Rocket Town, California
Mad Mike Hughes launches himself in the air just to prove the Earth flat. No countdown, no safety measures, just a self-made rocket attached to a mobile home. He takes off so suddenly even the children steps away don’t have time to see him go. Neon green and white shoot up to 350, freefalling before he makes it two thousand feet, not even as high as a plane.
His flight is short and his landing hard. “He’s going down fast” can be heard in the crowd, a second parachute deploying like the period at the sentence’s end. He could have died ten different ways, but he did it to see the truth.
There’s something admirable in this kind of crazy. If this were a fairy tale, perhaps he’d be a hero, a fantasy paladin who travels the land on his trusted neon green rocket, fighting an evil kingdom in the name of truth and justice.
Perhaps he’d only be the madman, a Don Quixote fighting windmill giants.
