Samuel Oliver was a man who thought he could fly.
Inspired by crude sketches found in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, Samuel had engineered his own flying machine, sans modern technology. He'd called his prototype BXJPLMN, which was an acronym he thought up before he knew what the following words would stand for. The device’s unabberviated name became Ballistic X-perimental Jumping Propellant Leveraging Men and Not-Men. BXJPLMN was a curtain rod equipped with gift wrap paper in the shape of wings.
Samuel stood at the edge of Makebabies Cliff, his eyes focused on the tiny baseball diamond at the very bottom. He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm himself. However, his hands trembled and involuntarily shook the contraption that he carried on his shoulders. From the depths of the valley he and his invention must have looked like a winged cross.
One inhalation did not placate his mind. Perhaps if he breathed deeper… Samuel gulped the most air he’d ever drawn in his life. Unfortunately, it was too much. He choked and sputtered for several minutes on what he’d ingested. His faced turned red, then blue, and then gray. He slid down from the ledge and his corpse soared across the sky.
A child who was playing in the baseball field stopped at this sight. He saw a black dot gliding past the sun, slowly sinking deeper towards the ground. The child thought he had seen an angel. This child then felt horror encroach as he noticed a lifeless body clinging to some haphazard assemblage, plummeting to Earth. He watched Samuel zigzag across the air and fall to the ground thousands of feet away soundlessly.
And the field was silent, mourning the fruition of a dream postmortem.
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