A BALLOON IN JUNE
Once upon a day in June the world was wrapped in a big balloon and in July the heat began to fry this plastic sphere in the sky. By December there was nobody alive to remember if Earth ever existed although some insisted it did and others resisted this point of view.
There was no evidence something so immense could disappear in less than a year so those living on other planets all assumed that Earth was never here. How could this have been? There were no coffins to bury people in.
There was not a church or steeple or a prison packed with people, no Disney land or brand of beer or corner bars or Cuban cigars or signs that wars once were fought, not even a park or a parking lot.
There were no fossil remains or bits of brains or hearts or other body parts or donkey carts or rocket ships or planes to make long distance trips to foreign lands of which there were none, only an empty place in space going to waste. All evidence of Earth was erased by the burst of the balloon, the first in galactic history.
But there were a few scientists who believed that the people had been deceived and there truly was an earth that once was alive and thrived and was one day here in the empty atmosphere. And they advanced the possibility, no---the probability--- that the erosion and explosion of the planet Earth could happen once again.
That the sun, the moon and Mars and all the other stars, the satellites and days and nights and civil rights and blacks and whites and ice cream cones and chicken bones and pizza pies and ham on rye and big blue eyes and even girls and guys and nations we despise would realize that they were hastening their own demise and decided to compromise and there'd be peace at least between the West and East and the North and South would shut their mouth and go along and the whole wide world would sing a happy song and nothing else could go wrong.
But it could and did. One windy day every place in space, including the Milky Way and the Northern Lights and satellites and women wearing shorts and tights and even birds in flight and quite a lot of other stuff exploded in a giant puff and when all the rubble drifted away the remaining planets woke up each day knowing more blowing balloons were on the way.
There was no evidence something so immense could disappear in less than a year so those living on other planets all assumed that Earth was never here. How could this have been? There were no coffins to bury people in.
There was not a church or steeple or a prison packed with people, no Disney land or brand of beer or corner bars or Cuban cigars or signs that wars once were fought, not even a park or a parking lot.
There were no fossil remains or bits of brains or hearts or other body parts or donkey carts or rocket ships or planes to make long distance trips to foreign lands of which there were none, only an empty place in space going to waste. All evidence of Earth was erased by the burst of the balloon, the first in galactic history.
But there were a few scientists who believed that the people had been deceived and there truly was an earth that once was alive and thrived and was one day here in the empty atmosphere. And they advanced the possibility, no---the probability--- that the erosion and explosion of the planet Earth could happen once again.
That the sun, the moon and Mars and all the other stars, the satellites and days and nights and civil rights and blacks and whites and ice cream cones and chicken bones and pizza pies and ham on rye and big blue eyes and even girls and guys and nations we despise would realize that they were hastening their own demise and decided to compromise and there'd be peace at least between the West and East and the North and South would shut their mouth and go along and the whole wide world would sing a happy song and nothing else could go wrong.
But it could and did. One windy day every place in space, including the Milky Way and the Northern Lights and satellites and women wearing shorts and tights and even birds in flight and quite a lot of other stuff exploded in a giant puff and when all the rubble drifted away the remaining planets woke up each day knowing more blowing balloons were on the way.
posted by Ed Weiland at 11:09 AM
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