Love Drops

Flash-Fiction - by Larry Hodges

The greatest and most tragic love story began with a bomb exploding on a packed plane, six miles in the air.

Two minutes before his death, Lester practically waltzed down the aisle to his seat next to Elma as he returned from the restroom. He knew that at their grandparenty age, restroom proximity was top priority. So when they'd boarded, he'd race-walked to middle seat and, arms folded but giggling in a very non-grandparenty way, refused to budge, forcing Elma into the preferred aisle seat. He'd felt slightly guilty when he'd forced her to get up so he could use the restroom. But she'd gone twice, as he'd reminded her.

"The Orlando weather will be perfect," he said. Ironically, they were flying through a thunderstorm. As a retired weatherman, he'd spent weeks pouring over weather maps, praying for such weather. They were flying there to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary at Disneyworld with their kids and throngs of laughing grandchildren. He couldn't wait.

"Not a drop of rain, my big hurricane," she agreed. She was a retired gardener, which—as she often said—meant that she was both that and a weatherwoman. Even after she retired, she'd continued to wear what she called her uniform, blue bib overalls. When he'd retired, Lester had stacked all his suits and ties and, with a solemn ceremony, burned them in a bonfire in the back yard. They roasted marshmallows over it. Then he'd gone out and bought his own array of matching bibs. He actually found them a bit bulky and uncomfortable, but if she wore them, then by God, so would he. Both wore them on the flight, smiling at the amused stares.

"Nothing will stop me from taking the roller coaster with the grandkids," Lester said. "Right after eating a pound of fudge, of course. Care to join us, my little raindrop?"

"Not a chance! We should act our age." She patted the top to her bib. "I'll be on the Merry-Go-Round with the little ones and two pounds of cotton candy."

Once again, he held Elma's hand in his, hoping to find the perfect grip. Not too tight because of her arthritis. Not too loose or it'd be like the linguine she made for him on Sundays, with fresh tomatoes and garlic cloves . . . vastly preferable to the current smell of stale pretzels and sweaty humans, which he quickly put out of his mind.

Everything was perfect.

"What the Gazooks?" Lester cried when the bomb went off a few rows ahead. Elma turned to him in horror. Oxygen masks fell out of the overhead as smoke poured over them. Elma shouted something, but Lester couldn't make it out through his ringing ears. The seats in front of them protected them from the bulk of the blast as hot air exploded about them.

As they reached for the masks, the plane went into a dive. His stomach churned in the freefall. A wrenching, ripping sound tore painfully into Lester's tortured ears like red-hot knives. They were thrown forward as the plane broke in two, their side tilting upward as the front half fell away, just four rows ahead.

They hadn't put their seatbelts on after his return from the restroom. The thundering winds snatched them out of their seats like plastic grocery bags. Lester grasped for Elma's hand. Somehow, they maintained hand and terrified eye contact as they shot out of the plane and into the thunderstorm outside. They began the gut-wrenching freefall to the ground.

"I love you!" Lester cried, knowing she couldn't hear him in the roaring wind and freezing rain. But she mouthed the words back. Already he shook from the cold. They pulled together and hugged. In the last few seconds of his life, he looked about, squinting through the rain—weirdly noting how the raindrops were falling up, with air resistance slowing them down more than a human body—and saw that Elma still gazed into his eyes.

He'd never felt so warm.

Lightning struck Elma and Lester four miles in the air, killing them instantly. It created flash recordings of the structure and electrical activity of the 100 billion neurons that made up their brains, embedding them into two falling raindrops, each with two sextillion molecules—twenty billion molecules for every neuron. Their lifeless bodies fell away at 150 miles per hour while, as raindrops, they reached terminal velocity at twenty.

The two raindrops nudged and caressed each other, and then they merged into a larger, wobbly one whose surface cohesion barely held itself together. Wind and other raindrops pummeled them, threatening to tear them apart. The raindrop bulged into two like a figure eight, with only a tiny, tortured segment preventing them from falling apart from each other forever.

"Stay with me!" thought I-We-You as the segment frayed in the near hurricane winds and pounding rain.

"Always!" You-We-I. Slowly, surely, inexorably their love pulled them back and held them together as no matter-based adhesive could.

"What's happened to us?" thought I-We-You through tiny bubbles of excitement.

"I don't know," thought You-We-I. "Can it always be like this?"

"No more bib overalls," thought I-We-You. "We never really liked them, did we?"

"Only what was in them," thought You-We-I.

Without the physical obstacles that were their bodies, their adoration grew exponentially, like a fire doused with increasing torrents of jet fuel, easily outshining the fiery inferno that made up their falling plane. The rain continued to pound them, like tears splattering on a car's windshield before they washed away.

At twenty miles per hour, it took six minutes to fall the first two miles. But as they approached the theoretical limit for love itself, relativity and reverse time dilation kicked in. Each time they halved the distance to the ground, they also halved their distance to that absolute limit for love itself, and so experienced time at double the rate. In the three minutes it took to fall the next mile, they again experienced six minutes. In the ninety seconds it took to fall the next half mile, another six. Soon they were just feet, then inches, then tiny fractions of an inch from the ground, and yet each time they halved the distance to the ground, they experienced six minutes.

They would never hit the ground.

"Thank you for being with me," I-We-You thought, with the passion of a thousand universes. Somehow, they still gazed into each other's eyes like newlyweds.

"And you," You-We-I responded. Their raindrop pulsated through the colors of the rainbow.

It was a love that could never end and could never die.

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