TUESDAY: The Terminal Velocity of Falling Objects

BY PATRICK CAMPBELL

Copyright is held by the author.

OBJECTS WERE falling from the skies.

The first traceable incident was on a Wednesday afternoon, late last January, in Meriden, England, where an American style Fridge-freezer fell on the village green.

I remember because it was the day Claire asked me to move out. She didn’t really offer an explanation, only that she was going through some stuff and that she needed some space. I figured it would only be for a while and told her I’d start looking for a place, but she said she meant now and wheeled out one of the little suitcases we usually took on holiday, already packed.

On the way to my parents, I stopped at a petrol station. That’s where I spotted the article in the local paper. FRIDGE FALLS ON GREEN read the headline. Apparently, no one had actually seen the appliance tumbling from the sky, but a few people reported hearing the thud when it landed. Residents of the village stood about for a while, looking up into the clouds and asking each other where it could have come from until the proprietor of The Ram’s Head ran an extension lead out his window and tried plugging the fridge in. Remarkably, it worked. The once pristine lawn had cushioned the landing and taken the brunt of the damage — a photo showed the crater in the pristine lawn — while the rather swish-looking stainless-steel appliance, save a small dent or two, remained completely intact. So the pub landlord and a couple of his staff wrestled it out of its crater and wheeled it across the street on the trolley they usually used for taking deliveries. It found a home in the pub kitchen.

When I arrived at my parents’ house, I tried to show them the article, but they didn’t really seem interested, only asking if I’d eaten yet and how long I’d be staying.

I checked all the major news websites, but only a few questionable outlets had picked up the story about the fridge.

The Bechstein Grand Piano that fell from the sky above São Paolo, Brazil, on the day I finally moved into my new place, was harder to dismiss. It landed on Raul de Silva, a charismatic politician and, up until that point, front-runner in the mayoral race. At the cacophonous moment of impact, he was in the middle of giving a speech in one of the city’s parks. Media companies allied with the politician speculated about an elaborate assassination plot, but the theory ran out of steam when no explanation could be provided as to where the piano had come from. There were no nearby buildings that might have provided a launch platform and there was no evidence of anything flying in the airspace overhead. A search was conducted for any nearby trebuchets, but of course, nothing was found. Space debris might have made sense, but no one could explain what a grand piano had been doing in orbit.

The opposition media made a joke out of the incident, suggesting the falling piano had been arranged by the Acme company with a cartoon of the politician depicted as Wile E Coyote. Soon after, the politician was discovered to have been embezzling party funds to pay for his failed investments, cocaine addiction and penchant for partying with prostitutes.

My new place was a room I rented in a house that belonged to an old Polish lady, called Go?ka, who spent all of her time talking to her pet schnauzer, Tobi. The house had a funny smell about it and the dog yelped and scratched at my door at night. I had to keep reminding myself it was only temporary. Only until Claire figured out whatever it was she needed to figure out.

Soon, objects were falling all over the globe.

A 2002 Toyota Prius sank a luxury yacht when it fell from the sky near Mykonos. An entire train carriage fell on a group of climbers in the Himalayan mountains. An international conflict was narrowly avoided when half the letters from a Starbucks storefront almost destroyed the ornate domed roofs of the Kremlin. The three hundred jars of Marmite that fell in Slough were met with mixed reactions.

At some point, Claire stopped answering my calls and texts.

Forums sprang up online, with more and more contributors reporting some mundane everyday object plummeting into their lives:  

A leather sofa fell through my windscreen while I was driving and the insurance company is refusing to pay out.

Our Bahamas beach holiday was ruined by a shower of office stationery.

A washing machine fell on my cat. R.I.P. Mittens.

In the early months, a few of the incidents were discovered to be hoaxes.

A man was arrested and charged with manslaughter after CCTV footage was found of him throwing a lawnmower from the roof of a 45-storey building in New York. The lawnmower had landed on an open-top tour bus, instantly killing three French tourists. No one could explain how the man had managed to get the lawnmower to the top of the building without being seen by security. 

One of the most prevalent theories gaining traction was that the objects had been sucked into the air by tornados or other freak weather incidents, but this theory was laid to rest when a bronze statue of Sylvester Stallone fell on a fish market in Osaka, Japan.

The statue was quickly identified as the iconic Rocky monument that stood outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but it soon came to light that the statue was still standing proud in the city and according to the original sculptor, and Mr. Stallone, all three copies, cast from the original mould were present and accounted for. 

This gave rise to the claim that this was the work of visitors from another planet – that they were flying by in their saucers and scanning the earth’s environment in order to reproduce our technologies. Others were convinced it was the work of God: disdainful of our golden-calf consumerism and forcing us to confront the rampant materialism of modern living in what they called The Second Flood.

In September, I was banned from Waitrose. I had seen Claire in the Fruit & Veg section with Richard ‘Dick’ Coxmore, the guy she always used to say was ‘just a friend from work.’ I had crouched low pretending to inspect some oranges, so they wouldn’t see me and watched as he put a punnet of figs into their basket explaining that they were full of aphrodisiacs. I decided then he probably wasn’t just a ‘friend from work’ anymore. I should have probably just stayed crouched behind the oranges. In all honesty, I shouldn’t really have been in the Waitrose at all. It was a couple of bus journeys from Go?ka’s place, but certain habits are hard to quit. 

A couple of months later a shipping container fell through the roof of that Waitrose and they ended up permanently closing the store, so the ban ended up being moot.

Everybody knew of someone who had started living indoors as much as possible: the kinemortophobic, as they came to be known. There wasn’t much they could do about the shipping containers and lorries, but a roof over their heads would at least protect them from the smaller objects. Certain billionaires built bunkers with miles of tunnels connected to key buildings. I was that way for a while after the Waitrose incident, not with the bunkers and tunnels, obviously, but I did find myself staying indoors more and more. I think Go?ka appreciated the company, although she still seemed to prefer chatting with Tobi. 

Work called to let me know I had been let go, which was understandable considering I hadn’t been in for a while. They said I’d be missed, which was nice.

Some people took to wearing builders’ hardhats and motorcycle helmets when they went outside, but that precaution was proven futile when a ‘children-crossing’ traffic sign sliced one such concerned citizen clean in two as she waited in line for an ATM in Bergen, Norway. 

And yet, despite the increasing regularity of falling objects reported in countless television segments, endless newspaper articles, grizzly photos on social media and word-of-mouth accounts, the majority of the world’s population had never actually seen a falling object first-hand. Therefore, for most, it was something they didn’t need to consider: so long as they had never seen anything falling, or nothing had fallen on them, it likely never would – besides, they had mortgages and day-care and pet insurance to worry about. If the falling objects really were a thing, it was for the world’s governments and scientists to worry about.

But while most people continued their daily lives, others became more militant with their scepticism. Many considered anyone who took precautions against the falling objects to be suffering from a kind of hypochondria and treated them with disdain. When city councils started installing safety nets over streets, the non-believers decried it as the first step in a global conspiracy to better control the population.

Just wait until they drop one of those nets on a big crowd and drag everyone away to an internment camp, said one post from a prominent contributor on 4chan.

The conspiracy theories differed slightly depending on which online forum they originated. Most didn’t believe the objects were falling at all, while others claimed that the objects were being dropped by government planes to instil fear in the population and carry out targeted assassinations under the guise of some supernatural phenomenon.

Whenever I tried to talk to people about the falling objects, they didn’t seem interested at all, and conversation with Goska was a non-starter. Still, we had ways of communicating. One day she left a fruit pie with a smiley face baked into the crust on my doorstep. I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of fruit it was but I appreciated the gesture. The next week I ordered an extra chow mein from the Chinese and left it on her doorstep. Like that we connected, she through the food she cooked and I through the food I bought or heated in the microwave.  Until one day she knocked on my door and when I answered she put the dog lead in my hand and pointed outside. At the time I thought it was a sweet gesture – her way of telling me that I needed to get out of the house – but looking back now I wonder if she had become scared of the falling objects herself.

Anywhere the nets had been erected over city streets they soon became filled with junk. The councils suggested that this was proof their efforts were working, but it was clear that much of the contents in the nets was more likely due to overlooking residences disposing of their unwanted waste out of a window, or businesses fly-tipping off of rooftops.

A whole industry grew around clearing the nets and salvaging unwanted or unclaimed fallen objects wherever they fell. Often the objects broke apart on impact with the ground, but sometimes the objects were functional and occasionally they had some considerable value. The company that was contracted to dismantle and remove the luxury cruise liner that fell on the Las Vegas strip profited twice over when they found the majority of the damage had been contained to the hull.

I found out later that the project had been managed by Claire’s new partner, Richard ‘Dick’ Coxmore, With the bonus he received they both took early retirement. Now, at least according to Facebook, they spend all their time on various white sand beaches around the world, surfing, rolling about in the sand and staring into each other’s eyes. This January, Claire posted an ultrasound scan.

After a while the news stopped reporting individual cases of falling objects, offering instead a tally of daily injuries and fatalities in a short bulletin, usually preceding the weather. 

The nets in our end of town had been due to go up last February, but the council delayed the project due to cost concerns. When they eventually went up in June it was two days too late for Go?ka who was instantly killed by a parking meter while out walking Tobi.

Her estate is still being handled by the solicitors and I’m not sure what will happen to the house. I’m sure eventually I’ll be asked to move out, but I’m still there for now looking after Tobi. I started letting the bedroom door open at night and he doesn’t scratch anymore. Instead, he usually pads into the room a little while after me, jumps up and settles down at the bottom of the bed.

Last night an ATM fell in the back garden. The crashing sound whipped me out of sleep. I ran downstairs, through Goska’s kitchen and out the back door. The machine must have hit the old oak tree on the way down, a thick branch lay across it on the path that divided the overgrown lawn in two. When I pulled the branch off, the door of the ATM sprang open; inside I found its contents, full and intact and in neat little stacks. 

Nobody has yet offered an explanation for the falling objects that everyone can agree on. Of course, everyone has their own ideas, but personally, I’ve stopped questioning it. With Tobi at the bottom of my bed, I sleep pretty well.

***

  

Patrick Campbell resides in Birmingham, UK, where he writes to exercise his demons. His short stories and micro-fiction have appeared in various publications. Find some of them at linktr.ee/PatrickCampbellWriter.