The Furious Spinner

Been sick for two days. Maybe three. It's difficult to tell since I feel like I have a cold all of the time. Curled up in a ball yesterday—won't bore you with the details; you've all gone through it. Now my bones and joints ache so much I'm longing for zero g—maybe a jaunt on Mars where at least there is less gravity. So I've spent the day watching television: that's what I do when I'm sick. Can't sleep, can't read, can't eat, so I watch TV. Today I spent most of the day by the heater watching "Mayday" on the National Geographic Channel. All about airplane crashes.

Twenty-four years ago I was on a plane that almost crashed—at least the passengers and stewardesses thought so. It was a flight from Greece, and we had stopped in Maryland, I think, and were now heading for Michigan. The pilot came on and warned us about turbulence. Almost immediately, we had the worst turbulence I had every experienced, and I was an experienced flyer by that time and had seen my share of bad turbulence. The plane shook so badly, I couldn't imagine it would hold together. Then it stopped. We all sighed, and looked around at each other, smiling nervously.

Then it started again: a hundred times worse. The plane was shaking and diving. The toupee of the man next to me flew up into the air at the same time that the stewardess went flying. I thought I was going to die. I did think about my life. I looked around at all the frightened screaming people, and I thought this was a terrible way to die: it seemed to take forever. After an eternity, the dive and the shaking stopped. The pilot said, "Sorry about that." The stewardess came over to check on us and said, "I thought we had had it that time." When we arrived in Detroit, ambulances awaited us. Apparently someone had gotten hurt. The worst part about the experience, aside from the wrenching terror, was that they never told us what happened. Maybe we weren't seconds from death: but we all thought we were, and it has certainly colored my view of air travel. (And after watching "Mayday" all day, I'm not inclined to step on a plane anytime soon.)

I didn't fly again until 1987, for a job interview out here. I screamed as the plane took off. I went for the interview, got the job, and flew home. That's the last time I've been on a plane.

In any case, I posted more of Her Frozen Wild on my website. I don't put more than twenty pages at a time because the website isn't set up to deal with more than that at a time. Sorry.

Need your help. First, wish me good health. Thank you, thank you. Second, I thought this exercise might be fun. I'm ready to write a short book. I wanted to do my Emily Dickinson novel, but I'm not sure I'm up to more research right now. I have the most fun re-doing fairy tales. My poem "Red Rose & Snow White" will be on the winter issue of Terri Windling's Journal of Mythic Arts. So I'm thinking maybe I could write a novel about them, or the Briar Rose story—although that might be depressing. (Of course, both of these stories have already gotten novel treatment in Windling's Fairy Tale Series.) Got any fairy tale ideas you'd like to see me write, either as a short story or a novel? I was going to say, "I'm looking for kismet." But then I looked up the word. I didn't know it means "the will of Allah." I'm not looking for the will of Allah—just inspiration.

Right now I'm inspired to sleep. But since I can't do that, it's time for more bad TV.

OK. It hurts too much to sit here.

Talk with you soon, I hope. 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.