A flight

The wind was dry, and it stiffened if one's path was opposed to its own. It curled its fingers against the underside of the little craft and rocked it back and forth on its axle, alternately tensing and slackening the chain that traveled between the tail and a bolt in the airstrip. A boy made his way across the path of the wind, lurching with each surge of the gale. A pail swung in his chapped hands, its wire handle cutting a white line in his pink flesh. Every few steps he would switch the loadbearing hand without breaking his stride. What had been a fairly straight course in his mind had manifested more weakly as a diagonal, and he had to brace himself to correct his path as he neared the airship. The craft had been built before he was born, during the first world war. It had originally been used as a dogfighter, and after the war it had been sold intact to a family of merchants to defray the national deficit. They had never bothered to remove the machine gun that protruded from the underside of the fuselage, and this had proven beneficial for them.

The boy had loaded the contents of the pail into the magazine of the gun, a modified Vickers. His eyelashes fluttered in the wind and he widened his eyes less after every blink. He flew back to the hangar with his arms outspread, making a daring maneuver and destroying several opponents before ducking under the slightly raised door into the bay. Inside, two grown people were having a heated argument, and this did not strike the boy as being unusual. "I've told you a dozen times, Netta, we're wasting our time if we don't go now. The more it's blowing, the better." said his father. "Besides, he's not even your son. It's not your place to get involved." The woman grimaced with scorn. "Go then. Go! Kill you both and your damned plane wreck, I don't care if you do. Go! Go now if it's so important to you!" The man recoiled, stung, and turned to his son. "Start the engine, Benito. We will leave in a moment." The boy hurried back out into the gale. For a moment, the sun mirrored the moon, its masculine form sinking behind a mountain range on the western horizon while the moon's feminine disc rose from behind another range in the east. Then the moon took precedence from the sun. Suddenly the roar of the engine filled the air and shook inside the boy's ears, catching him off guard even though he was in control of it. The man unhooked the chain from the tail of the fighter and climbed into the cockpit. The boy crawled into the tail and curled himself up behind the controls of the machine gun. He looked back and searched for the woman amidst the swirling dust on the runway, but she was not there. His eyes watered and he blinked furiously, grateful that his father's attention was fixed on the runway.

Man and boy rose into the sky as the burning red light of the setting sun through the clouds faded to orange, then to pink, then to a dark shade of blue. The plane rode the billows toward the horizon, rocking up and down on sky as it had done on land. The boy was tempted to fire the gun prematurely, but he restrained himself, fearing a swift tongue lashing from his father, whose grip which so often fell on the boy's arm when he misbehaved now held with equal firmness to the plane's controls. He shouted to make his voice heard above the din of the aircraft. "When I say now, you squeeze, understand? We're almost there now." The boy was suddenly filled with fear, not of what he had to do but of his father's disappointment. In that moment, success meant more to him than his own life and he fiercely gripped the gun in anticipation. Soon the broken black surface of an extinct volcanic island had risen from the ocean, and the man began to scream as they approached. "NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!" The boy's adrenaline spiked as thunder drowned out his father's screaming, the grinding of the engine, and his mother, who sang him softly to sleep.

Many years later, a man flew a brand new airplane without a machine gun over an island and smiled down at a thousand olive trees.

Copyright 2007 Gabriel S. New and $ilky $mooth $tories www.gabrielsnew.tk