Post-Funeral Mission to Mars
As the airplane enters the towering clouds, Billy spies wispy ghosts and shifting white valleys. What is turbulence to everyone else, to Billy is an angry fog monster. An old woman snores beside him. Others resign to airport novels, electronics, and the anticipation of the cart. Humming engines and whooshing air vents backdrop the cries of a baby, of two teenage girls absorbed in gossip. Billy peers out the cold, turbid window and sees Harryhausen beasts run amok in the cloudscape: dinosaurs gnawing on cars and bridges, a distant Cyclops ripping a train off its tracks. A break in the clouds reveals a stretch of suburbia, of baseball fields where an interest in sports fell short of home plate. All around, long thin roads blink with ant-cars: “Ants can lift fifty times their own weight, you know,” his mother once said, not long before getting sick. The edge of an upcoming cirrus cloud swirls over the wings: Here comes Conan through the smoke of battle, sword dripping with ruddy s