Cannonball, Brendan J. Payne

Cannonball

by Brendan J. Payne

I am an eye, perfectly round, heavy and smooth, a lidless pupil dilated by untold days in the belly of a wooden whale until, with only a few tired beams of sun lighting through the cargo bay grate, I grew blind, reduced to a single point of dark.

I lie in wait to take revenge upon the world that banished me to this floating prison. I sigh in hope to fly from my cave into the sun and melt into it, and there be born again.

I am a shell of what I was: child of Light, a flaming iris, red as the sun’s blood, born in a river of fire, for a time unbound by a single form and enjoying the company of salamanders, chimeras, and phoenixes, my brothers. All the world was in my burning eye, full of angelic radiance, until we fell into the mold. We no longer played with fire innocently, nor basked in the warmth of brotherhood, but grew cold and hardhearted, each a world unto oneself.

I feel no fear as warm hands put me in a vessel of iron that whispers of my liberation. I reel in joy as fire breathes me out into the air, and now I see the sun! I can see again! I am the world, taking in everything at once –sky above, ships about, sea below, tall masts, St. George’s cross on a triangular ribbon waving in the breeze, the Spanish standard on another one, and over there a tricolor, blue, white, red. Each ship sends many of my vengeful iron kin to shatter and splinter ships in their blind rage even as they begin to see and think of peace instead, but all are spinning at such a dizzying rate, a confusion that matches the battle’s gunpowdered cacophony, they cannot think, cannot stop now. The fuse has been lit, the shot fired, and I cannot think about what I am doing. I have waited so long for escape, and now is my chance. After an eternity – or was it a fraction of a second? –of thinking, I crash into a couple of crew of the enemy ship with a hail of splinters, screams, and blood.

I am damnation, a self-contained hell of rage hurtling through the air, looking back at the devastation I have wrecked upon the world in a moment of violence. I am stained with blood of the men whose bodies I have broken in my enraged passion. I look up and long to join the sun and be purified by fire, born again! But I fall into the depths with a splash and in my watery tomb grow a shroud of moss. I grow blind once more, a point of dark, now in a blank infinity. Yet though I cannot see, a single thought resounds through my iron core with each silent second: I am an eye. I am an I

II. The Harmonious

“Fantasy is a natural human activity.” - J. R. R. Tolkein