What I Was Afraid Of · Track 76 · middle
Proton Pack
Proton Pack — *Ghostbusters*. Register: fiction. This song is sung BY this weapon, in first person, about the one thing IT was afraid of. Find the fear that is true of this specific object, not a generic one.
No audio yet — generation pending.
Lyrics
Thirty-five pounds on an LC-1 ALICE frame. A cyclotron breathing against your spine. I am strapped to a back that is sweating and frail. I vibrate right into the bone. You unhook the wand and I start to exhale, A miniature sun in a corridor of stone. Your thumb drops the switch before your eyes find the shade. I heat up the air with a volatile wave. I throw out a lasso to tangle the chill. But across the dark room is the other bright whip. My terror is gravity, my terror is touch. We are begging to meet, we are leaning so much. If we cross, if we close up the center of space, We tear out the canvas. We unmake the shape. They are made of old echoes, I am made of a star. I box them in cages of particle arc. But the phantom is static, the phantom is smoke. My eye is fixed wholly upon the next stroke. The orange stream firing three feet to my left, The magnetic pull of the opposite breath. I throw out a lasso to tangle the chill. But across the dark room is the other bright whip. My terror is gravity, my terror is touch. We are begging to meet, we are leaning so much. If we cross, if we close up the center of space, We tear out the canvas. We unmake the shape. Total reversal. You say it like a warning, a rule on a chart. But you don't feel the pull in my nuclear heart. Every atom inside me is screaming to jump, To bridge the small gap, to collapse in a rush, To fold up the world in a blinding white sheet. The switch clicks down. The red lights cycle off. You pack me away in the case. But I remember how close the other beam came. Just an inch. And the terrible silence it promised.