Swiss Cheese with Footnotes
You told them your foot was stuck in the storm drain grate, but they didn’t believe you. Like, no fucking way. The grate is specifically designed to allow bipeds to patter along the street without falling through the cracks. They yelled at you to get away from there, gotta gotta gotta, and you yelled back, sorry sorry can’t, and they yelled, shut the fuck up, nobody’s ankles are that skinny, and that was that
It all happened before the sky caved in like a shoddy building built by shoddy building contractors who’d cut so many corners, they had to build it like a dome, and even though you reckon a dome is more structurally sound than a box, you’re not an engineer, you gotta rely on the experts. You were gonna ask your mother who was a structural engineer, then you remembered she was, which means being in the past, which means not here and now if you wanna get picky about what it means to be dead
(Footnote 1: Everybody should have a mom, but not everybody does.)
Long ago you told a friend you wanted your kid to grow up to be an engineer, and he laughed and said you’re kidding me, the child is too sensitive, which was weird coming from him ’cause his own son became an engineer, not that you’d ask his son about domes versus boxes knowing he’s been working with renewables which were supposed to save the world but as we all know they didn’t — we knew the score the day the sky caved in
(Footnote 2: You think the sky should be immune to collapsing but you’re no expert or an astronomer.)
It’s too late to complain that they shot you after they shot you, and impossible to file a formal complaint with the cops against the cops. It’s how they got away with shooting you for no other reason than the puny fact that you wouldn’t move from the spot the SWAT team’s guns were aiming at. You couldn’t move because your foot was stuck in the storm drain grate, and the SWAT team couldn’t move because they had already pointed their firearms in your direction, which created a standoff, of whatever nationality which quickly became moot along with all other nationalities the moment the sky caved in. There were no more borders to set you up with an identity, and no more verbal tenses. The past and the future tangled with each other for the gold on the cosmic podium, and the present, which has always been a poorly wrapped gift, folded upon itself and got swept away like a celestial rag under your unstuck foot while you plummeted upward toward unknown galaxies at such breakneck speed, there was no way you could actually see the shooting stars
When the shots rang and turned your chest into a bleeding grater, which grated on everyone’s nerves, especially after the medical examiner pointed out to the crime scene investigators and the detectives in charge and the mad dogs barking at everything that you hadn’t lied, you really were stuck, and they in turn ran it by their captain who ran it up the ladder huffing and puffing till it reached the mayor who dispatched the PR department to point out to the media to point out to the public that our SWAT team legitimately feared for their lives and had only a fraction of a second to react and we wouldn’t change a thing if we had to do it over again because none of it is our fault — not the crazy ass weather, not the firestorms, not the nuclear fallout, not the vanishing insects, not the sixth extinction, not Fukushima, not the sea level rise
(Footnote 3: The mad dogs belong in another story, but they barked their way in.)
Once upon a time you were exported like some exotic produce packed in a shipping crate to some fucking war zone in some fucking desert on the other side of the world, where you got assigned to a vehicle that couldn’t handle the shifting sands, so like the good boy that you are, you steered it down the yellow brick road only to have it blow up on a roadside bomb. Whether that early mishap was a coincidence or a sign of things to come, whether it went down in a fireball outside the sweep of time, you still can’t undo what happened
Or figure out why you survived, unlike members of your unit who were your friends and others who were in your unit but weren’t your friends, and locally grown organic combatants you had never met to know if you’d want to make friends, and bystanders who were too young or too stupid to know they wouldn’t be spared to go on with their lives, it didn’t matter that they never agreed to work with the anthropogenic meat grinding machine that makes everything it touches get fucked and go extinct
(Footnote 4: You know how that works when all hope gets sucked out of the room.)
Out on the paved street of your hometown no one knew about your long-ago roadside mishap, which you survived minus one leg, which was too fragmented to be airlifted with you to that nifty state-of-the-art facility halfway around the world, where in theory they’d fix you up to appear to the casual observer like an ordinary biped. In reality the supply chain got broken, it got broken with big enough holes for the CEOs to swarm through and loot all the fancy components of your theoretical state-of-the-art prosthetic. There was no one to foot the bill for your extended hospital stay while you hopped around waiting for the supply chain to get patched up with no one willing to make it happen as long as the chain-repair technicians refused to work for minimum wage. In the end, it was cheaper for all concerned, stakeholders and experts alike, to kick you out
So there you were, grabbing onto fences and garbage cans and streetlights — anything not to crawl on the sidewalk beneath the foot traffic rushing back and forth — until some enterprising witch took pity on you, and took you in, and took it upon herself to get you up and running, and a few other takes to give the anthropocentric movie editors a chance at doing the right thing. You weren’t even a footnote in history and there was no great big happy ending for you, just a peg leg in the piratical style of yore and other small time shit. You learned to walk around town between potholes and storm grates — happy to go on with your life, happy to breathe in the smog, watch the birds drop off the trees from heat exhaustion with no AC, the dead butterflies blowing around like autumn leaves in the hot desert wind that seized your hometown by the throat
Until your lungs got perforated by hot metal, though unlike the dead birds and other trinkets subject to gravity you didn’t fall to the ground. Your pinned wooden leg kept you upright, chin on your chest, the rest of you tilting to the other side, where gravity kept wavering between apathy and the overwhelming desire to bring you down. Someone from the killing crew dug out your ID, or whatever laid a claim to the body standing there like a scarecrow with no birds to scare, slightly tilted to one side, riddled with bullets, a special marinade of blood and gunpowder
(Footnote 5: Bird shortages worldwide have been linked to the dramatic uptick in scarecrows being thrown out of work.)
Everybody blamed the messenger, which in this case was the ME, who after pronouncing you dead had the gall to point out that you told the truth about being stuck in the storm drain grate, with the subtext pointing a finger at the SWAT team for having killed a war hero, which required someone at the top of the hierarchy to call in a favor from the building contractors to bring their backhoes and bulldozers to the site and cover up this latest mishap with dirt so deep, not even the mad dogs tagging along could dig it up
They had no way of knowing, mad dogs and bipeds alike, that the sky would cave in that day, which essentially would do away with any hindsight. No one but the self-proclaimed sapient species passes judgment on whether death and destruction is okay or not, and with them all gone, we default to the neutral position of who the fuck cares. By that point you’d already left gravity behind in favor of hurtling into space at warp speed so breathtaking, there was no way you could pause ever again to take in the view
