flying till death

flash fiction

flying till death

I catch the glow of a distant ad blimp in her lost gaze—neon blues and greens—and track her mesmerization to the floating thing sparkling against the backdrop of a dull, polluted sky. A new drug, Ambrosia, is being advertised. The pill is pink as a Barbie doll, and suddenly her eyes gleam again like a little girl. Feels like flying and a little something like dying. It flickers, blinks back at her stunned expression across the night as if saying, ‘hurry up and try me’.

“God, that stuff can’t be good,” I tell her. “I mean ‘dying’? Really?” Embers fall from the butt of my cigarette like dying fireflies. “What a way with words.”

“You say that with tarred lungs of your own.” Her gaze remains fixed on the ad blimp until it’s no longer visible, never managing to trail back to mine. “Some of us like to accept our fate before meeting it. A fate we’ve crafted for ourselves as a way of reclaiming control over our lives, you know? ”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” A cough of smoke. “Reclaim control over a short-lived life?” Dying at her own hands as a way of scrambling for a seemingly lost autonomy seemed extreme.

Her own thoughts had become a cocktail of government propaganda; perhaps the only thing left to control was her ultimate death.