tincantheory

It wasn’t that I didn’t like paper airplanes–I loved them–it’s just that this particular one had been hovering beside me for the best of thirty minutes.

“Shoo,” I  said.

I tried to ignore it. There were some kids snickering somewhere, surely. Rich kids–this was premium stuff!–ready to pick on poor me. I was eventually annoyed enough to risk my dufus; I looked around and there was no one watching that I could see. There were no trees above and I even checked for a string, risking my dufus even more. The wind was light, but should have knocked it around and wasn’t weird enough to keep it up like that.

“Shoo!“

But three paper men with tethers around their waists climbed out of the plane’s center fold to hand me something. They looked terrified at the height of my shoulder, but smiled when they gave it to me: a blurred picture of a lurching Big Foot in the forest, their mouths turning like little Os drawn by kids bored in class–over and over and over and over.

And then they flew away.

I rubbed my eyes, tried to massage back into me the bearings I’d just had. No, I said. Then I looked down. A paper clip reflected the sun from the grass. I picked it up.

It wasn’t until I’d walked almost fifteen minutes that I’d found them wadded in the grass, greenstained. I checked their pulp. Erased. There were footprints leading out into the woods, a howling in the key of intense sorrow.

I had to tell the world.