Fireworks in her eyes a micro story
He saw fireworks in her eyes.
At least, that’s what he thought he remembered anyway. It was the only explanation or description he could come up with now that he had decompressed and unjacked. Their faces had been pressed together, the pressure intense. Eyeball to eyeball.
A penumbra of flame. Like frozen ejaculate from a metalsmith’s anvil. Or maybe the last throes of a dying star.
At first he thought it was a glitch in the game… because, you know, technology is advanced these days but not that advanced to survive with your face pressed up against another player’s face. Just doesn’t happen. His next thought was that he’d fallen asleep in the suit, and he was dreaming. It had happened before. During another caffeine jacked, adrenaline fueled, monster marathon session.
But she had spoken. And told him his future. The voice came from deep inside his brain somewhere. Like she had coopted his internal audio surround and overwhelmed it for her utilization only.
It hadn’t made sense at the time. Almost tarot in its obliqueness. Yet looking back on it later. She was four for four. She was perfect in her accuracy. And now she would be coming for him. Because she said she would… and she was perfect so far. She was perfect so far.
The long and short of it was, he had 36 hours to live. It would be painful. And then it’d be done. It was her fifth read of the chicken bones, her final line of the palm read. Whether it was game or not was immaterial now. Because he had seen interstellar beauty, “there were fireworks in her eyes”, and he didn’t know how to un-see it.
Consecrated. That moment.
He’d attempted to catch the words of it in ember. But it was like catching stardust in the moonlight. The epitome of etherial and ultimately elusive. He wasn’t much of an artist, but he scribbled the patterns of their fire without even noticing the nervous tick of his muscle memory playing across the page. There was one scribble that caught the essence of it across the cover of his grandmother’s old Beatles LP. Eleanor Rigby?
The sand was slipping faster through the hour glass’ ampoule now. The dying of the light.
He considered protecting himself from the pain. Selfish he thought. And without giving it much thought he stepped out onto his porch where he was t-boned by a semi that had had its breaks go out 2 miles up the interstate. The oil tanker truck had had so much momentum that it hadn’t actually exploded until after it had gone completely through his house.
And the explosion resembled millions of evanescent fireflies released from thousands of canning jars all at once. Deep inside the wreckage of his home his pain was eternal. But a smile lit across his mind as he watched the fireworks light across the sky. And when the fire had finally carried him away, he met one particularly intrigued young woman and told her the fortune that so clearly was written across her irises in explosions of fireworks and light…