What this guy sees is smoke and he hears noise like screaming. He’s on the ground, he’s at an airport, and what the fuck why the fuck is he seeing smoke?
And using my phone now, texting Michelle. Shit, oh shit, is this only a matter of time? Before I get explodified? And what of the people around me? What about when I’m on the train? If I get blown UP yeah yup, gonna be here. God damn train doors will blow out and there I’ll go too.
This guy sees smoke. Someone just blew up a vest they were wearing. A vest or a belt. I don’t know yet, and it probably doesn’t matter because BOOM! he blew himself up.
This guy filming with his smartphone, he listens to a woman screaming nearby, she screams in English, even though this guy and this airport are in Brussels. The smoke is gray and white and thick and people are dead, a lot of people, this is like Beirut, like Paris, like Baghdad, like surely the future, and the future’s future.
Does this happen on Abaddon? At night, not every night, but most nights, when I’m outside, and assuming it isn’t cloudy, I find myself looking up. The stars, the stars, the stars, blue-silver-white and red-yellow-red-orange-white, and some are stars, not every single one is a star, because Abaddon is a planet. I’m from Abaddon. Not anymore, but I was. Now I orbit the Sun, but on Abaddon we orbit Aldebaran. The day is red, a little blue – like here on Earth, and in Brussels, but it looks overcast in Brussels today, from what I’ve seen – on Abaddon, when I was there, at least, we stopped killing each other. Well, not me. I’ve never killed. I wasn’t crazy, and I am still not crazy. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But, it’s been so long, maybe shit’s gone bad, and maybe now on Abaddon people wear vests of explosives and blow themselves up in craftports and hyperstations. It’s been so long. Millions of years, people change, people die, people blow themselves up to blow other people up.
This guy should just get up and run, but he wants to document what’s happening. I don’t think I would, I’d be running, I think, I think I’d feel safer outside, I’d be thinking of Michelle. This guy is filming, though, which I suppose we need those who stay and film and document, we need to know what has happened from the inside.
This is something that is going to keep happening, and it’s not like that’s saying anything new, but fuck I don’t want to die on a train. This is me thinking about me, but I am thinking about other people because on Abaddon we’re raised to worry about other people more than ourselves, but come on, I’m worried about me. In terms of life, I’m more concerned about Michelle, but she’s never on a train or heading into Boston, so she should be okay from bombs.
Because I’m like a lot of people on the morning commute into the city, I think about my body being ripped apart in fire and shrapnel. Blasted away from my skin and my muscles and my bones becoming dust and blowing down the tracks and into living lungs. Do a lot of people think about that? They must. I’ll ask the fellows at work around the water cooler. They’re always at the water cooler. They’re water cooler maintenance workers. The water cooler breaks down a lot. Then there isn’t any water at work and it’s famine conditions.
I don’t cry for Brussels, not yet, maybe for a moment if I keep seeing these pictures, if the news shows us bodies, I’m a fairly emotional being from a small planet circling a grand red star, I cry at movies and not the ones you might think, mostly animated movies, and when thinking about tiny animals talking in sad voices. I can cry easily. I’m from Abaddon, we’re emotional people. Or we were, because like I’ve said, I’ve been gone for millennia, and maybe all the rest are dead or worse: they’ve become killers over politics and gods and land.
People are dead today, and they’ll be dead tomorrow, and they died yesterday, but there is something about bombs, how quickly they tear you apart, the noise, that fucking explosion! BOOM! YOU’RE DEAD, FALL TO THE GROUND! DID YOU NOT HEAR THAT SOUND, THAT WAVE OF – BOOM!
It crashed like a tidal wave, and then there would be silence, but the alarms are sounding, and a woman is screaming for help in English, but she’s at an airport in Belgium. And the guy is filming, and he films smoke and two people are dead near him and their luggage is all torn up and fucked up, but the dead bodies near him look relatively unharmed, but I can’t see the fronts of their bodies, so maybe they look bad and I can’t see it from the footage.
This guy sees smoke, and slowly it leaves, and he can see more and more, and maybe he can hear more, but maybe his hearing is shot because the explosion was so loud it was deafening.
Maybe he’s from Abaddon. I have no way of knowing. He could be, though. However unlikely that may be. What if he misses that great blood star?
Granting there will not be so many clouds tonight, I will look to Aldebaran, I won’t see Abaddon, it’s too miniscule, obviously, but I was there once and never again. I am here, now, and I will live to see more explosions and more monsters and more men filming and Michelle will be okay if I get my wish and she won’t get hurt, and other people will get hurt and that is not what I want, it is a horror story, but it is how it is here.
I long for Abaddon, but I need this world.
seanpatrickwhiteley 