A World without Airships

The telephone call was a surprise. His father flat and lifeless, distant and scratchy with static.

“Your Mam’s dead son.”

“I’ll come home.”

Climbing the tower to the passenger deck, ticket in hand, Mark couldn’t shake a sense of the world cracking open, the future blown off course. Below him, Oxford was a miniature village, belfries at eye level, secret gargoyles secret no longer.

Above, the curved body of the airship creaked. As a child, he thought the great lozenge shape was a balloon itself. Laughing, his mother corrected him: ‘What you see is just the ribcage, inside, a bag of gas grows and shrinks like a giant lung’.

His mother loved airships. Boats of the air she called them.

The viewing deck was half empty, windy, a few businessmen talking at a table, an excited child leaning over the guardrail.

Looking down at the patchwork of fields, the huge props above like cartwheeling legs and arms, he knew that there were millions of worlds, all different.

In one, airships end in a tangle of mud, flames and wire. In another, his mother is still breathing.

Floating gently above the world, Mark cried for all things that will never be.