FL0003
"SKY’s THE LIMIT"
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DATELINE: THE MOON-DRENCHED BEACH, AGAIN
(4:03 AM, year unknown)
Fellow passengers, it’s another beautiful day in the Limoverse. Where the surf meets the horizon, four headlamps fade into view. They scan the sand in the dark, crawling ever so slowly toward us.
They’re technicians of some kind. As the figures draw nearer we catch glimpses of a few reflective letters on the backs of their jackets: DSFL. They have instruments—are those Geiger counters?—and their heavy bags carve trails behind them.
We can’t make out their faces but we glance down into the reflection of the tidepools to check that our own are in order: it’s been a while since we’ve met other people. That’s when we notice that the water seems upset. Tremors at first, then hairline cracks begin to race across the ground beneath us. The sand unseals. Thousands of bottles buried beneath the sea, caked in muck, unloose themselves and fly like iron filings towards the magnet of the moon. The technicians raise their instruments and measure.
Our unaided eyes strain to follow the flight skyward. At the moment the bottles vanish into the light there’s a crack so loud—of thunder? of glass?—we can’t even hear it. The sound whites out the sky. Paper, paper as far as the eye can see, scraps and sheets and notes and more, rains down all around us.
We grab whatever we can. A photo, still wet, taken from a highway long ago: two frozen plumes rising from the twin stacks of a power plant, suspended in fork formation, icy gray, against a sky so pale and cold that even vapor struggles to move against it.
Feels familiar. Save that for later! No time! We grab another from midair: a worn sheet of paper, covered in creases—an old fortune teller. Lifting a corner we find a recipe for
And on the flip side, some lucky numbers and a message that blinks from red to blue:
Don’t bother naming the waves
Just hold the sky in place
The heartbeat lives in the tides
And love comes in on a sunbeam