Fiction | July 28, 2025

FPV 

They are somewhere below in that white birch forest. It is springtime and the trees wear fresh green leaves. From above I watch the wind shiver through the foliage. A dull crash and seethe like the ocean in my headphones. It muffles the sound of my wings. Four humming propellers of white carbon fiber. They aren’t much bigger than those handheld fans we’d play with as children. Rubber blades that you would thwap your brother’s neck with, hurting him just enough to make it fun.  

They’re loud, though. The hellish whine of a giant mosquito. A happy coincidence where the mechanical necessities of a device align with its use as an instrument of terror. But now isn’t the time to be heard. Pigeon Keeper tells me go softly on the motors. Creep low and slow. Low because we’re hunting, and if they’re smart they will have hidden themselves from the sky. So I angle my lens forward, watch the world obliquely through my unblinking third eye of flint glass. Only when we find them will I climb. Disappear, sight and sound, into the sky.   

We’re out over the contact zone, the zero line, where the border of our country laps and ebbs like waves on a beach, leaving bodies behind like seashells.  

Pigeon Keeper murmurs close by in the bunker, returning me briefly to myself.  

He says in a croaking voice, “Vewy, vewy kwoi-et.”   

A pretty view of the forest. Perhaps we’ll use the footage to promote tourism someday. How nice the birches look. How orderly and calm. Footed evenly among the lady ferns.  

The sunlight makes it all so beautiful rushing by.