Eight Days of Ether: every day a new theme and only 24 hours to submit.
Day 5 – The People Indoors. Edited 21/01/2025 to include the full text.
Carole mostly drives the body for the big stuff but they all do a few day-to-day things like shopping, which accounts for the odd items Carole finds around the house. The camouflage underwear for instance, that’s The Robin.
Tofu is The Emily’s doing, with her vegan fads and tendency to throw up if any of the others eats a burger, and the Metallica album she woke up to in the early hours one Sunday was The Charlie’s. It brought a bleary neighbour to the door ready to punch her lights out. That generated a slight frisson.
‘Certainty is for wusses,’ says The Charlie. ‘If we were on a cliff top there might at least be a tree to catch at on the way down. Make it a bit more worth the effort.’ He starts to drum on his forehead with his fingers and the clatter brings Carole back.
‘Jeez – how’d we get up here?’ She grabs at the window frame and wrestles herself back into the room. ‘Well?’ she says to whoever’s listening. It wouldn’t have been The Ella – too busy being Emo – or The Robin either. For all his macho militarising, he likes predictability. She hears nothing for a moment then, Not me; Nor me; I was out; Not me, either, stupid idea; Like I said, boring. Carole sits down on the carpet to consider this and knuckles her eyes. Was there a newbie among them; another split? Someone who didn’t understand the need for balance so they aren’t scuppered by polarisation? She goes indoors to count.
The Jenny dislikes predictability even more than The Charlie does, and the windowsill was a silly mistake, she gets that now. When she was little, before all the fighting and the mess that split everyone up, she loved the circus. High wires, trapeze with no nets, men who caught bullets in their teeth. They looked invincible but she got all charged up knowing they weren’t. She likes being charged up.
‘Let’s play chicken,’ she says.
Autnor’s note: Risk, like adventure, is in the mind of the taker. For some of us, a roller coaster ride is beyond our need for excitement but for others, it’s jumping off a platform[1] at the edge of space. Strangely, risky decisions are more likely to be made by groups despite the fact that the individuals themselves would be more conservative. It’s called the Risky-Shift[2] phenomenon and it shows how extreme views pull other group members along the dimension of risk towards a view they wouldn’t have held otherwise. Usually, this would be an external event – one you can leave if you wish – but what if the debate was taking place within? There is a much debated condition that used to be called multiple personality disorder and now goes by the name divided or dissociative identity disorder. People with this condition are reported to experience multiple personalities often battling for supremacy, some of which actually take over so that the ‘main’ personality has no idea what happened during that time. This story is about what happens when the acutely balanced need for risk that keeps this individual safe is suddenly upset by a new, more extreme entity.
SCH 2014/2025
[1] Felix Baumgartner. No, no, no, no, no! http://news.sky.com/story/997627/space-jump-felix-baumgartner-sets-leap-record
[2] Also called group polarisation or cautious shift among other things http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/risky_shift.htm
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 
An interesting idea, but my problem with this story is that it doesn’t work on its own, without your explanation of Risky-shift phenomena. What’s obvious for you may not be obvious to the reader, and ideally the story should be self-sufficient, ready to use without the reading manual.:)
Absolutely right, Irena. Maybe if I’d given it a more thorough ‘surface’ read, I could have strengthened that. It gives me ideas for a revision so thank you 🙂