impractical weapons: part one

The rest is silence: or, my adventures in the united states of relative freedom.

1

All across the midnight sky, fireworks bloom like sprinkles on a cupcake. A cobweb on the chandelier and the neon sprinklers weren't alone; the anarchist airship the royal Marie Antoinette was its northern star.

Leisurely with engine's cut, drifting those July wind's, that were alway's nostalgic. Its captain and her ladies-hands held-leaning over the bow. Eye's speckled with the duck tape light of the city below, in all it's modern power a speckled piece of coral.

It wasn't an independence day. And the skyscrapers and slums were empty from the skies. Nuclear in her mind, however, was that slow descending bomb, the winds didn't disturb it, parachuting down with its blades slowing its descent through the sky. It was a dreamy kind of fall that forced meditation like a campfire.

She remembered watching the propeller blade's fall from the trees a spinster's cyclone delivering, a generation (childhood has a strange time to be recognized?). But the modified shell of a minisub that she had dropped on the edge of the atmosphere and had now watched in the rocking arms of her dirigible.

Feeling like a kid who let of a balloon in a parking lot to wait for it to pop and land on the pavement. Guilt was there but inclosed resembling a blister, meaning it didn't stop her from going to the store.

Her cowboy hat was blowing up, a strategic hand holding it down. The fake gold of the star practically glitters on with bold words stretching SHERIF, and the red string tightened under her southern chin. All those lives, she thought. But now, at least there was nowhere for her to return to and in the stale cotton candy of the cloud's weaving the disappointed face of the harvest moon.

Josephine met her creator's eye's as if to admit her disappointment in herself, "I know," she may have thought. But descending now the bomb black and with significant roles of bolts. It's painted smile with the cliche of shark teeth. But the face wasn't threatening; it seamed imbracing and alone. Desperate and hungry, smiling with the red lipstick on its cheek that traditionally smiley bones had to force Josephine to pucker up for. But not today, in bad taste, he thought she smooched it cleanly and wiped the leftovers with a paper napkin she left to drift to the earth in the wake of the royal Marie Antoinette.

What city was the bomb going to lay into a crater, what city was the bomb going to leave a scar or a drained lake? It doesn't matter it could be any large, suburban center with a surprisingly sane populist.

And now it was about to all go away. Maybe someone was staring at the thing as it entered the safe glow of the street lamps, surprised and intrigued as it came down like a potato bug, and quiet repetition of its fan ignition imitation whump, whump, whump. But he wasn't thinking anything when it hit the pavement, he didn't see anything, and he wasn't feeling anything anymore. The world became for a short time to any objective viewer; photographs ruined negative in a world of digital photography.

White and black reversed. Alison Josephine was familiar with this by now but never would allow her self to get used to it. It hurt more when she was numb, and when the world came back, an inferno of orange and pink. Face's, Skelton's, children and their mothers, fathers, and their wives. All there ghost's piled in and fed out, driving out every piece of there existence. Forming a pike swelling and stabbing everything above. Her face glowed in its light. Her hair was blown back by the blaze.

That's the thing about smileys bones invention, his most remarkable originality, the aether bomb. An average warhead blast's away at the body of everything alive, but once released, the real damage start's burning on there soul's forming napalm. Traping the spirits of the dead and making an inferno that can burn for decades and will burn until the ghosts were gone. Josephine was sitting with her back to the railings coiling up lips dry from the cold with goosebumps from the cold needling her spine imaging to hear the voices of the dead, bewildered again at the idea of something that feeds off and dissolved everything eternal in the human spirit. If she smoked, she would need a cigarette.

"How can I do anything now." it's all she could think as she sunk more forth into the abyss her ear's stinging from the pressure. Saltwater was burning her nose while it swallowed her lungs. The sun took up all the ocean above her-she felt-wanting her, as she was far too gone to want anything, but back now, alone, she is still sitting on the deck. We can see something that is far away. She isn't looking at us; she isn't looking at anything, but possibly the honeycombed sun no longer warming, just pulling out of the darkness, Josephine understands she has earned death. Illuminating that, she has nothing to face but detection, and we leave her now looking over our shoulders and go instead to a room down the stairs and to the left. Where on the bed, hand's palms up. She is crying.

She has just lost everyone she cares about, lost her sister's and father, her mother and cousins, aunt's and uncles. All we see is the bed with folded blankets-the only color besides her that come's to mind, over-saturated blue.

It may seem unnecessary to note her dress was white and speckled blue, a hard candy easter egg, or that her features implied every stereotype of a grad student who wanted to be a television financial news reporter. Or that her blond hair tied behind her head, seamed out of place, that possibly one night after passing a hard test, the ladies at her dorm all died their hair blond and her forever a Burnett only agreed reluctantly. But on graduation day two year's later, she was the only one out of them with hair that was only dark in comparison to streaks of light reflecting off a car. Shallow? Out of place? But it is not the time to know her yet, only see her, and we can't because I can only use words.

2

Time...time, what time is it? Early morning with the curtain's open. Discombobulated and disarrayed, Jessie whistler is tired sitting up from fourteen hours of varying states of rest, none of which was satisfying.

Every day of the last two weeks was the same mundane taxidermied fig mermaid, which is to say all stitched together, aware it was waiting to be forgotten. Hand's comfortable in streaks threw hair familiar with expensive conditioner. A fairytale pixie asleep in a bird's nest with a cocaine problem she can't handle anymore. Her wing's sick and fragile as a wax paper with cooling cookies.

Her choice is soon coming, but to call it an option. Is to imply more control, then the decision has allowed. She can't remember being so unhappy with life before this. So wearied at her reflection, unable to recognize the finality of the tone she thought in.

As alien as some stranger in her skin. Waiting for a chance to let thing's return to the way they were. Allowing coincidence to take back, it's dares and prodding. It's cheap soliciting on the street corners its momma, it well knew, taught it better than stand on.

There were time's she snuck out of the castle-mansion? Whatever is the fashion to call the royal family's home. And walked out among the subjects, there were consequences she was more than prepared to except. Results that in there time had been black hole's threatening the sanctity of her home and pleasant life on the planet. But the alway's passed. And she alway's seemed to feel lighter for it.

The first time she had gotten drunk, waking up with one of her friend's older brother in the sleeping bag with her. Leaning up with a da Vinci trademarked smile and pleasantly asked the young man, "what the hell did we do?" or when caught by her father in front of the family's summer home. "I'm so sorry, dad, but there has been an' accident." but he could see that it was going up in flames behind her. But this was different; she had long been passed the comfort of having someone to yell at her. But now there was no one to yell at. Now there was nowhere to fall back. Nowhere to retreat, and grudgingly she knew there had never been.

When you take the ornament and ritual out of royalty, there isn't much left. And when you take social formality and obligation out of a family, you have a bunch of strangers with an inconvenient last name. And when you take those awkward strangers away, all you are left with is, thought's like this. Stretching her legs into her underwear, tracking a not cold but a naked feeling. That she had left the best part of herself back on the bed, but it was a desire to be buried a desire to make a den out of those blanket's, and forget this happened, everything. Which is a dangerous urge when indulged, she was lucky to have someone to hate, something to avoid if only to keep her moving. Looking out over the sky's the deep blue of the ocean, some small island clouds on its mount's, I wish I were on the other side of the glass.

That those pixie wings weren't a metaphor, she could go somersaulting through the sky's, but how much of the appeal to be limitlessly unrestricted then it's unobtainable? But for her it was attainable, only her "wing's" were stolen, her wings weren't her wing's anymore, for all she knew well pressed they were gilded and dangled from God's keychain. And this chain of thought's delivers to the reader, precisely the drama, that she is trying to muster the strength walk against.

It's not on her; it's not anywhere in the room. It's not in the captain's quarters anywhere. As she knew, the rules say it can't leave a horizon's distance from me. So disappointed in how obvious it was, smiley bones. I could have known that two years ago. No chance of fighting it off of him, well, shit. She couldn't leave her quarters ether. And he or Josephine wasn't stepping foot off of the ship. As much as the author and the reader(I'm assuming.) won't be doing any high sky's espionage, It seam's she has arrived at reality, that her boldest and best plan for action was merely to ask when he brings her lunch and if not lunch supper. If he has and he has to. - If he can, and this is the dice roll.- With a moral center, no one else seam's to believe in, to give her feather back.

3

It was a Tuesday, with sea-blue eyes and ocean lung's, with white that inspired heaven, all clean and withering, drizzling, and drifting. One of those Tuesdays, where the rain wasn't invited but appreciated. Lip's tung and lung's indulging the sparkling chill of every breath.

Everywhere felt frosted like grass in an early winter freeze. But where was life? Its always going away on day's like this, and the only bird or grasshopper, seam's out of place and intrusive. As does everyone you don't live with. And over there on the horizon come's again the royal Maree Antoinette. Black as brimstone, cold as the rest. But the brimstone of the engine room blazing heat, that makes the devil take off his fur coat, on chance visits. Window's sealed, but the one we stare in on, and how comfortable it looks to us, how inviting an invitation-only discovered that day after a party.

We try to ignore those people arguing, ruining this picture. Still, on closer inspection, there is only the one claiming another and someone unable to understand their participation, standing with locked arms that distilled reminds me of either a totem pole or a circus-trained grizzly. "Cooooome on," whined the blond, "let me see it?" pouting, and objectively a victim. Smiley bones felt like he just kicked a baby rabbit. Waving with its red crown backpack, boarding a plane, he just wired to explode. Smiley bones weren't one to cry, but Jessie whistler made him feel like he needed a pacifier.

"Fine, you can have it, but if you run off and tell Josephine, just to rub her nose in it, then I will warn you in advance, for your own safety, you shouldn't provoke a conversation with me for at least a couple of decade's." "Understood, you powerful and handsome man." Nodding with an unironic smile finger pointing to make sure he understood who she was talking to. And with a rare grin, he pulled out from his wallet, something he had without explanation been told in no uncertain term's never to show anyone, never to leave out, unattended. Or mention. To anyone. Something he never understood and forgotten about, until Jessie asked if she could have it a few moments ago.

Now usually Smiley, would never even let his word be broken on the racks or with a mallet. But this was, as everything between the two of them an exception. He withdrew it from its eternal resting place, behind a driver's license and fake insurance card. The pathetic feather was small in stature and class. Chip's in its symmetry with the perfect cheesecake cut's chipped into a teacup. Black with a flavor of luminous green, he held it out to her, the eye's amazed it was prom night, and it had just now donned her, with him standing there naked that her high school sweetheart was hung, impressed and excited. "No, sit it on the bed!" his head turned weighed down by the shift in his drooping eyebrow. "OK," said Smiley long enough for his mind to settle and reassert itself. Disturbed with sincerity of the awe, she lavished on it. It could have been a dead mouse on those silk sheets, and it wouldn't have changed the elemental spirit of the scene.

Well, her home and everyone she loved was murdered last week, by her girlfriend. So he let it go. Head propped up on hand's; the dew drop's staring down-making shore it didn't escape.- Threatening to engulf her whole being. An excited sadness is unrestrained.

At any point, she just had to ask, ask, that's all. Tear's spilling out with closing eyelids; a bucket pushed over. Joanna and her father, Whitney and her mother, all died. And bones now at the doorway, with the unnatural, deservedly suspect way, saw her, or better imagined her, or still more sat in the seat next to the rabbit, as the world went far away in her eye's as the plane burning and falling. Dissolved like candy rock's in a bottle of crystal soda pop. Replacing the only flame's for the air bubble's, and death for sugar.

She was a crier, but not like this; over the year's the bucket came out, but it was birthday's and goodbyes. And only rarely clenched socket's tears of rage. Not this, in his imagined seeing. He never wanted enough empathy to feel that he never wanted to care that much, or couldn't understand the benefit in it. Coincidence, as a wise man, said, is the natural state of all thing's in and of the universe. But how many coincidences is a person expected to bear with every man shot down dragging the star's and stripe's from the ground, to be the NEXT to fall gasping dead, in the eyes of God? It never matters. Sincere regret is something best drowned or embraced. And Smiley carried it walking the ship, what did he tell her before he stood at the head of the boat? With crossed arms with a smile, a chip in the image he so carelessly embraced. Probably nothing, but maybe with a bit of kindness, Jessie was more then worthy of, "I would help you if I could kid." Which is kind of ironic, kinda.

When the fit left her, she held the feather and what as it dissolved into her returned her, and she felt nothing special. Unable to remember how this worked, wanting to make sure she wasn't going to kill herself. The idea wasn't a flight manual, flapping her arm's with a cutting pull for the wind, cranking her head disappointed, "this was supposed to go better." She looked out the window, watching the wind in the rain. With no land in sight. She took off her dress so it wouldn't get caught in her wing's, and took a plunge like she was God's test crash dummy, arm's and leg's flailing like they shouldn't. Hair blowing across her face with seemingly trying to reach out in self-defense, for the crash. Rolling and tumbling in her lungs but she didn't scream.

She was a bag of entangled bug's dumped out a sack, and then she wasn't. A green head black duck, continued her fall till it caught itself on its wings. Clumsy and petite. Flapping away from the sun, flying off somewhere, we probably care more then she does, but what can you do? You can't be free until your free of yourself, and she needed to fly far too much, to be happy free falling.