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Riding the Drone


Contents:

The story

Connect with S.A. Barton


By S.A. Barton

Copyright 2014 S.A. Barton

Smashwords Edition



The Dream


This is where it begins.

Earth, water, and sky: the world opens, flowerlike, with me at its center, high in the blue. Arms spread, I soar far above the ground, weightless, without care. I have not always been without care, but as I fly I am free. Nothing weighs on me.

I was born in the city, hemmed in with concrete and boarded-up windows and the arguments that blew like cloudbursts out of open windows into the sticky-hot night. I grew up, joined the Air Force—nobody gets blown up in the Air Force, the legless Army vet who hangs out in the public library all day told me every time I went, with whiskey on his breath. I took a bus across the country, where the recruiter told me to go and when; the Air Force trained me, and then a roaring cargo jet carried me over the ocean. Inside the vibrating walls, a dozen of us sat, wearing heavy coats against the cold of altitude, and we could see our breath. There were no windows where we sat, but the pilots let each of us up front for a few minutes to see tiny gray dots of Navy ships carving tiny white wakes on the waves far below, before we headed over the land and descended to a dirt runway scraped into the earth by yellow bulldozers that still sat beside the flat place they had made.

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