Scale Model of a World War II Airplane
Michael Derrick Hudson
When you’re thirteen, an old man’s face has a Wild West look,
the site of unimaginable extinctions and ancient
trackless massacres, dried-out arroyos and gulches carved
into the moon-white silica. You grow accustomed, however,
to the pity and the waste of it, to the fact this
catastrophe is so obviously not me. So before it was too late,
one Sunday I helped him put together a Nazi
Stuka dive bomber, just like one he said he saw flying futile
late-war missions over Luxembourg or Belgium
or somewhere else. Not a good plane, he told me, we swatted
‘em like flies. The news that he was dying had finally come
to bore me a little, in that heartless, guilty way
of the well-meaning young. So that’s what I did in order to be
a good boy: an old man’s afternoon dutifully
obliterated. We made a mess, what with my impatience
and his Parkinson’s, splayed-out landing gear and a gummed-
over canopy. The tiny pilot and his pitiless machine-gunner
we managed to blob for eternity into the cockpit
while I affixed the decals: tiny black crosses for the wings and
wadded-up snarls of tiny, meaningless swastikas for the rudder.
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the site of unimaginable extinctions and ancient
trackless massacres, dried-out arroyos and gulches carved
into the moon-white silica. You grow accustomed, however,
to the pity and the waste of it, to the fact this
catastrophe is so obviously not me. So before it was too late,
one Sunday I helped him put together a Nazi
Stuka dive bomber, just like one he said he saw flying futile
late-war missions over Luxembourg or Belgium
or somewhere else. Not a good plane, he told me, we swatted
‘em like flies. The news that he was dying had finally come
to bore me a little, in that heartless, guilty way
of the well-meaning young. So that’s what I did in order to be
a good boy: an old man’s afternoon dutifully
obliterated. We made a mess, what with my impatience
and his Parkinson’s, splayed-out landing gear and a gummed-
over canopy. The tiny pilot and his pitiless machine-gunner
we managed to blob for eternity into the cockpit
while I affixed the decals: tiny black crosses for the wings and
wadded-up snarls of tiny, meaningless swastikas for the rudder.