Timothy C. Goodwin

They fired up the laser

but they couldn’t turn it off because of all the New Science that made it work so they knee-jerked a solution which was to just point it up into the sky and after a scrambled media frenzy about whether or not the International Space Station would maneuver around it in time (It did, the media frowned) and a really thin scratch across the moon things settled down and everyone rerouted all the planes and put up speakers playing predatory sounds to warn the birds and there was this sense of Okay: The Great List Of Things To Avoid, Updated but pretty soon they had to build a wall around it because people kept trying to get to the laser, to touch it I guess and the wall got higher and higher as more and more people kept trying to get to it and of course it was easy to shrug them off like one does with those people that leap into the polar bear enclosure or just reach out to pet a moose in the woods but the more time goes by I think some people just don’t understand how bad a thing can be, like sometimes it must be nice to still believe there’s a cartoon center to everything, that couldn’t possibly hurt.