Adventures in Short Fiction #02: Kind of a Reach

"What does it look like?" Simon barked, standing over a giant red barrel, sweating, wrench in hand. "I'm transcending, goddammit!"

The red barrel had been sculpted to look aerodynamic. It had fins, vents and a papier-mache nose cone which wasn't quite the same shade of red as everything else. The back end had a fuse sticking out of it. "Right now?" I asked. "This second?"

"Soon enough," Simon said, beckoning me over. I noticed the barrel was sitting on a thin wooden track which led down the hill and up to a lip at the edge of a small cliff, a natural ramp if ever there was one. I was beginning to piece together Simon's machinations.

I admired the barrel's paint job, looked over blueprints hastily drawn in the dirt. "You're not really going to--"

"Yes! I am, of course I am," Simon said, approaching me. "How else am I going to activate my crown chakra in this bloody countryside? I'd like to see you escape Kamadhatu without a propulsion unit."

"I don't... what?"

Simon strapped on goggles and a large, pointy backpack. "You could see all of this if you used your third eye." He stepped into his barrel, lit the fuse on the back. "Don't blame me if you find yourself stuck in samsara for all eternity."

Something exploded on the back of the barrel, sending it ricketing down the track. It careened up and over the edge of the cliff, the jigsaw craft actually achieving some bastardized form of temporary flight. At the height of its arc, Simon flung himself from the cockpit, hollering like a drunken Briton playing at cowboys. His backpack exploded into two vinyl archangel wings, which carried him up and away from the plummeting barrel, and for the briefest moment he actually hung in the air, weightless, the afternoon sun casting his titanic shadow all the way back to the hill. Then his left wing snapped off, and he tumbled into the woods below.

Searching the underbrush for the crash site, I came upon the barrel, hopelessly shattered beyond repair. Bushes rustled behind me; Simon appeared on the scene, muddied, bloody and grinning, the sparkle in his eyes almost as evident as his newfound limp. I offered my shoulder, but Simon wouldn't take it, couldn't stop smiling.

I was a little surprised to find he hadn't become jelly on a rock somewhere. "Holy hell. You alright, Simon?"

"Better than alright. The things I saw, you couldn't imagine."

"Well then you'd better tell me, I guess."

Simon stopped, grabbed my shoulder, gazed intently into my eyes. "A catapult. It's going to be the biggest you've ever seen, a great elevator of taught rope and steel to the heavens. I start work on it tomorrow."

I walked Simon home as he spoke to himself in complex equations and theological riddles, arguing with and then apologizing to himself. I left him there on his front lawn, drawing diagrams and formulae in the dirt, scratching away at answers either buried in the ground or lost in the sky.