another and taking it in turns to pontificate, you were more interested in looking at the river. After all, you never got the chance in the ordinary way of things, just driving by one way or the other, concentrating on the queue to get under the railway-bridge or the queue at the roundabout ahead.
It took you a minute or so to realise what was odd about the river. At first, you thought it had dried up, which was crazy, given the recent weather, then that the weed had taken it over – Algal bloom you muttered to yourself. Finally, you understood. The river still showed the characteristics of flow, but was in fact motionless. The ripples and the eddies and the curling of the surface were all there, but they were fixed. It was so disturbing to look at, that you wandered on, under the railway-bridge, just to see what was happening.
There was a big car dealership there, and they’d gone so far up-market (or indeed, as you thought, up themselves, given that they were slapbang next door to a thriving used-car business) that they’d plonked a ready-made small fountain at one corner of their forecourt, in front of one of their big plate-glass windows – well, the spray from it probably kept the local kids at bay. Only the fountain, too, was motionless, and hung there as if it were extruded acrylic threads. Somehow, its stillness and silence told you that it couldn’t last, so you turned round and walked rapidly back uphill to your car – not as if you were scared, of course, not as if you were in a hurry, but as if you were doing some power-walking, as a form of exercise.
Good thing you did, too, because you hadn’t been sat there five minutes before people’s engines began to start up again. First the ones that had just cut out began to turn over and fire, and then everyone else took the hint. That was an end of the peace and quiet, and brought the need to shut the window and turn off the air-vents, so you didn’t suck in the exhaust from the car in front, and naturally it took half an hour before any traffic-police appeared to clear the gridlock by establishing and imposing priorities, instead of leaving everything to the aggression of the individual driver.
Within three-quarters of an hour, though, the whole procession was moving slightly faster than a snail, more at tortoise-pace, through the first roundabout, under the bridge to the second roundabout, and into town. A change of wind splashed spray from the fountain onto your windscreen. (You’d been too busy keeping your distance, back and front, in the queue to look at the river.)
As you wound along, you tried the radio again. Radio 4, this time. The general view seemed to be that the Effect was of alien origin, and that we should try to do something to prevent it happening again, even though we didn’t know what it was, and could therefore have no idea how to stop it. The buzzword, though, was Fortress Earth. Well, at least that made you smile, and reminded you of the Wise Men of Gotham, who built the towering wall round the tree, to keep in the cuckoo, so they could have spring all year.
The more you thought about it, the more it seemed to you that what had been done was something carefully weighed in advance, a product of the scales of justice. If you wanted to know what exactly it was from our side that, put into the pan, had produced this response – well, the area of choice was vast. Crimes against each other, crimes against our planet, crimes against the universe… where did you want to begin? Where did you feel you could stop?
As you listened to the increasingly confused debates, you found yourself exasperated by the fatuousness of one particular school of thought. These were the people – and there were quite a few of them, to judge by the number interviewed – who criticised the aliens for not having made themselves clear enough. They got our attention these people said but they haven’t given us their message. They haven’t told us what they want us to do.
Round and round they went, saying the same thing again and again in different words, whilst you sat at St Mark’s roundabout, and the lights changed ten times (you counted) and nobody moved in any direction at all.
Finally, you began shouting back at the radio: “Do you really want them to put ideas straight into our heads? Is that what you’d really like? They’ve told us what they want us to do by showing us! They want us to stop! That’s their message: STOP!”
And just at that moment, the lights changed for the eleventh time, and the car in front of you moved forward, and you moved forward too, because the car in front of you had done, and all the other cars moved forward, because that was what everybody was doing, and if everybody’s doing it, nobody can really resist… and if everybody is doing it, then everybody can do it, and so, although you’d seen them arrive (though you hadn’t realised it at the time, or, indeed, now) and although you understood their message perfectly (which not many other people seemed to have done) you still kept on going, even though you were still shouting STOP! STOP! STOP! Until, eventually, you calmed down, and just concentrated on the road on your way to wherever and whatever you thought was important…
Mike Rogers
Seen from Above
“What are they doing, down there?” asked the creature riding one of the stars.
“Who knows? They don’t seem very sensible to me,” the second star-rider said.
Hera, the first rider, suggested, “Hermes, why don’t you fly down and find what that couple are talking about. They are shouting and frightening the little boy with them. A lot of the people don’t appear to be very happy. “
Hermes looked down at the round world and decided to go down by parachute, folding down the wings on his legs. He landed just near a railway bridge and was able to hide the parachute on the edge of the railway line, knowing that he would be able to fly back up to the stars when he was ready. Climbing up the bank he met a large tortoise who withdrew his head quickly.
Hermes tapped gently on his shell and said, “You have nothing to fear from me. I would just like to have directions to the town.”
The tortoise peered out a little way and rolled his eyes.
I don’t know. I think I am lost. I live in a garden and the people feed me but I wanted to explore and now I want to go home. Sorry I can’t help.”
Hermes felt really sorry for the tortoise but knew he could not carry him and fly so he offered, “If I fly over the area, how will I recognise your garden so I can tell you in which direction to go?”
“There is a trampoline and a blue paddling pool for the children.”
The tortoise did not seem surprised at the idea of Hermes flying around.
Hermes opened his ankle wings and flew over towards some houses not far away. He soon saw a garden with the items described and landed very gently behind a large hedge. There was nobody in the garden so Hermes crept up to the kitchen window and peeped inside. On the kitchen table was a baking bowl and a set of scales so he guessed that somebody would soon be baking. He tip-toed out of the garden and flew back to the tortoise.
“Look here. I can draw a little plan in the earth.”
He did this and told the tortoise to follow the direction of a tower in the distance. He saw the expression on the tortoise’s face and explained, “You will only see it when you have gone round the second corner.”
A big tear rolled down the tortoise’s cheek as he expressed his gratitude.
Hermes ran towards the tower which was on the edge of a large park and shopping centre.
Being a God with amazing powers, he was able to make himself blend in among the shoppers in the bustling shopping centre and he followed the crowd to a man standing on a soap box at the end of the Mall.
The smartly dressed man was obviously extolling the virtues of the current Political Party but Hermes knew that most of what he said was cognitive distortion. He obviously believed much of what he said but many of the people in the crowd were unconvinced and heckling him.
Hermes observed that even family groups or couples were arguing among themselves. One pleasant looking lady surprised Hermes by shouting, “What about mental health facilities? We have nowhere for respite care for our child. We are desperate for a break or some help.” Her partner was patting her shoulder and shushing her.
“It’s no good telling him, love. Politicians are all the same. I think lots of them start out with good intentions but then they have to follow the Party Whip.”
Other couples seemed to have different views from each other and looked cross and miserable.
Hermes felt he had heard enough and flew back to find Hera behind a big cloud talking to Zeus.
“Is there anybody down there who would be worth bringing up here to talk to us?” asked the great God.
Hermes thought for a minute and then said, “I looked at all the papers while I was down there and there were many instances of people being kind and caring towards other people, regardless of who they were. One man drowned, saving a boy from a river, and several people rushed into fire-filled houses to try to rescue people they did not know. Scientists and Health Workers work extra hours when needed. There are wonderful things happening. However, there are families breaking up because they cannot cope with the stresses. They don’t seem to communicate enough. Tell you what, Hera, there is a lot of work for you to sort out Marriages.”
Zeus was looking thoughtful all this time. “It seems to me, they need something to bring them together. Should I throw down a meteorite like the one in Arizona? That would give them all something to think about.”
Hera was looking worried, “Pardon me, Sir, but would that be disturbing only for the people in a particular area?”
Zeus looked very thoughtful again. Then he spoke firmly.
“I have the very thing. I will send a serious pandemic, a virus the like of which they have never known before. That will test their intellects. They will be forced to pull together and pool ideas to find cures. It will bring out the best in people as they try to find solutions.”
When Zeus had gone, Hera said to Hermes, “I do hope He is right. I am not at all sure that the different Countries will think about each other and co-operate to find a solution. Countries are led by individuals who are not always the brightest or kindest. We shall see… ”
Linda Dalzell 20/06/21
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