Last Chance Fireworks

It was a long time ago…those nights when the darkness was complete and all you could see out there was what you could imagine on the farthest fringes of your own near-beliefs.
And we shot hundreds of fireworks; squibs, firecrackers, Roman Candles, bottle rockets and the occasional giant Sky Busters that rained down glitter on our heads and echoed their reports out to the top of the sky.
The strong smell of cordite filled the air and the nighttime sky was awash in the glowing colors of pre-packaged Chinese dreams of dragons and the ethereal smokes of a thousand dynasties. Your fingers would get slick with the polished, silver residue of finely ground gun powder that made them appear alien in the half light of fading fire balls. And still…we wanted more.
We filled the sky with images and screens and the radiance of tightly-rolled paper magic that screamed out how tired we were of what we normally got from the sky: Silence and apathy.
So we shot our rockets up to them that they might hear and understand that we were busy about the work of filling the space with gods of our own because we were tired of waiting around for the Real Thing.
An inescapable sadness always followed the Final Report; when the glow of the last rocket was swallowed up by the darkness in slight degrees as it crept back slowly to reclaim what had been its own only seconds before.
And in the fading echo of the boom, we awaited the voice of an absent God and we walked away slowly with many backward glances; hoping still, at the last, to catch some fleeting glimpse or see some subtle clue of the thing we wanted: Some evidence of Mercy and Love.