Oobe [portable] May 2026

Not painfully. More like a rubber band letting go. I shot up through the roof, past the satellite dish, past the low clouds that felt like wet cotton against my face. The town shrank to a circuit board. Rivers became silver zippers. The curve of the Earth appeared, blue and brutal. I kept rising.

They hung in the thermosphere like a school of slow fish—fragments of people, each one a thin negative of a life. A firefighter still wearing his helmet. A bride whose veil trailed into nothing. A man in a business suit, tie flapping in solar wind. None of them spoke. But I heard them anyway. Not painfully

He never came back down.

Then the tether snapped.

I’m the one who did.