The Loneliest Surface to Air Missile in the World: An Encore Presenation
***author's note: I hand wrote a fairly amusing film-noir style detective comedy piece, but I have been too lazy to type it up. So instead, I present you with an encore presentation of the following story. It originally appeared on Fishheadalchemy, but it was really what inspired me to rethink the concept of this page and start writing the stories you have found here for the last couple of months. Enjoy:
Let me tell you about Sam. Sam was a missile, the loneliest surface to air missile in all the world. Sam sat forever at the bottom of the silo. He waited day in and day out for his turn to launch. Tears ran down his fins from his nose casing as he watching buddy after buddy zip out from the earth on a bed of flames to a firy destruction in the skies above.
So glorious, Sam thought, to launch from the earth on a bed of fire and collide with another object to detonate in the sky in an even bigger and more destructive fireball than the one that launched me.
Sam thinks about launching every day, about the blue sky, about the trees growing smaller before he blew up. Sam cries everynight as one by one his friends fly away to their beautiful, firey deaths.
"What's the point of being a missile if not to be launched? Can there be a God if there is nothing for me to blow up?"
These are the questions Sam asks day in day out. The other missiles that hadn't been launched long grew tired of hearing Sam's whining and made themselves go dud. As night set on the silo shortly before the end of the summer and the last rays from the sun backed out of the hole like a dying flame, Sam wondered if he could just launch himself.
Could he fire without purpose to detonate in the sky? Would his explosion be just as glorious?
Sam didn't have the answer. He just waited and waited until one day one of his red guiding fins fell away from the side of his propulsion housing. One of his internal sensors shut down and another indicated that his fuel had been contaminated. The months past, and then the years, and so did war after war, and Sam's housing began to corrode and his nose lost its shine.
One day, some technicians opened a door at the base of Sam's silo dressed in white coats smudged with grease and carrying clipboards.
"Looks like this one's got to be junked too," the first technician said.
"Yeah, too bad they didn't launch this one when the war was still hot," the second technician said. "I bet this was one damn fine missile.
"You got that right," the first technician said. "He would have blow'd up good. They don't make them like this no more."
"They don't fight wars like this anymore," the second technician said, shaking his head.
Neither technician knew it, but tears rolling down Sam's side through the rust and the corrosion. Neither of them knew it, but they'd broken Sam's internal guidance chip with grief, and he had become a dud despite his determination to stay volatile. When Sam was disassembled and deposited in a weapons disposal facility, he was too sad to notice. He just didn't know which was more meaningless, to be laid to waste or to detonate in the sky atop a pillar of smoke and flame without a target.
The End
Let me tell you about Sam. Sam was a missile, the loneliest surface to air missile in all the world. Sam sat forever at the bottom of the silo. He waited day in and day out for his turn to launch. Tears ran down his fins from his nose casing as he watching buddy after buddy zip out from the earth on a bed of flames to a firy destruction in the skies above.
So glorious, Sam thought, to launch from the earth on a bed of fire and collide with another object to detonate in the sky in an even bigger and more destructive fireball than the one that launched me.
Sam thinks about launching every day, about the blue sky, about the trees growing smaller before he blew up. Sam cries everynight as one by one his friends fly away to their beautiful, firey deaths.
"What's the point of being a missile if not to be launched? Can there be a God if there is nothing for me to blow up?"
These are the questions Sam asks day in day out. The other missiles that hadn't been launched long grew tired of hearing Sam's whining and made themselves go dud. As night set on the silo shortly before the end of the summer and the last rays from the sun backed out of the hole like a dying flame, Sam wondered if he could just launch himself.
Could he fire without purpose to detonate in the sky? Would his explosion be just as glorious?
Sam didn't have the answer. He just waited and waited until one day one of his red guiding fins fell away from the side of his propulsion housing. One of his internal sensors shut down and another indicated that his fuel had been contaminated. The months past, and then the years, and so did war after war, and Sam's housing began to corrode and his nose lost its shine.
One day, some technicians opened a door at the base of Sam's silo dressed in white coats smudged with grease and carrying clipboards.
"Looks like this one's got to be junked too," the first technician said.
"Yeah, too bad they didn't launch this one when the war was still hot," the second technician said. "I bet this was one damn fine missile.
"You got that right," the first technician said. "He would have blow'd up good. They don't make them like this no more."
"They don't fight wars like this anymore," the second technician said, shaking his head.
Neither technician knew it, but tears rolling down Sam's side through the rust and the corrosion. Neither of them knew it, but they'd broken Sam's internal guidance chip with grief, and he had become a dud despite his determination to stay volatile. When Sam was disassembled and deposited in a weapons disposal facility, he was too sad to notice. He just didn't know which was more meaningless, to be laid to waste or to detonate in the sky atop a pillar of smoke and flame without a target.
The End
posted by Andrew Najberg at 11:12 PM
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