The sky. Someone’s little sister is trying to eat a cloud. Reach into that perpetuality, feel the sky’s innards. We’re not the kind of boundary-seekers experience once probed to proffer. What’s sad is the roar that proceeds the silence. Can there be any comfort in that roar, ever, it is unthinkable. Slowed down, the sound of the sky vehicle breaking apart can be its own exotic percussion, soundtrack to the wind dance of a long lost desert tribe, sound of bleeding and breaking. The plane is like a body, it can shatter against a cloud just like a skeleton. You got on thinking if anything goes wrong, this will be my chance to really try it out: to go beyond the inevitable into the near-impossible. How many have chanced this feat. The crew had to be trained to get us this far, but how does one train to be a passenger. There is nothing offered in the way of sacrifice training, one can only learn to be a ghoul through experience. The marshals,

Their guns soon to be buried in the sand. Bodies disintegrated, children of a flash-in-the-pan experience, their wives will send floral wreaths to the rescue plot, not worth visiting, nothing to be recovered there. First to go is your sense of smell, best to not sniff the burning, all the membranes in your nostrils having been burnt out to protect you from that coldest slab of knowledge, the defeatist quartet playing their medley in the skyscrape,

Black crackling of disintegration, a meter, a bit of the command post flies right past your head, you could have reached out and grabbed it but you were preoccupied with your own leveling, chores of the desertwind. Bright snatches of light from the burning darkness, it is a Sunday, that much to be remembered, a final thought for one or two perhaps: Oh yeah, Sunday,

Burning, the sky and the swallows swimming past, I love myself the sky, I was a third-rate businessman in this life but I can be something greater in the next, perhaps a parasite,

Filth falling from the sky, tile manufacturing firm’s vice president tumbling through plastic towers and vials of pills, he will never have a chance to evolve past his own fears, terribilities, at this phase. At this phase, forever falling, pills in his eyes, eyelids scrunching over three-inch slit of metal, eyeball juices, the sentient space of no movement, losing control as your liver melts into your spleen, the attitude of silence some of us take when becoming hoarse unbridled,

Love me and forever in the sky falling,

Reverse falling now back up into the heavens,

Skull dried out still encasing brain, frontal lobe frozen in fluids rear lobe aflame, thoughts continue unabated by pain and suffering,

Forever murder the sky,

The aboveness is one angle. You always hated that mirror that fucked you every morning. Upcoming sabbath to be a reunion of sorts among distant relatives, now shall be an occasion to mourn. For them to ask themselves what has really been lost. You, a person they barely know, a person unknown to most, let all your secrets die with you, only this way can you be said to be free. A window has opened on to the scene of your drowning. Straight away you see another body, his fate quite similar to yours. The screams dissipated after the first fifteen seconds when most of them began to die. You didn’t fuck the fire, the fire fucked you. Oh just straining to fucking understand. The suffering of children,

Dim haze renaissance of failure that comes buzzing through the mires. Worried to see that seasonal every day spleen that hits the engulfed brain explodes so lightly. Oh the wires. No babies can swim in the ocean. To talk about sand as you’re falling is really enough sky mutilation. One of them already dead, a soldier, his carcass in the cargo, made his fortune in the war. A land whose capital he couldn’t name, a land he couldn’t situate on a blank map presented to him only a month before, found in the circuitry of death a treasure trove of ancient bronze sculptures, buried in sand long forgotten, buddhas and strange deities long lost to our even stranger customs, sold to rogue collectors of the sacred and unsavory, he met his death before this flight, sentience undilated, it was his massive stupid fucking indifference to the plight of all those buried civilizations that eventually killed him, he became a rebel cockroach fighter in a nebulous guerilla war, the war didn’t belong to any country he had once belonged to, he was only in it for the riches he thought he’d acquire, ambition vomits a certain type and forces it to make out with its own mortality device, the situation of ostriches bred for some deviant psychopath’s neuraesthetic dementia,

The earth is not quaking. That was the sound of the plane breaking apart, a loud crack, like at a shotgun wedding hick flight attendant might have once attended back in her home state of fight more clarity,

The dismality of being a body falling through a cloud is quite purplish and voluble. Head wants to vomit satan, but suddenly it’s so sped up, it’s like the speed of yr agony is rushing through yr head in circles. Transguired. Sneeze and a martian might come out, a serpent alien being that could survive this,

Dying only lasts as long as a sneeze,

[…]

 

From Written in the Sky. Forthcoming in All Fall, a book of two novellas, to be published by Publication Studio in their Fellow Traveler’s Series in 2014.