IN
REALITY
Yesterday,
while we were hunting, really not far from us – though we had no idea, it was a
too small event – an ultra-light two-passenger sports plane nosedived into the
field, no survivors. Although the shoot deployed, for some reason, it
completely crashed the tiny thing.
IN MY
DREAMS
In my
dreams we’re either having family lunch at our parents’ house or wondering
about the weird neighbours: the wife has resurfaced, claiming we were unfair to
her husband and he’s sick now… Because the wife has died fifteen or so years
ago, this is unsettling, but not so strange, considering the neighbours. They
could have been faking it for insurance or something. She says she’s keeping
her husband caged so he won’t fall off the bed, which isn’t too unusual either,
but again, still unsettling. We are trying to have as little to do with them as
possible for next door neighbours.
Then
there’s a bang and I run out, thinking the central heating pump exploded, but
in truth, a small plane has just crashed next to the house.
It’s the
worst place to crash a small plane. First off, there are electrical wires
everywhere, so there’s danger of shock. Second off, the whole terrain is so
steep it’s built into elaborate terraces, very lovely ones, but unlike a
freshly ploughed field, this is just hard edge upon hard edge of stone plates.
Though I am afraid to look at injured or dead people, I run down, yelling
instructions into the 911 call: it’s also a bitch, because the road is so
narrow and crumbly, a large vehicle isn’t wise to use it.
There
are four men in the wreckage, which is piled upon itself: the first one is
moving, crawling from it. He’s in a jumper suit and it’s clear he’s really
badly broken everywhere. But he’s in shock and he won’t stop crawling and we
try to stop him or move him, only making his injuries worse. I tell mum to get
a blanket as he starts to crawl up the sharp stairs, so that we wrap and
immobilise him. I also tell mum to talk to him and pet his head to see if she
can soothe him out of crawling. I’m aware that once the adrenaline calms, he’ll
probably die. But maybe not. Help is on the way.
The
other three are under a large, though not that heavy flower-pot lid. Dad and I
remove it, but it’s a tangled mess. We know we are not supposed to move
anything or anybody, so we just try to check their limp bodies for pulse. One
man in impaled through, but so far the debris are preventing him from bleeding
out, so he should be okay for now. It occurs to me – we have an old abandoned
pool just next to the crash site, which is now a 2-ft deep pond for tiger lilies
– that there may be another person in the water.
The
firemen rescue arrives and they can’t come close to the house, because the
neighbour’s three large dogs – which an old sick man can nowhere near control –
are defending it. Because suddenly we have small puppies of our own which the
three large dogs will surely kill, I have to run – there’s a crowd now – and deal
with the neighbour. He is out of sickbed, but really wants to talk to my dad
about the dogs. I say now is not the best time, because a plane crashed in our
yard, but he gets emotional and claims dad is ignoring him and he wants to give
us the dogs. Handling an old man with three large dogs while four little
puppies with no survival instinct keep trying to play with my shoes…
I ran up
to the parking lot where the on-lookers and my family were, and the firemen
were erecting a ladder crane to get a better control of the scene pass all the
tress and wires. I saw that my dad was taking photos with my phone, though for
some reason the feed, the camera was still set on our summer vacation in a
resort, so all the photos he was taking were actually of a resort, not the
crash site.
I woke
up at that point, sore and tense, and couldn’t go back to sleep.
I
suppose this was my punishment for the hunt yesterday, during which four
bunnies and a bird cawked it and I had to listen to a shot bunny scream before
the dog silenced it. Half traumatising and half depressing. WTF, forest, I thought
we had a deal!
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