Written by Bobartles

I couldn’t quite remember when I first claimed my little piece of sky; it had been mine for as far back as I could recall. Presumably I’d felt its call from the moment I was old enough look up and see that vast blue expanse, so pure, empty and ripe for the taking.

My piece was easy enough to find. You’d have to be standing in the garden of the old abandoned house down the road, at nine o’clock (AM) precisely- no sooner, no later- with a couple of rulers and a pair of sunglasses. The first ruler goes parallel to your gaze, from the lobe of your left ear. The second ruler runs perpendicular to that, fifteen centimetres along the first. Look up at the sun, count exactly seven-point-five-three centimetres to the right, and you’ve got the dead centre. Everything for an inch around that? Mine. My little piece of sky. A little easier to see at night, of course, when the stars are out as reference points to mark the borders.

It wasn’t much, but it was mine.

Until now.

It was eight-fifty-nine and seventeen seconds, on a frosty Saturday morning. Thirteenth of the month (I knew it). I was standing in the old house’s garden, looking up, and something was wrong with my piece of sky.
There was someone there.

Moving deceptively slowly to my eyes so far below (it was actually approximately 570 miles-per-hour, to be slightly more precise) was a metal dart with wings like a bird, trailing water vapour behind it in a white plume that spread across the sky and neatly bisected my piece.

An aeroplane. In my piece of sky.

I didn’t know what to think. In an instant, everything I knew was lying in pieces around me. There was someone in my piece of sky. He could have taken any course, joined any flight path, but instead he’d chosen to guide that majestic machine of his into the fortress my mind had conjured up since I was less than two-feet-and-three-inches tall. He was… joining me.

I was no longer alone.

So I shot that bastard down.