3AM Exercise 1: The Reluctant I

Write a first person narrative using the first person pronoun (I, me, my) only twice. (600 words)

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I wait till the air is cool and thin before cutting his throat.

Thompson staggers forward and whirls around like a puppet. His hands tangle themselves in the balloon’s ropes, the crosspiece holding the burner looks like the hand of a puppeteer. He hangs there for a moment as the blood pumps out of his body, dripping into the basket, through the basket. There will be a rain of tiny red droplets falling in the valley below, speckling the corn, the beans, the square green of the poplar farm. A farmer might feel the wet and wipe it away like a stray raindrop, only to find a crimson smear on his hand. It will confuse him, worry him some, “give him pause” as Thompson would say. Would have said. His voice box doesn’t work anymore. The sound coming from his throat is the creak of a door that needs oil.

Thompson keeps reaching up to try to turn the burner down, to bring the balloon back to ground, but each time he does it, the distance his hand travels is shorter and shorter, tiny circular motions, like trying to catch a moth around a camping lantern. There is blood everywhere. Soaked into his clothes, on the picnic basket, the fuel tank, the ballast, the bottle of Veuve Clicquot, the orange label now stained the color of a desert sunset.

“Kkkkkklllllldkkkkk,” he says and curls up like a baby. After a long while, his breath no longer shows in the air.

The balloon floats south, following the contour of the valley.

A crow, all slick black and sharp as Thompson’s knife, lands on the edge of the basket. It is not a little Elvis, like Perillo would say. It’s more a James Dean. “You’re going to the electric chair,” it says. “Lethal injection. Firing squad. Hanging.” And it looks down at the landscape, then up at the ropes and ties connected to the balloon. Its eyes are drops of ink, shiny and wet, waiting to drip from its head.

“They call us a murder,” says the Crow. Its brothers circle the balloon, shadows flowing across the bright blue, and yellow, and red. “If you were a crow, you’d fly away. If you were a stone, you’d fall.”

He ruffles his wings, tiny black feathers fall into the basket like black snow. One catches on Thompson’s lips and flutters, as if his soul is caught in his mouth and trying to use the feather to take wing. The Crow departs, leaving black claw marks where he stood on the basket’s rim. His brothers follow.

Hours pass. The balloon floats west, into the setting sun, toward the Olympics, the snow pack barely visible in the half-light. The burner is a blowtorch, shooting hot air like a drug through a needle. Thompson’s blood sings as the stars come out and the wind picks up, whistling through the ropes, rasping against the silk.

Thompson stirs. First his arms twitch and claw at the basket floor, and then he bolts upright, his sightless eyes staring into the distance. His words are cold as marble.

“Why didn’t you toss the body? The balloon would have gained more altitude.” He coughs, thickened blood coming from his mouth and the opening in his throat. His voice does not come from his lips. “The moon is brighter in death.” He points up – past the hot air and silk skin, past the thinning air, past the trail of cirrus clouds, past the pinpricks of stars in the growing darkness. He opens the Veuve Clicquot and offers the bottle.

I grow wings and fly.