Oh, Mary, Mary—she has a lamb-copter.
Half fleece, half rotor, a chimera sewn by insomnia, not engineering.
No chrome utopia: it looks like a plush toy abandoned in a gutter, rain-bloated and buzzing.
Think less Studio Ghibli, more the doodle of a god who hasn't slept since the flood.
The creature looms eight feet tall, porcelain-delicate yet monstrous—
as though Clifford the Big Red Dog squeezed himself into Grandma's china cabinet.
From its matted back juts a single rotor blade, a grotesque cowlick haloed by sores that blister and throb.
Stooped gnomes scurry round the wound, each one wearing your face at different ages—
seven, seventeen, seventy—weaving sigils, whispering threadbare prayers,
determined to mend what should never breathe.
Mary doesn't ask.
Her hand in yours feels like static electricity and childhood fever—
she springs skyward, and suddenly you're airborne,
seagulling across a vault of sugar chaos:
clouds glitter like cracked spun glass, blue-raspberry lightning vines whip the air,
a storm tasting of blood-orange Pop Rocks.
Bolts snap past, candy-coated doom.
Then—a Twizzler thick as a subway car bursts through the cumulonimbus,
tasting of red, screaming of Saturday morning cartoons,
spiraling into a tunnel of impossible geometry.
The lamb-copter bucks and pirouettes like Torrent from Elden Ring,
rotor cleaving both cloud and dream.
Every corkscrew feels like a spell flung at mundanity.
Yet even glamour rots: cream curdles at the horizon, mildew freckles reality's seams.
Beneath the sheen, everything festers.
Below, the gnomes stay vigilant—your seven-year-old self mixing potions from dish soap,
your seventeen-year-old self drawing protection runes in notebook margins,
your seventy-year-old self who hasn't happened yet, already exhausted.
Wands aloft, they trace filigrees of protection—tiny crusaders before an unseen siege.
Something is coming.
Something darker than any Voldemort, older than any story you've swallowed.
Its hunger nibbles at your shadow.
Mary's hand turns colder—no, hotter—no, it's becoming frequency itself.
Realization lands: you are incidental—no hero, no chosen one, only ballast in another's myth.
The thought tastes metallic, but as it settles, the lamb-copter glows.
A pallid shimmer hardens into aura—no longer a child's aberration,
but an artifact older than calendars, lion-turtle ancient, strolling through centuries like grass.
Without thinking, your hand rises—the gesture older than words, older than wanting—
and stone warriors crash from the stratosphere like broken constellation teeth,
locking into formation, vigilant for a threat that never steps forward,
only breathes in the margins, waiting for you to remember its name.
And you, dear hitchhiker, are so very tired—twenty-eight years awake,
drifting from narrative to narrative, never asked to stay,
always the guest at someone else's apocalypse.
Mary's voice curls warm against your ear: Close your eyes, soft passenger.
Her hand now feels like your mother's hand, your first lover's hand,
the hand of someone you haven't met yet but will miss forever.
You nestle into the lamb's wool—it smells of birthday cake and funeral flowers.
Gnome murmurs fade into the rotor's lullaby.
Whatever doom idles beyond the clouds can wait.
Sleep claims you, wrapped in fleece and accidental grace.
If the stone soldiers crumble, if the shield fractures, if darkness pours in—
Sleep.
It will not change.
But if you wake—if you wake—remember:
the oldest forces in the universe permitted your passage.
And for now, isn't that enough?
Below you, the gnomes have stopped their repairs.
They're watching something you cannot see.
They're smiling with all your faces at once—
every age you've been, every age you'll be,
delighted by a secret they'll never tell.
The lamb-copter purrs through dimensions,
carrying you home,
or away from home,
or to the place where those words mean the same thing.
Mary's hand dissolves into pure transmission.
You're holding nothing.
You've been holding nothing this entire time.
You're still flying.
