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Gerry Scott-Moore

02 Five Images - Ice Floe

10/23/22

Images:


1) Ice floe

2) Green fields, harvest time

3) An orange, splash

4) Heavy lock, keyhole

5) Ferris wheel


Sentences:


1) The ice floe was long and narrow, something like a double-wide sidewalk stretching out in a southward direction, only much colder.

2) I don't know anything about the planting or harvesting, nor the packaging or trucking of grain, but as a child in Oklahoma I could smell when wheat was being threshed, the sharp smell mixed with the fine dust of county roads in late May.

3) Always on the dining room table were three glass oranges and two glass pears, nestled in a ceramic bowl which was whisked from table to sideboard whenever we sat down to dinner. The glass apple was dropped and broken before I was born.

4) We tore off the rotting screen door, now clothed only in scraps of rusting mesh; the front door was an ancient thing with a big fat lock that looked as if it had once been part of a mannacle for a wild animal. It did not give way easily.

5) On their first date he faced Debbie in the Ferris wheel cage and around and around and around it  went while Steve's stomach churned and burned, rose and fell, and threatened to empty its load of corndogs, cotton candy and apple pie. 


(9:36 min.)


Stitched Together:


As the ship edged beneath the waves, the crew managed to scramble to the hobbled lifeboat and then to an ample ice floe. Thankfully, the four of us had time to pack a few essentials before abandoning ship; water, scraps of bread, a bag of oranges, blankets and a large tarp-wrapped radio.

We put some blankets on Larsson, still delirious, and laid him down, we assumed, to die of his wounds. After opening the cumbersome old emergency radio, we found the cover locked down; it demanded some kind of little key. Jennings took his knife and after a few gouges managed to pry the top out enough to pop the latch out of the lock. It worked, but we found it had no microphone.

Larsson, still babbling senselessly, continued to rave at random of fire and his children and, of all things, a ferris wheel. He continued babbling about the Ferris wheel for long enough that we were gob-smacked when we saw, right where he had been pointing and waving for 20 minutes, a circular outline of lights, slowly rotating in the distance. We began shouting.

(7:30 min.)