I love flash fiction. Here’s a dashed-off/not edited story for your Independence Day amusement.
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Bobby Weston was having a great month. His plans for the Fourth of July had been brewing, literally, for over a month and tonight was the night that he would dazzle the entire neighborhood with the largest fireworks display they’d ever seen.
Bobby wasn’t his real name. He’d named himself at age 7 when he read a book about Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry. His real name was Silas Weston. Named after his grandfather, he had never experienced strong feelings about the name one way or the other. Until he discovered Goddard. From that moment on, he insisted on being called Bobby.
Like many hero worshippers, Bobby not only read a lot on the topic, but he went the extra mile and studied chemistry. Rather a brilliant student, he’d obtained his doctorate in physics following an outstanding collegiate career as a chemistry major. Pursued by some of the greatest firms in industry, he opted to work for Morton Thiokol during their peak years producing booster engines for the Space Shuttle. Working on the chemistry end of things, he’d been spared the pain of involvement in the Challenger disaster, but something died inside of him right along with the astronauts.
The next twenty years were difficult for Bobby. Every day he’d get up and go to work, doing his best to improve the product. One hobby that many of the engineers shared was manufacturing small rockets in their spare time. The inventory at work was tightly controlled, but they knew where to get a supply of top quality ingredients that would duplicate the classified contents of the missile boosters they rolled out for the government.
When the last shuttle flew, Bobby’s job followed it out the door. Over fifty, no prospects in sight, and a pair of grandkids approaching college and hefty tuition bills in the offing, he took a job working at a liquor store in the city. He was an oenophile of some note, and found great satisfaction in guiding his customers in their purchases. Until January 9, 2014.
That afternoon three angry young men robbed the liquor store and beat him with a vodka bottle. Months of therapy and hospital time followed, and eventually Bobby learned to walk and feed himself again. His encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry and physics remained locked inside his head, and instead of recommending wines he began drinking them to ease the pain he experienced almost every waking minute.
Determined to find his way back to a normal life, Bobby had spent hours in his hospital bed designing the device he was rolling out of his workshop toward the park across the street. Crafted to exacting specifications, it was a six-foot long section of steel pipe, a full foot in diameter, and mounted on a modified rack that had once held a tire rack at the local service station.
The “thriller” was what Bobby called it in his head. Nobody else had seen the thing, and he’d had to use his circular saw to cut a notch in the overhead door when he was ready to roll it out. Good thing he was handy with tools or he’d catch it from his wife when she saw the damage.
The thriller was filled with a composite material that had taken him a full year to assemble and mix. Modified with a few special items for color generation and sparking effects, it was a variation on the mix they had put inside of the shuttle’s boosters for many years. Bobby’s outstanding skills had allowed him to craft a special top to the thriller that would direct the flame at unique angles and balance the device at the same time. Once it was welded into place, Bobby gently filled it from the other end and bolted the cover down on the bottom. Using the chain fall in his garage, he rotated the vented end up toward the sky, inserted the fusing mechanism, and set it in a cradle of roller bearings. Once ignited, it would sit on its throne and spin, throwing gouts of flame, sparks, and a few Roman candle type devices toward the night sky. With the amount of powdered aluminum he’d ground up and placed in the mix, it should flame for exactly 76 seconds. The ideal amount to celebrate 1776 and the birth of the nation.
In a perfect world that would have made for an amazing spectacle. Bobby, however, was a bit off from perfect. He still did the math and chemistry very well, but quality control and common sense had left with the first swing of the vodka bottle on the day of the robbery.
Rolling down the alley to the end of the block and across the street to the park would have been easiest, but he didn’t want the neighbors to see him until it was already too late to whine about it and stop his fun. Consequently he rolled out of the garage, around his patio, and up the sidewalk toward the front of his house. It was the cable television wiring that proved to be his undoing.
Having forgotten about the added height the rolling stand added to his device, Bobby was genuinely surprised when he came to a screeching halt just inches short of the back gate. The top of the device had caught the wire that allowed him to view sports at his leisure in five rooms of his house, and shifted the device off of its center of gravity. At over 1600 pounds, it was an unstoppable force when it passed 17 degrees and levered out of its holder.
Bobby watched in fascination as it landed with a loud clang on the patio, knocking over his grill and shattering the expensive stone he’d so carefully laid down for his wife. There was no electrical charge in the cable, so it hadn’t set off the igniters in the device. Breathing a sigh of relief, he tried to imagine how he’d get it back on the stand.
Fortunately for his back, this was not a problem he had for long, as a small ember from the grill floated down and landed in the welded vents he’d placed to direct the flame. Rocket fuel burns quickly, and the ember did its job as an ignition source. Before he could move an inch, the device lit up the back yard and blasted a hole in his hedges as it did a pretty fair imitation of a SCUD missile heading toward Riyadh during the first Gulf War.
Years later the neighbors who were gathered on their front porches would still talk about the rocket that appeared from nowhere and vaporized Trudy’s Prius. Because any item that weighs 1600 pounds, and is just below Mach 1, will leave a mark when it hits a small object like a Prius, the device detonated the car’s battery with its impact, and then caromed off toward the brand new community center under construction on the other end of the park.
It took only 2/3 of a second to cover the 100 yards distance, but the device finally found an object big enough to stop it. The crane on the far side of the building was already in place for Monday’s delivery of the air conditioning units for the roof. Weighing in at several dozen tons, it stopped the device after it had punched through the concrete block building, just as it reached supersonic speeds. Combining the boom of the sound barrier being broken, and the rocket fuel shattering and exploding when it hit the crane, seismographs at the University of Tulsa recorded the event as a minor earthquake.
In a miraculous turn of events, not one person was killed by the flying glass when every window for seven blocks blew out at the same instant. Two houses tilted off and away from the blast wave, but most were spared because of the berm surrounding the softball fields. It, mercifully, directed the blast wave upwards.
Bobby managed to put his pants out before he suffered any major burns. The trunk of the maple tree in his back yard was between him and the escaping gasses of the improvised ballistic missile, sparing his life. His relief was short-lived as the police, Homeland Security, and three fire brigades all arrived within minutes to discuss his hobby.
Given his injury in the robbery, he was spared a criminal trial on the condition that he pay the deductible on a new Prius for Trudy, tear down his workshop, and limit himself to sparklers in the future.
He gladly agreed. After all, who could possibly object to an improvised sparkler next year?
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