Sarah Ohlin

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Disappearing Senses

Years ago in the first quiet of a winter morning, before the house awakens to warmth from the fireplace and movement of its inhabitants, my sister, brother and I sit at the top of the staircase in our fleece pajamas and fuzzy animal slippers.

“Is it time yet?” my brother asks.

“We have to wait for dad to get up,” I say.

We snuggle next to each other and wait. My mom, up before all of us, has put the sweet crescent rolls in the oven and the delicious hint of sugar and cinnamon reaches my nose. We peak outside from the upstairs windows and watch the puffy white snowflakes blanket the neighborhood. Enough snow to silence the entire world into peace, I believe.

We giggle with anticipation and try to guess what presents await us under the spruce tree.

Secret presents, praying for snow, and the glorious anticipation of waiting while our bodies warmed and the scent of cinnamon sweet-rolls sidled up the stairs and teased our noses.

I see them now, the Christmas traditions of my childhood, sealed up in the glass snowball one shakes upside down to set the flakes in motion. With each new Christmas that approaches, those traditions get buried deeper in the rooms of memory I begin to doubt.
One Christmas a few years ago I returned to Ohio to visit my family.

Christmas Eve we sat eating dinner together. My dad looked worn down and tired. I focused on my steak, not wanting to see loneliness, and loss smudged into his hollow eyes.

“Hey,” he said as dinner ended. “I have a story I want to tell you.”

Worn down and tired, I thought, but still telling those stories.

I sat on one of the matching loveseats across from my brother and mom. My dad sat next to me. Without even realizing it, I began my tune-out. I looked around the room. A huge stark wreath, made of dried baby’s breath branches, hung on the wall. Photos decorated pine coffee tables and shelves. Everything seemed colored in shades of nothing, barren.

“It was one of the craziest days in the war,” my dad barreled into the scene. “I was the Air Mission Commander, the link between the Scouts and the Cobra gun ships. His face took on a glazed look.

“Over our radios we heard this call for help from Damage 5-1 Alpha. I answered, ‘Damage 5-1 Alpha, this is Comanche 2, over.’

‘Comanche 2,’ he yelled, ‘we need your help…Receiving fire from three directions!’

‘Damage 5-1, we see the tracer fire. We’ll see what we can do.’”

My father spoke this dialogue between himself and another man as if auditioning for a masterpiece.

“I ordered my gun ships to make several passes, but it was really dangerous. Each time my men got close they received fire too.”

A dull ache from my cold feet ground its way into my body. A pain that was dense and almost numb at the same time. Just like the numb I had built around my body over the years.

“We refueled twice that day. It was the longest day of my life,” my dad continued. “One time the fuel guys threw sandwiches in through the window of the cockpit.”

I heard my father’s words one by one. I tried to process the story, but it did not reach into my bloodstream; nothing was clear. Men, frantic and yelling above the roar of the helicopter walked into my imagination. The sound of gunshots in every direction left a muffled echo in my head. Like the static of a needle on a record with no songs.

“Finally it got too dangerous so I said, ‘Damage 5-1, enemy fire is trailing our choppers, and we’re losing daylight fast. We have to leave you’

‘Please don’t!’

“We’d been flying for over eleven hours in such an intense situation and we knew the outcome would be horrible. But we had no choice. It was awful.”

I drank my tea to warm me, but I can’t remember the flavor and the heat did not reach my feet. My body stayed chilled. My father kept talking.

“A month later I was in Long Binh eating dinner with a visiting officer. He told me about this intense situation he’d recently been in, how he didn’t think he or his men were going to make it out alive. They were on the ground; fire came at them from everywhere, even the army choppers had to pull away. Amazingly, the Air Force jets came in, tore up the place and got them all out.

“I said back to him, ‘Jesus, we had this crazy situation very similar to that down around Cai Lay a few weeks ago.’

“The officer got this shocked look on his face, then said, ‘Oh my God! You’re Commanche 2! You saved our butts; I’m Damage 5-1 Alpha. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here!’

My dad slammed his hand down on the arm of the couch and laughed in excitement. “Oh I couldn’t believe it!” he said, “Damage 5-1 was alive.”

A happy ending, I thought. For a moment I wished I had listened more closely, to all the nuances that really make a great story. Tracer fire shooting back and forth, the smell of sweat and fear, the haunting panic in a man’s voice over the wires. But I was trying so hard not to travel backwards.

I no longer looked forward to my father’s stories. Anymore I didn’t even know why. Was it that he was always re-living instead of just living in the present without regrets and ghosts trailing him everywhere like automatic weapons fire through the dark of night?

There is not one scent, not one odor or tiny whiff of anything I can connect to that Christmas. I rubbed my feet, the cold pain made stronger by my damp skin It was a dense, throbbing ache; it hurt to touch them, but I rubbed them none-the-less, purposely feeling that unyielding pain, because all my other senses were disappearing and I needed desperately to hold onto something.

Two days later my dad and I sat at the airport waiting for my flight.

After a few moments of familiar, uncomfortable silence my dad said, “Hey, I should tell you this story about Damage 5-1 Alpha.”
I looked at him in awe and wondered, can you hear yourself? Don’t you remember telling this the other night? I looked out the enormous airport windows towards the glaring gray monotonous winter sky of Ohio nothingness.

“Do you know?” I wanted to ask my father, “Do you know your senses are disappearing?”

Sara Ohlin lives and works in Everett, Washington. Her work has appeared in ImageUpdate, an online companion to Image, A Journal of The Arts and Religion; Full Circle, A Journal of Poetry and Prose and Anderbo.com. She is on the review board for Trillium Literary Journal and she has recently completed a memoir about growing up listening to the stories her father told from his experiences as a Vietnam helicopter pilot.

Photo: Vietnam, ca. 1965. Helicopter and soldier approaching target. Viet Nam Photo Service. NARA via pingnews.

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Nik Perring

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

That light, that night

The flowers made me suspect it, gave me reason to suspect it, but the illnesses confirmed it. And I have to tell you, I’m a little worried; things haven’t been the same here since that light, that night.

I think I’d like to blame it on the smoking ban. If that hadn’t been passed then I’d have known no different. It wouldn’t have stopped it happening but at least I wouldn’t know. Ignorance, bliss and all that?

Summer 2007. August to be more accurate. I’ve tried to get an exact date for you but the sites that Google spews out are confusing and meant for people with a more scientific interest in these things than me, and meant for people with more brains. Sure, I’m a writer but that doesn’t mean I’m clever.

On two small bushes were (I counted) at least fifty spiders

So, at some point at the beginning of August 2007 I’d gone to the pub with my girlfriend. It’s a cosy little place at the top of our village, not all that far from the lights of Manchester which, on a clearish night, you can see from it. Behind the pub, up some steps, backing onto fields and hills, is the smoking area. There’s a wooden shelter there now, with lights and heaters, but then there was just grass, fences to keep the sheep out, and half a dozen benches. And one of those benches was where my girlfriend and I were sitting. It was dusk and we were just taking the tops off our first drinks.

We could hear sirens wailing; there must have been some accident on the dual carriageway a mile or so down the road – and when we saw the light in the sky we assumed that it was in some way connected to it. It was an odd light, unusual and striking enough for me, when I saw it, to exclaim, “What the fuck is that?”

I thought initially that we were looking at a helicopter’s search light, though a second later I knew that’s not what it was.
It looked like a star. A little more orange than a typical star and much, much closer than one ought to be. It was certainly more mobile than any star I’d ever seen. And it was moving towards us, in a line as straight as if it had been guided by a laser. It was fast, it was purposeful and it passed straight over our heads. It was absolutely silent. And it was flying under the clouds. We watched it disappear beyond the hills and then we went inside, both feeling oddly unnerved.

Of course, as would happen in a pub where you know people, you tell them what you’ve just seen. And when the barman said, “Meteor. It’ll have been a meteor. Meteor shower tonight, bud,” we felt relieved. Both me and my girlfriend had read about that. It was true.

“It can’t have been a meteor,” my girlfriend said emphatically a few seconds later. “It was below the clouds.”

I was less relieved on hearing that; the clouds that night were low and I knew that meteors barely tickled the fingertips of earth’s atmosphere.
What followed were discussions of weather balloons, Roswell, tricks of light, optical illusions, shooting stars, aliens don’t exist, meteors and the like, and more of that odd, unnerved feeling before conversations moved on, back to jobs, football, TV and the weather.
Until the barman went outside for a cigarette and saw it. He said it was just as we’d said it had been…

Later, when the sky was night-black, and I was outside smoking a cigarette, I saw it again. I rushed inside and ushered out a couple of witnesses. The light was on a slightly different course to the one it had been on when I’d first seen it, it was a few miles north though still travelling roughly west to east. It still looked more like a star than anything else, it was still tinged orange and it was still absolutely silent. Nobody knew what it could have been. And living not that far from Manchester Airport we’ve all seen plenty of flying things.

Although no-one else saw it again that night, the story does not end there. The following week, on the bar and on every ledge and sill in the pub, vases filled with the most striking and unusual flowers had appeared. They were orange and fiery and round and strange and looked like shiny plastic baubles. I asked, with a view to buying some for my girlfriend, where they were from.

“Some bloke,” said the landlady with her chewy Manchester lilt, “never seen him before. Just came in and dropped them off. All for free. Lovely, aren’t they?”

The following week, while in my girlfriend’s garden, I noticed something else unusual and new. On two small bushes were (I counted) at least fifty spiders. (Seeing spiders in a garden is not unusual, living in the country; seeing that many is though.) They were not anything like the sorts of spiders I’d seen before. These were half as big again as garden spiders and had large jaws and those predatory front legs. The most striking thing about them, what made them stand out as being very different, was their colour; they were fiery orange and yellow. They remained in the bushes constantly for two weeks, and then, very suddenly, they were gone.

We’re now in October. Plenty of other unusual things have occurred since: reliable cars have become faulty, people have suffered odd month-long colds, strange sores have been found on the bellies of previously healthy family cats, the birds do not stop singing, the landlady’s husband has suffered a stroke and one man has had to have a toe removed.

And do you know the worst thing about it?

As I was driving home last night I think I saw it again. That fucking thing; that strange orange light. What next, I wonder.

That Light, That Night is Nik Perring’s first contribution to Unmadeup.

The photo is one doing the rounds on UFOlogy sites. It’s of a crowd of around 100 people outside the One Elm Pub in Stratford-upon-Avon, who gathered to watch lights in the sky on the night of July 14 2007. 

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“Working Girl”

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

FLOWERS

I went into her room having already gotten the scoop from her previous nurse during report. She’d been married for years with two kids, one in elementary school, one in junior high. Labor was being induced at 38 weeks because the baby looked (on ultrasound) like he might be a big guy. She was petite and pretty. Her husband had already gone home for the night to take care of the kids. But here’s the kicker: Her husband was not the father of the baby. Not only that, but he knew! And whatever had happened before they came to us, they had made their peace with the situation. She had, after years of marriage, had a brief affair that resulted in this pregnancy — which she discovered after the affair ended. She and her husband would raise the child, but the FOB (father of the baby) would be involved.

For a scruffy little guy he had really shelled, out big…

Wow, how mature! I thought. These people were really dealing with this very difficult situation in a very constructive way. Then I met the rest of the family and the FOB. I won’t elaborate on specifics here, but the patient and her husband were a biracial couple – and the kids were just gorgeous. But the FOB was clearly of yet a third race.

Hmmm, maybe she confessed because she knew that once that baby was out, it was going to be pretty obvious that her husband wasn’t the daddy.

Oh well, whatever.

I met the FOB as he was coming out of her room. He had visited for several hours. After he left, she pointed to a huge arrangement of silk flowers that the FOB had brought.

Could you find a place for that at the nurses’ station? I just can’t have that here when my husband comes back in the morning. It would be too upsetting for him, she asked me.

No problem.

I hefted the arrangement up, impressed by the size and weight of it, if not the tacky silk flowerness of it. For a scruffy little guy, he had really shelled out for a big, if hideous, arrangement. Not bad! As I was walking up to the nurse’s station, a patient care tech who was sitting there looked at me sharply.

What are you doing with that?

I started to explain the whole complicated, delicate situation.

No, no, no, she said. That arrangement is supposed to be on the table right by the door to the call room. It’s been missing for hours.

I put it back in its place, noticing that it was sort of dusty — and it did sort of match the carpet.

Later on the patient asked me if I’d found a place for the arrangement. I said that I had. And it looks like it’s always been there…

“Working Girl” writote, frequently exteremely funnily, about her life as a nurse in America in Mostly True Stories. Artificial flower photographer merlinprincesse is Québécoise.

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Susanna Jones

Friday, May 5th, 2006

All for charity

The shoplifter was one of our most regular customers. For that matter, he was one of our most regular shoplifters. We had plenty. We wondered whether, since it was a charity bookshop, people who wouldn’t steal from normal shops felt that it was quite all right to pop in and help themselves when they were in need. For most it was just the odd Dr Who video or Guide to English Country Churches but some were more ambitious. There was the guy who brought his mobile phone to the music section and texted details of our stock to some remote controller who told him which ones to pilfer. Another one somehow distracted the attention of the volunteer at the till and escaped with the emergency appeal collection box under his arm. Perhaps he thought he could get the £40 quid’s worth of 2p’s to Darfur faster than the relief vehicles could. For panache, you couldn’t beat the soft-skinned young man who arrived as a new volunteer and walked off in his first afternoon taking not only the contents of the till drawer – several hundred pounds – but also the till drawer. That time we should have seen it coming; his name, he told us, was Robin.

But the person who became known to us simply as ‘the shoplifter’ had less pizzazz, was more persistent. An artist’s impression in the shop daybook showed an unassuming man with smooth black hair under a baseball cap. He was short with a wobbly beer gut. He had a tattoo. He wore a coat on top of another coat, each with large, baggy pockets. He knew that we had different volunteers in the shop every half day and it would take us a while to catch on. We did, but by the time we worked out that all the shoplifters with spider tattoos and blue baseball caps were the same person, half the stock was gone. The shop managers kicked him out at least twice but he always came back.

The day I first saw him, the shop was quiet. I was on my own at the till. I recognised him from the picture as soon as he appeared in the doorway. Since there was no one else around, I thought I’d better keep an eye on him. He moved close to the books in the art section, fiddled with his coat pockets. I watched his hands. Some of those books were expensive.

“How much will you give me for these, darling?”

I jumped. A small doll-like woman with a floppy hat and badly rouged cheeks grabbed my wrist. With her free hand she plonked some tea-stained books about Brighton history on the counter.

“I’m sorry. We can only take donations. It’s a charity shop.” I smiled and struggled to free my wrist. I tried to see past her to the art section but her face came closer to mine.

“If you’re a charity,” she sprayed, “let me sell my books. I need the money.”

Then she bounced to the centre of the shop, held her books up high. “A pound each,’ she rasped. ‘Who wants to buy?”

A small crowd formed. I could no longer see the baseball cap. Someone gave her 50p for a book of maps. Eventually the group cleared and I saw the cap poking out behind the music stand. The floppy hat moved in next to it.

“Look at this,” the woman sighed to the man. “The Beatles. I used to like this record. It’s a lovely picture.”

“Uh,” he said, then headed out of the shop. He gave me a smug smile as he left. He knew I’d missed my chance.

The woman came to the till and rapped on the counter with a pile of CDs. Her rouge glistened.

“Here you are. No, I’m not buying them. That man with the funny hat was trying to steal them. And this a charity shop.”

I gawped. “How did you get them off him?”

She screwed up her mouth and stared, apparently insulted. “He might think he’s good but I’ve been picking pockets for years. Now I’d like a couple of quid for my books please.”

When she left, I watched her in the sunny street, head held high on her tiny frame as she wove through the shoppers. A couple of kids sat on the pavement outside and began to sing Wonderwall to a badly tuned guitar.

Susanna Jones is the author of The Missing Person’s Guide to Love, Water Lily and The Earthquake Bird, described by The Times as “Fast paced and claustrophobic…a subtle portrait of how jealousy blooms from nothing.”

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William Shaw

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

The Lion

He’s late,” says the art director, leaning on a wall outside in the Florida sunlight. People look at watches.

“We’re calling his manager’s mobile,” he says, “but there’s no answer.”

People roll their eyes and snicker. “It’s a joke, man. C. P time.” The person we’re waiting for is a hip hop star. They are never on time. Rappers are always an hour, two hours late at the very least, industry standard. Coloured persons’ time.

They’ve hired an industrial unit for the photo shoot, a vast warehouse on an estate somewhere in Miami. I pull back the doors to go inside out of the sun, leaving natural light for neon, and walk a few paces… before I see the lion.

He stands on all four paws on the concrete floor, unexpectedly massive. It’s like someone has just yanked a string on my back and tugged at every muscle in my body. My body temperature has just dropped a whole degree (or is that the air con?) I have never been in the same room as a predator before; there aren’t many species left that eat humans. This fear must come from somewhere very deep. I suspect it’s something very ancient that makes me check the distance back to the door before I’ve even realised what I’m doing. No. It’s only a few yards but it’s too far to run if the lion decided to leap. Instead I look at a pile of packing cases to my right. No. The lion would chase me up them and maul me before I was a quarter of the way there.

I had known the lion was going to be there; I just hadn’t imagined what it would be like to be in the same room. I remember, now, video footage I’ve seen of a mentally ill man who climbed into a lion enclosure beign mauled, almost casually.

“Any news?” asks the photographer.

“Any time now,” says the press officer, still attempting optimism.

The lion stands, a chain around its neck. It is a magnificent animal; but it looks bored. It yawns. The teeth are enormous. Claws lurk under the soft fur of the paws.

You can see where the art director was coming from. It’s a cool concept. No, really. The lion as a symbol of manhoon, of African-ness, idomitability, maybe, but mostly the lion a symbol of terror. So that the man who stands beside the lion (if he was here) would be saying, “I am afraid of nothing.” Like an illustration of a Zulu in a Rider Haggard novel; only less racist. Or maybe not. Not that anyone ever says anything like that in situations like this. Photography is so non-verbal.

In the presence of the lion, people are acting with deliberate cool. The photographer wants to take a couple of shots of the lion without the rapper, maybe just because he’s being paid a day rate and he should be doing something. The thin man who comes with the lion yanks on the lion’s chain until the lion is pointing in the right direction.

I ask, “Are you, like, a lion tamer?”

“I just come with the lion,” he says. It turns out he owns it; this is his lion. He adds, “You don’t really tame lions. You just feed them.” He explains that all you do is give a lion a heavy meal. After that it doesn’t want to kill anyone for a while.

“Oh.”

The lion slumps down on the cold concrete.

“When did you feed him?” I ask.

“Look at the size of his cojones,” the make up woman gasps. Laid out, his balls are indeed large, like she says. “Can I stroke him?” she asks.

“Sure.” She’s Chinese-American maybe, pretty, with long black hair and long legs in tight trousers.

She leans forward and strokes the coarse sandy fur. “He’s so beautiful,” she says.

Everyone here already knows the hip hop star will never show in time to be photographed with the lion. By the time he gets here the meat will have been digested and the lion will be considering another course. The photoshoot will turn out to be an elaborate, expensive waste of time. The whole scene will have to be photoshopped. The afternoon passes. Every now and again, someone else new enters the warehouse, but never the hop hop star. Each time it’s the same reaction as mine. They stop; their eyes widen. They are making the calculation, “Would I make it back to the door in time?”

The make-up girl is less easily scared though. She looks at the lion’s testicles, then turns to the wiry young man who owns the lion. “They’re amazing. Can I touch them?” she asks. She wants to tell her friends she has touched the balls of a lion.

I’m waiting for him to look appalled, to tell her no, that that would be a crazy thing to do to his lion, this beautiful predator; all he says is, “Sure.”

She leans forward towards the lion, hand outstretched.

William Shaw runs UnMadeUp. This story was the first story on the original UnMadeUp site and was featured in the 2007 Blog Digest edited by Justin McKeating.

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