Free Escape Velocity: The Anthology by Unknown Page A

took a deep breath. “Yeah, let’s move.”
     
    From a nearby hill, Nessa watched the two figures slip out from the bushes and deeper into the woods, away from the patrol. When they were clear, she shouldered her schoolbag, picked up her flak-tattered luggage, and padded down to the trail. A lovely woman with brilliant, piercing eyes was waiting for her. Together, they headed for the riggers’ shop.

Being of Sound Mind
     
    Roy Gray
     
    Packaging is my life. Boxes and bottles along with tubs and trays are tools of my craft. Paper and plastic, glass and board, films and foils are the fabrics I work. Creating new packs to get food from farm to factory to fridge or, in management speak – manufacturer to distributor to retailer to consumer, filled my day.
           But no more, because now I’ve reached those ‘sunny uplands’: free time, secure pension, financial independence.         Only after retirement do you realise what you miss and it’s not the specifications and requisitions or the leaflets and labels. No; what you lose is Friday lunchtime at the Rodney drinking the week’s calamities into laughs, pert secretaries asking after a few spare boxes when changing office or moving house, eight a.m. angst – when deliveries are late and your managers aren’t, cheerful gossip from operators in pink hair nets and white overalls whilst their high speed bottling line stands idle and accusing. Now you can only mull over those grey February Mondays when chummy analysts were keen on an overnight loan of the instruments they needed to check conditions in their fridge, or greenhouse, or a flash of lab technician’s cleavage brought a glimpse of the coming spring.
           When you want to write, retirement seems the ideal opportunity to make that step but sitting at home slaving over keyboard and reference books suddenly becomes a lonely way to live. In factory and lab people were everywhere but now, with a distant, divided family, there’s no one. So, suddenly, with no warning on the radar, loneliness looms like a long hard winter.
           But you persevere: past rejections, rewrites and revisions, ignoring unhelpful editors and agents and (all too helpful) vanity publishers. And manuscripts pile up. Then one day, at a nadir in your new career, you hear a child’s voice piping at your door. Puzzled, you save your work as you surface from your screen. You see a little girl peeping round that door and instantly summer arrives in a bundle of bright smiles, long hair, dolls, toys, and unanswerable questions.
           “ Hello,” she says. “Where’s mummy?”
           “ I don’t know where your mummy is but we’ll find her,” you answer, opening the door wide. “What’s your name?”
           She skips in, giggles, and looks around curiously, all sunlight and smiles. “You know my name. I’m Sara and this is Dolly.”
           She holds up an open top box, a homemade model of a bedroom for a doll, its interior furnished with bits and pieces of packaging; film, foam, board, plastics. Inside, Dolly lies on the bed. Nicely done, presumably by her parent or grandparent.
           Sara places the box on the floor and pulls Dolly out with one hand, holding the box down with the other. The rasp of Velcro as Dolly wakes tells me why she hadn’t fallen out of bed. Sara, doll in arms, bounces over to the computer.
            “ Can we play, Granddad?” she says sending an attack of the vbvbvbv’s into my current opus. ‘Granddad’, that seems odd but you have grey hair and a beard. Maybe children of her age call all elderly men ‘Granddad’. What would you know of such things?
           “ You certainly can,” you say, not sure if ‘we’ means Dolly or yourself are about to play. Sara answers that question by sending Dolly dancing over the keys until a dialogue box opens, locking the keyboard. “Perhaps we should find your mother first?” you suggest.