Saturday, August 13, 2022

Flash fiction, zeppelin style

The Loneliness of Zeppelin Denver

Zeppelin Denver was my name. Christened LZ-17 in August 1915 and only later did I get a proper name. One of many airships created in the early years of the twentieth century at the great zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen. My origin story showed promise. Finding a chum did not seem like a problem. There were so many new ships. Then came the war. We sailed off to Britain with as many bombs as we could carry. Hurled them from the gondola like Zeus's lightning bolts. Friends and potential partners were blown from the sky. LZ-24’s crew was killed but the ship stayed alive and and it motored off into a North Sea cloudbank. Engines stopped when the fuel ran out but it kept going, lifted by the winds, until it ended up in the Arctic, we suppose. Never found. He was my brother and best friend. Later, I was part of postwar reparations. The United States came to Germany's big rummage sale (all things must go!) and claimed me, naming me for an American city nobody in Germany or even the U.S. had ever heard of. I was off to America. Zep friends were built but it was not the same. My German accent got in the way. American zeps avoided me and then, in 1937, the Graf Zeppelin Hindenburg exploded and that’s all she wrote. Self-immolation was suspected, one of the first blows against Hitler, or so they say. I would not be surprised if GrafZepHin staged the farewell as he always was theatrical. It left me alone and heartsick sailing through the sky cleared of everything but clouds and aeroplanes. Many aeroplanes. They were the future and I was not. I sailed on. They kept me around through the next war, mostly as a curiosity. Spent a few years filming football stadiums from on high. But that was it. Dismantled me from the outside in. Skin peeled. Skeleton removed. Bled of helium. The heart was the last to go.

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