• Home/Blog
  • Short Stories
    • Six Quarters
    • Footprints
    • Vial
    • 1=2
  • Poetry
    • Featured Poems
    • Chicago Poems
    • Chicago Portraits
    • Haikus
  • Essays
    • "Buy it. Or Don't. It's cool. Whatever."
    • Let's Send All the Billionaires to Space
    • Skeletonwitch vs. Barenaked Ladies (or On Music, Subjectivity, and Language)
    • The Olympic Spirit: Nationalism and Internationalism
  • Publications
  • Writing Services
  • Speaking
  • About
  • Home/Blog
  • Short Stories
    • Six Quarters
    • Footprints
    • Vial
    • 1=2
  • Poetry
    • Featured Poems
    • Chicago Poems
    • Chicago Portraits
    • Haikus
  • Essays
    • "Buy it. Or Don't. It's cool. Whatever."
    • Let's Send All the Billionaires to Space
    • Skeletonwitch vs. Barenaked Ladies (or On Music, Subjectivity, and Language)
    • The Olympic Spirit: Nationalism and Internationalism
  • Publications
  • Writing Services
  • Speaking
  • About
Derek Lazarski

Vial

​        The night seemed to swirl around me, and the only way I could tell was the slight glimpse of mist I got from the light buzzing twenty-five feet above my head.  The glass object was burning cold in my hand as I stood in the middle of a parking lot wasteland.   I didn't know what the jar held.  It could have been edible or something medical or maybe an illegal substance of some kind, prescribed as my only escape.  All I wanted was destruction.  My veins were frozen crippled now, stretching down from my hand into my wrist and shooting up to my elbow.  I gritted my teeth, leaned back, and then my body slingshotted forward, hurling the object out into the blackness.
        For that moment—that tiny lapse in eternity—everything was serene.  Because I knew that out there, out there in the air hovering in the darkness above the cold pavement was an object.  It was moving but staying perfectly still, trapped in that slice of history.  My lungs expanded and contracted the chilly air while the vial was still—suspended perfectly in animation for that freeze frame, floating high above the harsh reality of the empty parking lot below.  And as it sat there, that twenty feet above the planet, I knew its fate.  It would be destroyed.  It would end, just like everything else here.  Only unlike everything else here, I had control.  This time, I was the destroyer.
        But when the waves of the shatter hit me a split second later, it was all lost.  The time was gone, the excitement missing, the control vanished.  My whole body was cold, my hand now quaking under the pressure of the stillness around it, and I began to cry.  As the night swirled around me and the light buzzed twenty-five feet above my head, I scrambled along the dirty asphalt to find something—anything—to launch into looming annihilation.




​All work on this website © 2004-2016 Derek Lazarski. All rights reserved.
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by SiteGround