Let Me Defy Gravity

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen
A kingdom of isolation,
And it looks like I'm the queen.
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap!

Let it go, let it go,
can't hold it back any more
It's time to try
Defying gravity
I'll let it go, I'm defying gravity
and you won't bring me down

I'm through accepting limits
'cause someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try, I'll never know!
It's time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me I'm free!

Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
I think I'll try
Defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye
I'm defying gravity
And you can't bring me down:

So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky!
As someone told me lately:
"Everyone deserves the chance to fly!"
And if I'm flying solo
You'll never see me cry
I'm never going back,
The past is in the past!

Let it go, let it go,
and I'll rise like the break of dawn
I'm flying high
Defying gravity
Here I stand
In the light of day
And nobody...
Is ever gonna bring me down!

...the cold never bothered me anyway.

$20k Summary

A girl wakes up in a youth hostel in Glasgow.  She has only a vague recollection of who she is, and her throat hurts.  She has a bag with a wallet full of credit cards, passports and drivers licenses in different names, books, and a photograph of a man that she loves.  She decides to call herself Louise, which is one of the names on the credit cards.

She walks through Glasgow, and gets occasional snatches of memory from things that she sees – she remembers an evening at a certain restaurant, with the man in the photo, or holding his hand while walking down a specific street.  She stops at a café, and while looking through the wallet she finds a train ticket to Birmingham.  She remembers that Birmingham is home.  Written on the ticket is “miss you, see you soon, M.”.

The train is for today, so she rushes to catch it.  She sleeps through the journey (it’s about six hours) and has weird dreams, about a little girl that looks like her and shadowy people trying to catch her.  She remembers sitting on a train like this with the man in the photograph.  She remembers him stroking her hair and telling her it will be okay.  She remembers feeling trepidatious.

In Birmingham, she walks through the city centre, unsure of what to do next.  She remembers more things; winning bets in a pub, going up to the top floor of the blue Radisson to pick up fake IDs, and so on.  She wonders if any of the names on the credit cards are hers.

She remembers having an argument on New Street at midnight, not caring who could hear or what they thought.  She remembers accusing the man in the photograph of something, she doesn’t quite remember what it was.  She knows that it was something which proved that he never cared for her.  A part of her desperately wants him to prove her wrong, to say exactly the right thing to prove that he does care about her.  Another part of her wants him to get it wrong, so she can leave him; being with someone who cares about her scares her.  She doesn’t think it can possibly last.  She’s always waiting for him to prove that his feelings aren’t enough, and trying to make him prove it so she doesn’t have to deal with the stress of waiting any more.

It starts to rain so she shelters under the council buildings in Victoria Square, with a group of other people.  After a while, she realises that the man behind her isn’t ignoring her, like you do in a crowd.  He’s staring at her, glaring at her with hatred.  She’s not normally a coward, but once she sees that expression in his eyes she turns and runs.  She keeps running, in a blind panic that comes from inside.  It’s the same sort of fear you get from a monster in your dreams.  You don’t know why, but you know you have to get away.

She’s on the Bristol Road before she realises he isn’t following her, that no one is.  It’s still raining.  Using one of her cards – this one with the name ‘Lauren’ – she books a night at the hotel.  She dreams again; she dreams about being a child, hiding in a cupboard and hoping that someone won’t find her and hurt her again.  She dreams that her mother finds her and asks what she’s hiding from.  Her mother says she’s silly.  Lauren knows that her mother knows what she’s afraid of.  Lauren doesn’t understand why her mother pretends she doesn’t know.  She notices that her mother  She wakes up when the thing she’s afraid of comes into the room.

She wakes up in the night and spends some time feeling lonely, and missing the man in the photo.  She remembers spending nights wrapped around him, and remembers waking from dreams with him wiping away her tears.  She remembers him bringing her tea in bed in the morning, and she wonders where he could possibly be.

She dreams about her mother.  She dreams that she and her mother live in a little cottage together and keep chickens, and live an idyllic life.  She dreams that she lives with her mother for years and years until one day she slits her wrists.

When she wakes up her wrists are fine, but her throat hurts again.  She sings in the shower to try to cheer herself up, and she remembers how happy singing makes her.  She sings a song that makes her wonder about the man in the photo.  She wonders what his name is.  She thinks of all the ‘M’ names she can, and none of them sound right.

She thinks she sees something waving at her in the bathroom mirror, but when she wipes the steam away there’s only her own face there.

When she leaves, the door of the room next to hers is open.  She walks inside and sees a photo of herself, with a plane ticket under it.  The plane ticket is for Oregon, later that evening, and is in the same name as another one of her credit cards, Lisa.  The picture is of her, on a swing, with the man from the photo behind her.  It’s sunny and they look happy.  The bed smells like him, and there are cigarettes in the ashtray by the window.  She realises he was here in the night while she was missing him, and starts to cry.  She wonders if he’s running away from her, if he’s rejecting her, like everyone else.  She tells herself that can’t be true, because if he were he wouldn’t be leaving tickets for her.  She wonders if it’s really meant for her, because she knows Lisa isn’t her name.

The plane ticket is for that evening.  She leaves the hotel and walks to a nearby primary school, which she attended as a child.  It’s a Catholic school and there’s a church attached.  Lisa remembers being frustrated by a specific discussion in class.  Her teacher had asked why there was a hell, if god was all forgiving.  Lisa remembered knowing the answer; because god only forgives those as much as they forgive others, as that same teacher had told them.  She remembered being annoyed when he wouldn’t listen to her answer and kept trying to get them to debate the question.

She walks up to the alter, looks at the statue of Jesus on the cross and is overwhelmed with grief.  She doesn’t know why she’s crying, but she can’t stop.

She reflects on her own beliefs.  She doesn’t think of herself as a Catholic; she’s an atheist.  However, Catholicism is the first religion to come to mind whenever she thinks about the subject, and she knows the specific god she has rejected is the Catholic god.  In the night, when she’s frightened and thinks of praying, it’s Catholic prayers she thinks of. 

Lisa leaves to get some fast-food for breakfast.  This triggers another memory of her childhood, one where she is punished for not finishing her food.  She starts to panic, and calms herself down by reminding herself that she escaped, that she ran away to Glasgow as soon as she was able.  She remembers that she was seventeen and she’d gotten a job in a fast food place just like this – maybe this exact one – and had saved up every penny she earned until she was able to leave.  She realises that she had come back to Birmingham at some point in the past few years, but can’t remember when, or why, or when or why she returned to Glasgow.

Outside of the fast food place is a bus stop, and, on a whim, she gets on the bus.  It’s one she remembers she used to catch to get home.  However, when she gets off she’s not at the house she grew up in but at another building, a plain, stern-looking place that she knows to be a nursing home.

Breathe In/Out

So this was it.  I was finally desperate enough to respond to the advert, the to-good-to-be-true advert.  I knew what the catch was, I wasn’t stupid.  I was just desperate.

My heart was hammering as I picked up the phone.

Don’t do it I kept thinking, there must be another way.

But there wasn’t another way.  I’d spend weeks going over and over my meagre income and my substantial debts, and there was no way the two would ever work out.  Not unless I sold my body, the most lucrative thing I owned.

Someone picked up.  I was so distracted I barely heard her greeting.  Somehow, I pulled myself together when it was my turn to speak.

“I’m calling regarding your advert,” I said, only a slight hesitation in my voice. 

The advert was circled in the newspaper I clutched to myself.  Breathe in/out, it said.  £500/£250 per breath.  Easy money.

I got the job, not that there was ever any question about it.  The interview would have been less of a joke if they’d just held a mirror up to my face and waited to see if it fogged up or not. 

There were ten of us starting together that day.  Most of us seemed to be about the same age, my age, mid-twenties.  A few were older.  One girl looked to be about sixteen.  The road that lead her here was built from the tracks on her arms.

Half an hour of training.  The guy was manically cheerful, grinning his head off, telling us all how lucky we were to be here.  How fortunate we were to have this chance.  How we were going to make ‘a wad’. 

That afternoon we were lined up outside in our safety gear, waiting for our chance to hop on and join in.  I fidgeted as I waited, taking in the amazing sight.  The breeze – it was always blowy here – rustled my hair.

I’d heard of it, of course – who hadn’t?  Even seen pictures.  But to see it up close like this was something else entirely.  The sheer size of it; the way its body stretched over the horizon.  I’d have been awestruck if I wasn’t also paying attention to how shattered my new co-workers looked as they walked past us, heading home after a brutal shift.

Shifts were twelve hours long.  Twelve hours of hard, back-breaking work.  If you fell off, you didn’t get paid, not a penny for the entire shift.  Not even if it was the eleventh hour when you slipped.   Four shifts per week, twelve on, twelve off.

I came to the front of the line, watching the little teenager hop on ahead of me.  That was the official terminology, “hopping on”.  What she actually did was more like an undignified shuffle, climbing across people until she reached her space.

Then it was my turn.  I climbed up into the space recently vacated by another worked, the weak link in the chain.  I hooked my limbs around the people around me, holding myself in place.  Then I braced myself.  My core muscles were aching within the first ten minutes, but I had no choice but to hold on, now I’d committed myself.

Just think of the money, I thought to myself, trying desperately to distract myself.  The money.  £500 to breathe in.  £250 to breathe out.

I had plenty of time to think over those twelve hours.  What I thought about most was it.  The giant thing I was performing CPR on.

I wondered what the aliens had been playing at.  It was five years ago now, when they’d first arrived, dragging it behind their spaceships like one of those giant balloons you used to see at parades.  It’s as big as a mountain range.

The transcript of the conversation is available online.  I tried to remember it, line for line, as I braced myself there in a mesh of other people.

Our ruler is dying they had said, in their strange language, full of beeps and boops.

If you do not save our glorious leader they added we will raze your planet and revive benevolent with the blood of your species.

Then they had left, leaving their ruler behind them.  But not without first destroying Australia, just to prove they could.

And that brings you to me, and to all my co-workers hanging beside me.  They were right when they said their ruler was dying.  The world’s best doctors – within those first, frantic, 24 hours – realised that he needed CPR.  And that was exactly what we were doing.  Over and over.  Breathe in, breathe out.

Each of the giant alien’s breaths took 5-8 hours and you’re paid based on how many of those happen in each of your shifts.  A lucrative shift might get three – one right at the beginning, one halfway through, and one right at the end - while the next rota would only manage one.  It was a lottery. 

A few times, over the years, we’d tried building a machine to replicate the task we were performing by hand, but none of them had worked.  After the last disaster had culminated with the Glorious Ruler almost dying it had been decreed that the wages would be doubled.  It was hard, tiring, back-breaking work.  There was no respect and no joy.  But the money was good.

Every time the breaths slow down beyond one every ten years, every world leader is lit up by a red spotlight.  The same red spotlight which heralded the destruction of Australia.

Sometimes, they try a different approach.  Sometimes, when the breaths slow down, they light up a billion or so people instead of the world leaders.  One in every seven or eight.  It’s never been me, but once it was my mother.  It’s a lot scarier when the person destroyed might be you or your family than when it’s happening to a stranger halfway around the word.

So we breathe.  Or we die.  Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.

The Earworm - a Horror Story

Tracy sighed when she heard the beep in her ear. Patiently, she waited for the whisper to finish – it was a new one. She couldn’t quite make out the words.

“Hello,” she began, as she’d done fifty times already that day. “Thanks for ca-“

It was then that Tracy toppled from her chair and onto the floor, blood streaming from her ear. The agent next to her – Vince – began screaming. His manager, Sarah, came over and carefully checked Tracy’s pulse.

“Auto in!” she snapped at Vince, who was gawking. It wasn’t every day that the person next to you suddenly fell out of their chair. Reluctantly, Vince took another call.

Beside him, and her fellow manager, David, quietly discussed what to do. Sarah gently laid a coat over Tracy – who still hadn’t moved, Vince noticed – while David walked away. Vince wondered if he was calling an ambulance. This guess was confirmed when a couple of paramedics arrived fifteen minutes later and took Tracy away. Vince noticed that Tracy’s phone had somehow switched itself off; she wasn’t just logged out, the phone was completely dark. That was odd. Maybe the manager had unplugged it when he wasn’t looking, but why would Sarah do that?

“What happened?” everyone whispered. Vince shrugged. He thought about asking to go home early, but decided that was unlikely to be allowed. Besides, it was raining and the thought of going outside was just slightly more horrible than staying at work.

When Vince came back from his break, later that day, another agent had disappeared.

“She just collapsed!” someone told him. “Exactly like Tracy did!”

Vince was now spooked. He wondered if some sort of awful illness was going around that was making people faint?

When the third person collapsed, an hour later, he was more than spooked. It was Tariq, opposite him, and it happened exactly like Tracy. A call came through, he started to speak, and then suddenly he was never going to speak again.  To satisfy his own curiosity, Vince had put himself in natural and gone round to try plugging Tariq's phone back in, to try to get it working. It was completely dead.

One co-worker had put herself in natural, gone off to have hysterics in the ladies, and was refusing to go back on the phones. Eventually, she was sent home sick. Wait times were increasing, as everyone started spending more time in aftercall, discussing the three agents who’d collapsed so far, wondering whether they were dead or just ill.

It wasn’t long before another two people collapsed; an agent and the manager who’d been listening to her calls, giving her side by side coaching. Vince tried telling David about the weird way the phones had gone down, and the fact that they’d all been listening to calls when they’d fallen unconscious. With trepidation, David opened their call listening program on his PC and started listening to one of the calls on his earphones. He collapsed as well.

Vince took off his headset, put himself back in aftercall and refused to take another call. Sarah finally agreed that something weird was happening, and that getting them all off the phones was for the best. With a sigh of relief, the remaining agents – only six of them, since most people had gone home at 5pm – either put themselves in aftercall or logged out. Vince watched as the last agent tried to log out, but, without realising, put her phone on speakerphone instead. The buttons were right next to each other.

With a feeling of dread, Vince to call out to her, to get her to turn the phone off, to make sure no sounds would come through. He was too late.

They heard a beep, and then a grinding, whirring sound. It only lasted a second, but seemed much longer. By the end of it, everyone in the room was dead.