Numbers
This entry is from a challenge for a writing group I'm in. The challenge was to oscellate between writing a paragraph where every sentence is under 5 words and a paragraph that is one long run-on sentence. We wrote for 20 minutes.
This is what I wrote:
Ten. Oh Three. Seven. Twenty-Four. Data blast. The radio squawked out numbers. Eleven. Data blast. Seventeen. Punctuated by blasts of data. The encoding was unclear.
High in the cold mounts, somewhere along the boarder between Iran and Azerbijan, or perhaps Armenia, or perhaps Turkey, a broadcast lit up the air waves for two and a half long hours every night.
Move. Now. Words just above whispers. Pounding footsteps hauling equipment. Frantic strapping of gear. Pedaling sturdy mountain bikes.
They listened, recorded, and sometimes tried to triangulate the unusual transmissions from this new number station, sometimes Kurdish, sometimes English, Sometimes Arabic, sometimes Farsi, always the same calm and collected voices between nestled between the static of screaming electrons.
Hide. Off the bike. In the bushes. Under the shrubs. Listen for the motorcycles. Look for the helicopter. Listen for the drones. Hope.
But that news, brutal, terrible, joyful, of the dead and the living, atrocities and escapes, encoded and spliced, pictures and brief videos, always just dodging the last patrols, could not be suppressed, could not be cut off, could not be killed, a hydra of hope lugging gear from mountain top to mountain top, they came to learn, was broadcast by that mysterious numbers station they had found.
Hundreds dead. Boarder crossing, need supplies. The names of those who lived.
This story is based on a real numbers station that started broadcasting at the beginning of the US/Iran. The reality seems to be that it's a US station but I couldn't help imagining something beautiful instead.
It was also a great writing practice. I had actually been struggling with an action scene in something else I was writing, and I think I'll be rewriting my action sceens now.
I'm not connected with the region, and I don't have a whole lot of knowledge beyond the few podcasts I listen to and friends who don't want to talk about what's happening. But there are real humans risking their lives to resist the Iraninan regime, who are being killed by US and Israeli bombs, who are struggling to share information about what's happening, who are trapped in the middle of this fight. Wars are always between the worst peoplde, tyrants and dictators, almost exclusively not against each other but against their “enemy” populations and with their own oppressed peoples.
Iran, like many countries in the Middle East, is incredibly diverse in ways a lot of people outside are not always aware. I tried to highlight that a bit in the story, but please forgive me if my linguistic geography is not accurate. It's worth knowing about, worth learning about, worth listening to real stories from real people who are familiar with the region.
So if this was interesting, the war has been covered by It Could Happen Here, among others. Their reporting is good because their reports have at least been on the ground in surrounding areas and understand something about the complexity there. I would also recommend listening to The Fire These Times talk about this, as well as other monologues relevant to Israel, the US, and this war and others.
Finally, I won't miss an opportunity to plug Safety Through Solidarity. The only way to end the harm done by Israel is to dismantle its base of support, and that cannot be done without understanding Zionism as an ideology and being able to cirtique Israel and Zionism in a way that is not anti-semetic. Israel is a horrific manifestation of European antisemitism, and it can only be dismantled by facing and deconstructing that antisemtitism.
Here's the final edited version:
Ten. Oh Three. Seven. Twenty-Four. Data blast. The radio squawked out numbers. Eleven. Data blast. Seventeen. Punctuated by blasts of data. The encoding was unclear.
High in the cold mounts, somewhere along the boarder between Iran and Azerbijan, or perhaps Armenia, or perhaps Turkey, a broadcast lit up the air waves for two and a half long hours every night.
Move. Now. Words just above whispers. Pounding footsteps hauling equipment. Frantic strapping of gear. Pedaling sturdy mountain bikes.
They listened, recorded, and sometimes tried to triangulate the spurious and unusual transmissions, sometimes Kurdish, sometimes English, sometimes Arabic, sometimes Esfahani, sometimes Farsi, always the same calm and collected voices nestled between the blast of screaming electrons, from this mysterious new number station.
Hide. Off the bike. In the bushes. Under the shrubs. Listen for the motorcycles. Look for the helicopter. Listen for the drones. Hope.
But that news, brutal, terrible, joyful, of the dead and the living, atrocities and escapes, encoded and spliced, pictures and brief videos, always just dodging the last patrols, could not be suppressed, could not be cut off, could not be killed, a hydra of hope, lugging gear from mountain top to mountain top, some of those listeners came to learn, had been broadcast by that very mysterious numbers station that they had pondered, night after night.
Hundreds dead. Boarder crossing, need supplies. The names of the living. Names of the identified dead. Are you ok? Are they ok? Who made it out? We are alive. We hope this is over soon. A whipser for the dead. A broadcast for the living.