Bradford’s Instinctual Reaction

It feels like Friday. I think I even told someone it was Friday. I hope that doesn’t screw up their day.

In 435 days of writing 1000 Days I’ve never come up with the idea that I might prepare for some writing the day before. I’ve always thought of this endeavor as a seat-of-the-pants sort of thing. I hit the blank page running. Last night though I did. I thought about what I wrote yesterday and I devised a bit of a plan. Not an elaborate plan. Not even a well organized plan. Maybe not a plan.

I did think about what I’d written though. I tried to imagine what might happen next. Here’s what I got…

(it’s not neccessarily a continuation)

A mostly blue Richardson-Blount NF32 “Jack Rabbit” skimmed the morning plains as the sun pinked the horizon from nautical to civil twilight. At ten meters off the deck it was closer to wrecking with the earth than it measured nose to tail. The pilot, Captain Charles “Not Chuck” Bradford, skimmed landmarks and hazards outside the cockpit with his thoughts. He ticked them off like a chef might run down an endless ingredient list: tree, rise, fall, tree, pond, copse, rocks, creek… Bradford’s Drivers’ Ed teacher—a coach probably—mentioned the technique in a classroom lesson. Explicitly naming objects gave them substance in your thoughts in a way that merely perceiving them with your eyes did not. Bradford reacted to information, data, not to ideas.

Tree, tree, arrojo, dead body, rise…

“What!”

Expert training dulled Bradford’s instinctual reaction to wheel like a barracuda at flashing metal, but he did round the mains forward to bring the Jack Rabbit to a contemplative hover after 300 meters. Patrols had busted for weeks since the initial incursion. In the first two days they rounded up a handfull of refugees—less combatants—and nothing since.

Day 436