Quiet Crashing
Major Schillings burnt his hand on the engine and recoiled, unable to fix it. He watched as the skin burned slowly down his thumb like a cigarette, opening up his flesh like a flower in bloom.
He wished it were raining, or that a mob were chasing down him and his plane. He didn’t care which mob it was or why they were chasing him. Caring was never in the training.
But he wasn’t in the Americas anymore. It was hot and dry and silent. Airborne dust sprinkled his wound, and he watched the blood carry it like leaves on an amazon river, until it turned black and percolated.
His heavy eyes scanned the desert runway, though he remembered being well rested. Only his SUV broke the horizon. He should just go home now.
The overheated engine coughed and sighed, it too uninspired without the threat of danger. Schillings felt no need to move the plane, or the tools. He’d return tomorrow and find everything untouched by all but dust.
He stepped through the door, thinking only of where they kept the wipes in order to clean up the blood that had dripped onto the center console of the SUV.
His daughter screamed when she saw his hand pass through the light. The cries filled his ears, but fell dully on his numbed attention. His son, hiding behind the couch, ran behind his mother, who grabbed his face and kissed him.
He felt happy. Happy they had never watched the popular footage of his unit’s crash landing — the contortion of the great war machines, the hugging of metal and skin clinging tightly to one another as they rolled into a form indistinguishable from people or plane. He hadn’t brought himself to watch it either.
Things dropped fast in the war. Things like levels, and altitude, and bodies, all of them dropped. Walls dropped, homes dropped, and all humanity too, until all hope dropped and then finally the flags dropped. Everything dropped but guns.
Nothing developed slow, or seemed to run its course, only the communication home and the realization that humanity had no hero in war. But here, in the free and open sand, everything was slow. Nothing dropped, or fell, or crashed. Like the blood from his hand, everything dripped.
As the sun draped over the landscape, the magenta sky, silly with toddler colors, sent the blue sunset towards a quiet crashing, and an explosion of hue burst through the house. A pillar rose in the distance, but no blast would ever reach their window — only the creak of an empty rocking chair, sun-bleached on an uneven porch.
And his hand, his hand was only a flesh wound — a frozen stream, a dirty cut. In the silent boredom of a godforsaken wasteland, he’d found no peace, but there was love in the slow and restless.
thanks for reading
Austin G. Lack
[t] @lackofaustin
