great ball of fire (part 1)

The idea came to him as he clutched his throbbing knee. His knee throbbed courtesy of a beverage cart being pushed down the aisle of his flight by an attendant who wasn’t paying any attention. Certainly not a unique occurrence. Even as your eyes travel across the page somewhere there is a flight attendant not paying attention. Getting a drink wrong. Giving a pillow to the wrong passenger. Saying “Have a nice day” to the herd of people existing the plane without bothering to look up from her task of looking busy. What makes this incident worthy of being on a page is not only the owner of said throbbing knee but what he was doing on the plane in the first place.

Nap Lapkin.

Super spy.

And he was flying to Washington D.C. to once again save the planet from certain destruction.

That got you. I bet you’re thinking to yourself that this is the quickest you’ve even been sucked helplessly into a story, unable to resist reading on.

And his throbbing knee got him to thinking. Thinking was the only way to avoid standing up and breaking the neck of the clumsy stewardess. It occurred to him that the pain he was feeling would have been very different if that beverage cart had been traveling ten thousand miles an hour. Hurtling down the aisle like a metal comet. His knee would have simply been sheared off.

He sank back into his first-class seat and briefly imaging his leg flying off to land wetly somewhere in the back of the plane.

And that’s when he realized that what made his leg hurt was the fact he was a conscious being. The various chemicals that made up his body were aware. Things collided in the universe all the time but rarely did they hurt because the objects weren’t aware. For a brief moment he appreciated the throb in his knee.

Then he remembered why he was flying to Washington D.C..

Damn it! Less than a dozen paragraphs in and I already don’t know if you put a period at the end of a sentence ending in D.C..

Damn it to hell, there it is again.

I would email my editor but I’m in the grips of inspiration and don’t want to lose track of where I was going with this.

Now where the heck was I going with this?

Oh yes, Nap suddenly had a thought. Rookies might call it a hunch but Nap knew that his intuition was never wrong. Where other people might have an educated guess, Nap leapt immediately into unshakable certainty. It was one of the many gifts that made him such an asset to his government. He could make a connection that seemed at the time absurd but in the end it was always proved correct.

However crazy it might appear at the time.

And this thought was crazy.

You see, Nap was flying to Washington D.C. to (thank goodness there were words after D.C. this time) to sit down and brainstorm with top officials about possible ways to stop the comet headed right for Earth from ending all life as we know it.

Even Washington D.C.. (now I’m just doing it to myself).

He rubbed his sore knee and realized that this comet might actually be aware. He marveled at his own intuitiveness for a few minutes then pushed his seat back and went to sleep. He still had a few hours in the air.