An End to Efficient Vehicles

By Matt Bell

In the sky, invisible microwaves crisscross like jet trails, undetectable to us but disorienting to migrating birds, rearranging the V’s of geese into characters from new, unknowable alphabets. I point and you follow my finger as we try together to read their messages. The V is an efficient vehicle, you say, its shape doubling the potential range of the geese.

I wonder if their new letters will be any better, or if all that will happen is that they will fall frightened from the sky, unable to tell their crashing families that they love them, the way I want to tell you and know I’ll never be able to again. Instead we will move cautiously around each other, interference rendering impossible our old structures even as we become unable or unwilling to find the new shapes that might save us. I scream something, words you might never hear or understand, and then I too am plummeting downward, racing you headfirst towards the bottom.

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