Eshtine

armada

"It's an airplane," Mom says.
"No." The rumble had gone on too long. It was below my conscious attention for the amount of time it usually takes for a plane to pass overhead; I only really hear it when it keeps on after that. It is a dull, characterless roar, remarkable not for its volume or pitch but its duration and the feeling it gives of being everywhere at once. I begin to think of earthquakes, the low grumblings you hear from no discernible direction that signal shifts, grindings of rock, and the toppling of everything you know.
"Then it's a helicopter circling," Mom says. "I wonder what it's looking for?"
Listening harder, I think, yes, that sound could be from rotary blades. We'd grown used to the police helicopters droning over us some nights, though hearing them and seeing them always made a part of me remember Belfast in the movie "The Boxer." They make me think I am in a besieged city, and yes I know the police are there so the criminals can't hold us captive, but under the thrum of those giant black metal insects, it no longer matters whether the good guys or the bad are the ones laying seige.
I look out the window. It is just after six, we had settled in to a bland dinner when this noise had interrupted us. Dinner had been purposefully bland--pasta shells in mushroom soup--a concession to recent craziness in my digestive system. Bland, at the moment, is all I can take. But here is strange thunder. When I get to the window and look out at night, what I see seems as crazy as my insides have become.
"It's an airplane," Mom had said. There's an opera based on the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood, a very modern and odd opera made up of quotes from the book ringing changes against musical patterns. "It's a nosebleed" is one line whispered in the libretto. "She gets them all the time. Terrible nosebleeds." In context it is clear a murder has just been discovered but is being explained away. The red drips are just a part of the everyday world.
"It's an airplane."
The next line in the opera is "There's too much blood."
There are too many airplanes.
I gawk at the window, making unhelpful sounds that relay no information to Mom. So she gets up and I throw open the back door so we both can see. The roar is much louder now.
We are watching an ugly parody of Santa's reindeer. Cold white and blinking red lights cross the sky. There is one light in the lead and eight following in two neatly spaced columns of four.
They move so slowly. These are F-15 fighters, but other than that I know nothing about them. How high do they fly? They seem like they are either scraping space (so their slowness is only an illusion of distance) or that they are low and lumbering, like aerial tanks, like a slow but resolute armada. They have no need to hurry. They will get to where they need to go.
"They look like geese," I tell Mom as their red lights flash across the column in answering patterns. They look more like the ghost dogs of Herne the Hunter from Celtic legend, spirits torn from mercy baying for blood in the night sky.
They fall out of sight below the western horizon. Mom sighs. "As if we didn't have enough to worry about."