by Marcus Jonathan Chapman
It used to be a symbol of freedom and strength, bald though it was called. There were statues in official buildings and statuettes on the tops of flag poles. It was tattooed on the soldiers, officers and citizens with overwhelming pride. The eagle.
Now the laser shows had taken over. Lights pointing in all directions, splayed in all sorts of colors. Dots on walls, shapes bouncing off flat surfaces.
At first there were lasers only in the hands of civilians. At sporting events and theaters, jokesters would point single, red lasers into the eyes and crotches of athletes and actors. The more responsible among us used the lasers in academic settings, pointing at important points within lectures. Then video went viral and seemed to spark the consciousness of all mankind onto one laser beam.
A young girl, taking her parents lasers and adding some of her own, taped all of them together and stuck them on the weather vain of her roof. As she stepped back to admire the lasers whipping in all directions the wind would blow, she fell off the roof and never was the same, but neither was the world.
An explosion of tributes made to the girl, Lucy, became know has Lucy’s laser’s. People were putting together lasers with everything, on lawn mowers, through cereal boxes, on car windshield wipers, their dogs tails. They started adding other media to the mix, lasers playing out the scenes of movies to music and interpretive dancing. Soon, there wasn’t a time of day or night, or a direction in which you could look when a laser beam could not be seen.
This was the end of the eagle. So fickle were the people of the country, that they blamed the eagles weak eyes on the biblical downing of great birds. Almost like a plague, the baldies fell from the sky. Chomping their beaks and grasping with their talons on the way down, seemingly hoping to clutch a branch or telephone wire.
“The laser and its beams are what make us strong now. We were wrong to follow that stupid bird.” And so at every official gathering, public event, statue and statuette, the eagles were slowly replaced with lasers, light shows and multimedia extravaganzas.
This was the way the country found something they could control.
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