Thu, 19 May 2005

jerkury
Somehow my uncle got hold of hundreds of weather balloons, and spent weekends launching them in clusters from the farthest end of his farm, then racing back to the silo in his pickup, climbing to the top, and shooting down any he could get a bead on, culling the weak from the herd. He stuck elaborate letters inside small capsules where the weather-detecting circuitry was to go, but never expected a reply; after all, the majority of these letters ended up wrapped around dead trees out by the railroad tracks, and the rest were written in his crablike scrawl, barely ledgible to himself and his wife, much less any poor sap wondering what this big white thing was doing in the backyard. Sometimes, while drunk, he would tell me that one day he was going to fill the rest of the balloons with explosives and let them all fly, flocks of them dealing death all over eastern Iowa. I didn’t think much of this until I saw helicopter footage of the barn torn open and burning on the midday news.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #