|
SOMETHING FALLING
by
Steve Cartwright
Copyright © 2001 All Rights
Reserved
Something
big was falling from the sky just
above his head.
As
the waitress with the curly red hair
laid the Mayson menu on his table, the
dark-haired man suddenly felt a lack of
reality.
A
lone cigarette was sending up a plume
of smoke from the middle of the glass
table. His brown eyes looked through the
smoke at the menu. The word MAYSON appeared
on it, but nothing else. Looking up, he
saw the waitress was gone. Something big was
falling from the sky just above his
head. Darting his eyes upward, all he saw
was mist. Still, he could feel its immensity.
And it was right above him. He
leapt to his feet, spilling his chair.
Looking around him, he saw that he was
alone. Everything looked shadowy and he felt
queasy fingers plying his guts. To
the right was the outline of a distant
city. Staggering in that direction, he ran into
a wall. The city had been painted on there,
crudely as though by a child. The
wall, he saw, ran up into low-lying white
clouds. Following the wall, using his fingers, he
found himself back at the glass table.
Now fifty cigarettes fumed from ashtrays. "Where
am I?" he called, looking for the
waitress. Hearing the sounds of a crowd,
he turned to his left and saw the waitress
bringing trays of food and drink to
several people. But when he tried to reach
them he ran into an invisible barrier. His
breath fogged the surface as he saw
them all in there, laughing and drinking
as though at a party. He saw
couples dancing, holding each other close; a
blazing birthday cake was fogging the room;
a black-draped coffin lounged in a corner.
The dark-haired man tried to bang on the
glass, but his hand dragged as though underwater. Something
big was falling from the sky just
above his head. Suddenly
his boots seemed welded to the floor
and he couldn't budge. **** Smoke
filled the entire vibrating cabin. In the
helmet visor words blinked from the console:
REENTRY MALFUNCTION REENTRY MALFUNCTION. His
eyes flitted in their sockets, sightless,
just below the nameplate that read MAYSON. The
fire had fused his boots to the metal
floor. The
capsule was breaking apart, battered by
Earth's atmosphere. In
seconds it was totally afire, falling
helplessly to earth in a million pieces.
The
End.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Cartwright once was a
newspaper reporter, covering the police beat, while
also looking for bizarre events such as
UFOs, ghosts, and psychics. Over twenty-five
years he's had hundreds of his non-fiction
articles published, mostly in various
newspapers. He's had short stories
published in commercial magazines such as Heist
in Austrailia; literary magazines and
other publications including Clay Tablet, Georgia
Journal, Liquid Ohio, and Nocturnal Lyric. His
short story "Neighborhood Watch" appeared
in Seeing Through Symbols, a literary anthology
published by Chrysalis Books. He did a
cartoon series called Not Unweird in Poets
Artists & Madmen, an Atlanta magazine with a
circulation of 50,000. He's lived in
metro Atlanta all of his life. sccart@aol.com
|
