Blog Love Omega Glee: I Like To Fly My Airplane Around Town (3 April 2012)

Hot days in April used to be rare. Now they occur with more frequency. Spring seems to jump so far from winter that it seems to have sprung over itself into summer. Sweating, Jake's dad opens up one of the windows in the living room. He feels a cool breeze and plops back in his chair to read the newspaper. Birds chirp, and he rustles the newspaper turning pages, but otherwise the late afternoon, usually noisy, wiles away serenely.

Then a loud drone fills the air. ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH! Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther, but always ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH!ing.

Dad puts down the newspaper. One of the cats--Monique or is it Rudy? He can never get the names right-- meows and jumps in the open window to see what the noise is. Dad gets up and looks out the window. He pets the cat, who seems entranced with watching some distant object, her back end twitching and tail waving wildly. A red thing flies by the window. The cat clicks with a clatter as the thing goes by, getting more excited.

"What the hell was that?" Dad thinks.

He goes outside. The buzz is louder out there. ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH! His neighbor, a white man in his thirties wearing a Cleveland Caucasians ("CC") baseball cap, is on his upstairs porch holding a set of controls with a pair of joysticks. A model red airplane flies around the front yard, divebombing passerbys. Dogs shake their owners' leashes and leap with mouths chomping at the fast red airplane as it flies by. People stop and watch. One of them calls to the neighbor, "Hey Jerome! Is that one of them drone planes the Pentagon uses to spy on the terrorists? Are you spying on us? Haw haw!" Jerome laughs and keeps flying his plane.

Eventually the passerbys get bored and pass on by. Even the dogs get more interested in a tree or piece of litter than the red plane. The neighbors go home, back to their houses, including Dad. But Jerome does not. He keeps flying the plane.

For hours.

ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH!

Aside from the occasional crash and tangle with a tree limb during which time the drone ceases as Jerome comes downstairs and gets the plane out of the tree, he keeps flying the plane through twilight and into darkness.

ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH!

Jake's dad cranks up the volume of the television that night, but in the momentary silences between programs and commercials, and during the quiet parts of the show, ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH! can be heard from outside.

"Doesn't he ever get bored with flying that thing?" Jake's mom says, looking outside hours later.

ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH!

Finally the temperature drops enough that Jake's dad closes the window, and the sound disappears. But when they shut the television off for the night, they can hear ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH! coming from outside.

That night, Dad hears ZZSSZZZCCCHHHHHHH! in his dreams, and dreams of moving.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.