The Ides of July – Part 1

My grandmother is in hospice with literal hours until she passes.  My mother has one foot in the grave, and won’t outlive her for more than a few months.

I’m not in a good place, this would not make for good reading.  Or pleasant reading.  Or healthy reading.

So, story time.

The Ides of July – Part 1

I sat down, dazed.  My ears were ringing, my hands shaking so hard I didn’t know if they would ever stop.  I hadn’t expected that one, not at all.  I lifted my hand up, feeling my forehead to see if I had any new scars-to-be.  I could barely feel anything, and I wasn’t sure if it was the hand damaged or the forehead.  For the life of me, I couldn’t find my eyebrows.

My name is Erica Grant, and as my dad likes to say, I was born to blow stuff up.  I exploded out of mom with little warning, my birth lasting eight minutes from water broken to me squealing for all I was worth.  Fourth of July was my favorite holiday.  While other toddlers and young children screamed in terror at all the noise and light, I screamed if I was removed from it.  My mother, throwing up her hands to the sanity of the thing, finally just left me outside in a tent with dad.

I sat there, binkey in one hand, rattle in the other, and stared up into the sky as firework after firework exploded.  We lived in the sticks, but it was a suburb of a real profitable section of Kansas City.  The fireworks went on forever.  The noise was outstandingly bad.  I soaked it all in, and the noise and lights settled deep within my bones.

It was the usual suspects from there.  M-80 in the school toilet?  Did that.  Improvised explosives made from disassembled fireworks?  Did that too.

What my parents had not expected from me, however, was the request for the chemistry set.  It had been me working my tail off, saving all my allowance for some new firework or another, that mom and dad practically fell over themselves to get me a more educational outlet than making things go ‘boom’.

Jokes on them.  That first chemistry set, and the science books my dad would stop everything to go get me, only taught me to make stuff that blew up better.  They had taken away my tinker toys and given me a real hammer to play with.

Predictably, I screwed up far too often.  Hence all the scars.  My dad said I looked like I had picked a fight with an ornery stretch of barbed wire.  I told him his face looked like a baboon mask.  We stuck our tongues out at each other.  Usual dad stuff.  Mom… well, she just cleaned up the mess and paid for more tutors so I wouldn’t burn the house down or kill myself.  Or both, I guess.

I was pretty good at chemistry.  Pretty good at all things science, really.  English and History were right out, but when it came down to tracking the figures and balancing the chemicals, I was in my element.  It turns out, being good at science meant a lot more than making new and improved fireworks.

Humanity had run out of rocket fuel.  It had been subtle, sneaking up on us while we were fixing global warming and trying to bury all those killed by the intense but thankfully short lived World War 3.  It hadn’t lasted more than week, but almost two billion people had died, and we had lost all of the west coast, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and a huge chuck of China in the process.

After that, the UN ratified the Nuclear Arms Pact, and all the nuclear weapons on the planet had been rounded up with ruthless, military efficiency.  We had flown the all out of atmosphere, to get them out of play as fast as possible.  Humanity had a taste of nuclear holocaust, and the price was too high for even the most dedicated maniacs.  There would be no repeats this time.

All those launches, all that running about, all the cities to decontaminate, and soil to protect, and the scientific community had too much on it’s plate to remember that rocket fuel was a limited quantity.  All of humanity was finally united in purpose, and we couldn’t get those wretched devices off planet fast enough.

It turned out to be too fast, as good as our intentions were.  So, humanity had been left without a choice.  Earth was the only home we would ever have now.  So we turned inward, and for fifteen years as I grew from that small child sleeping under the burst of fireworks into the young woman I am now, protecting what we had was our guiding principle.

Which meant that once I showed an aptitude for the ins and outs of blasting things apart, my life’s course had been determined for me.  I had to go through the motions, but all of my tutors knew that my talent had but one destination.

SA.

Boomfully,
Justin