Bomb Fetish Symphony in D-Major

Short story: A music-loving bomb engineer searching for love finds it in an explosive climax

Designing a modern bomb is better than the best sex you ever had: You penetrate deeper. You explode bigger. And when everything works like it’s supposed to, the mass killing is like the climax to a beautiful symphony - beautiful and satisfying in every way.

This is what Katie, a defense engineer at Raytheon, wanted to say when the guy at the party asked her what she did for a living. But she stopped herself, remembering that the last time she said that, the guy she was on a date with went into a sort of shock - his eyes widened like he saw a ghost and his lips quivered, with glistening specks of drool seeping out the corner of his mouth. He looked around like he wanted to ask for the check but held on long enough to finish his beer before saying sorry, he forgot he had a thing and had to go. Katie felt a little hurt by his frantic departure because she thought they had a good rapport. His sense of humor was a little edgy, like hers, and so she felt comfortable making the dark joke about her job. But it’s like her best friend at work, a gay missile engineer in his 50s, always says: “New York straight boys are too gay even for me.”

Such was life for a female weapons engineer with a love for classical music and designing weapons of mass destruction while living in the liberal mecca of Brooklyn. Katie was surrounded by people who think they’re morally superior, even though they vote for the same policies that made it possible for her to be making nearly a quarter mil per year at the age of 25. She sometimes considered transferring to Huntsville, Alabama, where she was sure to find a man unintimidated by her profession since that city is to the defense industry what Nashville is to country music. But doing so would mean she’d have to live in Alabama, which didn’t have a world-class symphony within a thousand-mile radius. Besides, she felt there was something morally repugnant about moving to Alabama just to get laid.

So she decided to be herself. She loved missiles and music, and although the pleasure she got from both wasn’t quite orgasmic, it was close. And the way she saw it, if a guy couldn’t accept her for who she was, he probably couldn’t get her off anyway.

That’s why, while looking directly into the light blue eyes of the man at the party, she went ahead with her line.

“Designing a modern bomb is better than the best sex you ever had. You penetrate deeper. You explode bigger. And when everything works like it’s supposed to, the mass killing is like the climax to a beautiful symphony - beautiful and satisfying in every way.”

Katie shrugged and smiled, waiting for the guy to run away. But he didn’t. He stood still, mouth agape, eyes lost in her eyes.

“That’s the hottest fucking thing I ever heard,” he said.

Katie was stunned.

“Really?” she said. “Guys always freak out whenever I say that.”

The man’s face hadn’t changed.

“It’s weird that you say that as a rehearsed line, but it’s still hot. Maybe even hotter because it’s so weird,” he said. “I bet you know exactly how many people your bombs killed.”

“Not exactly, but approximately 6,435,” she said.

“Holy shit,” the man said. “You’re like a sexy Oppenheimer.”

Katie blushed. It was the nicest thing anybody ever said to her.

“Let’s fuck,” they both said at the exact same time.

And back to her apartment they went.

---

The cannon fire sequence in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture had just begun when the man slipped off Katie’s panties and began licking her thigh.

“Talk bombing to me,” the man said as he went down on her. Katie obliged, rattling off the names of bomb types and their various blast radiuses.

“The MK-82 has a lethal radius of 200 to 300 meters, and an injury radius of up to 500 meters,” she said in between moans and groans as cannon fire blasted from her bluetooth speakers.

“Don’t stop,” the man said.

“The BLU-118 has a lethal shockwave of up to 500 meters!” she shouted, desperately catching her breath in between words, the 1812 Overture coming to a crescendo. “The heat and overpressure effects can impact up to one thousand meters, sometimes more depending on architectural barriers!”

The man’s tongue whirled between Katie’s legs like the spin cycle of an overstuffed wash machine, and she was on the precipice of a bomb-like orgasm. She imagined watching the blast video of the last bomb she designed synched to Tchaikovsky’s cymbal clashes in cannon blasts; she remembered a long-ago tryst with a man whose skin was hot and salty; she thought of bodies incinerating within seconds of impact and how their genes live on in other relatives because nothing ever truly dies, just changes forms; she thought of another man whose shoulders were so wide, they were like wings protecting her from something she couldn’t see. Then her mind went back to the man she was with now. She put her fingers in his hair. It felt a little greasy, which made her want to pull her hand back, but she kept her fingers there because it felt like the right thing to do - she wanted to participate, but only nominally, and then she focused on her emerging orgasm, coupling it with a mental visual of an emerging mushroom cloud. A fleeting thought ran through her mind: Why did she always think of this when having sex? Why did she have to think of explosions and death when she wanted to cum? She answered her own question: Because it felt good - and quickly discarded the self-examination so she could relish the moment.

The cloud was small but rose quickly. The cap widened, got bigger, stronger, more powerful, until it rose high above a city skyline and completely enveloped the entire horizon, sucking in and burning everything under it, turning everything to nothing, and Katie came harder than she ever had in her life. Body, mind, and soul fused together in harmony with everything and she felt like she was floating.

Her fingers dug into the man’s scalp hard and she didn’t care. She had to hold it all right there, in that spot. She imagined the mushroom cloud dissipating, unveiling an obliterated landscape that was quickly turning into the most beautiful things. One day all of that would happen. She knew it. But for now, this would have to do. She was satisfied and wanted to either marry this man or keep him in a cage. Maybe the latter.

Tchaikovsky’s Overture ended. It was the last on her playlist and now the room was silent. She didn’t need music right now and was grateful for the quiet. The man got up and smiled at her, as if he was admiring his work. She let him. He earned it.

“Why are you so into bombs?” she said.

The man looked away and down.

“You promise not to think bad of me?” he said.

“Depends on what, I suppose.”

“Something about their power, the destruction, the dead bodies - I know it sounds psychotic, but it just does something for me.”

Katie pulled him to her body and never felt closer to anybody before. She knew other people had these images inside their head and liked them, weren’t scared of them, but welcomed them. But she never knew for sure if she had met one. Now she was sure. It felt good and comfortable.

“Me too,” she said.

---

A streak of sunlight shot in through the window and pried Katie’s eyes open. A rude headache throbbed in her skull and bile bubbled at the top of her stomach. She felt the woozy after-effects of once strong but now weakened chemicals swimming through her brain and knew she had been drugged. She looked around. She felt herself. She tried to think about what she should think about. How do you do that without knowing what happened. What did happen?

She looked around for her phone, but couldn’t find it. It wasn’t on the nightstand, where she was sure she put it last night. It wasn’t on the charger next to the dresser. She looked in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom, but her phone was nowhere to be found.

Katie went to her laptop to see if she could geo-locate her phone, but the desk in her living room was empty - completely empty. Not only was her laptop gone, but all her papers, folders, books, even the pens.

Fuck. The realization stabbed her heart like an ice pick: Whoever that man was now had access to designs for current and future bombs, missiles, detonation plans, and geographic areas that were considered to be hit. There were also codes for access to several areas of her company’s database. The man who had given her the best orgasm she ever experienced had fucked her in the worst way possible.

The previous night replayed in her head, except this time it was much clearer what happened. The interest in her work, the constant questions about it, even the way he approached her - with intent and purpose - it was now all so obvious. And as she listened to his voice in her head again, she detected the slightest of accents - someone who had been trained to sound American and really did, but sounded just a little bit off. She berated herself for not seeing it. She wanted to bang her head against the wall, tear her hair out, and break things. She should have known. She was trained to spot these things. But she didn’t. Now everything was about to turn to shit.

When you get fired from one of the world’s top defense companies, they take everything they can from you. Every electronic device you own, whether it was issued by the company or not, gets inspected and downloaded by people you will never see. Every email you’ve ever sent gets put into a database and analyzed. And the place you live in gets “swept,” that is, a group of faceless men in black suits goes through every inch of your home to look for anything that could indicate you may have been working for a foreign government. Katie watched these men go through her apartment like they were looking for a sock in a laundry basket - moving everything around, throwing everything aside, and putting it all back in a haphazard way. As she sat there, helpless, alone in her own crowded apartment, she realized that the job she loved so much had come to an end. She tried to think of music to calm her down. But the only tune she could play in her head was the hectic discord and impending doom of the opening to Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin. Frantic violins desperate to get away from the clumping trumpets as Katie watched a tall, slim man rummage through her underwear drawer, inspecting her lingerie too closely, a faint snicker on his otherwise blank face, knowing there was nothing of importance in there.

Years of passionate work doing the only thing that Katie believed she was able to do with passion had resulted in nothing but a humiliation ritual in her own bedroom. She wanted to cry, but it had been so long, she didn’t know how anymore. There was no more music in her head, only bombs.

---

Five months later, Katie was working as a systems engineer for an electric car company, designing engines that can get more mileage out of a single charge, and she had not listened to any music the entire time. She was bored out of her mind. She hated cars. There was no beauty in them and she was uninspired in every way. She hated the limited mechanics of automobiles and the lack of creativity involved in their design. Unlike with bombs, there was an endless maze of rules and regulations that hamper the engineer’s ability to create something unique and wonderful. Everything had to be approved by a lawyer - a soulless cog whose only purpose is to perpetuate a world run by similar soulless cogs. Everything about the job disgusted Katie and listening to beautiful music seemed to mock her existence. The only dream she had those days was when all this was over.

On the other hand, Katie’s social life was easier to navigate. Telling people she was an electric car engineer wasn’t as off-putting as telling them she designed bombs. She thought this could be good - an opportunity to find a meaningful relationship and maybe move on to a new passion in life. Maybe find something to replace the emptiness from losing her passion job. Maybe she’d be able to listen to music again.

Every encounter was the same: a penis with little substance attached to a man with less substance. As one of those men moved up and down on top of her, she looked up at him and saw that he was entirely made of plastic. His skin was a sickly grey shade and his eyes were just sockets carved into a ball of plastic with a mess of polyester materials on top for hair. She felt disgusted that this thing was on top of her and inside her and she wanted it to melt away forever so that the raw materials of it could be used to make something else, something with meaning.

She got up from under the fake plastic man and on top of it. “Oh hell yeah,” the fake plastic man said, and Katie immediately put her hand over its mouth. “Don’t say a fucking word,” she said, shoving her hand so hard into its mouth that she could feel its fake plastic teeth. She grabbed her phone and put on Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung. As the clarinets danced with the harp, she closed her eyes, grimaced, tightened her pelvic muscles and pushed again and again and again, harder and faster each time, fighting the sounds of the violin solo, a violent push against an angelic sound, exactly what she wanted to feel. But as the allegro molto agitato heated up and Strauss’ brass outmuscled his woodwinds, she imagined one of the bombs she designed dropping from the sky and hitting the bar she met this fake plastic man at, destroying him and everybody in it in a hellscape of flames - all of the fake plastic men inside melting into each other, forming a swirling, multicolored river, creating something oddly beautiful. Katie’s imagination criss-crossed the world, dropping bombs on the world’s greatest cities and the world’s smallest villages . Each bomb drop gave way to glorious fires and complete destruction. As she imagined global obliteration, she continued to thrust, harder and faster, trying desperately to feel the beginnings of an orgasm, but it all felt so far away, no matter how many bombs fell from the sky. And then the music stopped.

“Ohhhhhh” the fake plastic man mumbled with Katie’s hand smushed into his face. She felt him deflate under her and she was suddenly aware that he wasn’t actually fake and plastic, but a real person with no discernable qualities other than he wasn’t made of plastic. The fact that such a plain and boring person was wasting the possibilities of a human existence repulsed her. She got off of him, got dressed, and made a mental note to clean the sheets to get rid of any trace of him.

“Get out,” she said.

“What? Now?” the man said, still catching his breath.

“Right now,” she said.

The man got up and put on his clothes.

“Crazy bitch,” he said under his breath - loud enough to be heard but low enough to be indirect. Katie was standing by her desk, upon which was a heavy, seashell-shaped bookend made of heavy stone. She considered throwing it at the man’s skull, knocking him out, dragging his inane body down to the dumpster, and leaving him there. But it wasn’t worth the effort. She already forgot his name.

He walked out without saying another word and Katie took the sheets off the bed and threw them into the wash machine.

---

There was no warning before the bomb came. But as soon as Katie heard the slow, drowning crackle of flames, she knew it was hers. A beautifully erotic symphony of destruction that would end with the most intense climax.

She had just left her favorite coffee shop with an iced cinnamon oat milk latte in her hand. Her morning so far had been mediocre - a short run through Central Park, shower, a snack of two hard boiled eggs and half an apple, and a quick skim through a few chapters of a novel she was only mildly entertained by. She felt healthy, mentally stable, and comfortable As she took her first sip of her latte she thought about taking a trip. Quit the electric car gig, get out of the city, and go somewhere far away to immerse herself in something completely out of her wheelhouse. Maybe go to Italy to learn how to make pasta or Argentina to learn how to be a gaucho. She imagined herself learning new skills, new languages, and having sex with handsome, swarthy men. She fleetingly thought of herself as one of those geriatric women from Quebec who go down to Haiti to have sex with the young local men, but dismissed that thought right away. That wasn’t her - not yet, anyway. She was still young and hot. But everything comes to an end. If she had to do that, at least she wouldn’t be the first and probably not the last. She chuckled thinking about herself being old and wrinkled, stuck in an awkward sex position with an overeager man a third of her age. That’s when she heard it.

When Katie designed the 250-JX5 bomb, she wanted to create something beautiful. Her goal was to show that there can be an orchestrated aesthetic in absolute carnage. Her bomb would destroy, yes, but it would also create music, beauty, and love. She genuinely believed that destruction could contain all three of these. Explosions and blasts could have beats and rhythm. Destroying something old and ugly to create something new and beautiful. And then there was love. All of its forms - the sentimental and physical, as well as the offshoots, such as fear and uncertainty. Katie believed a bomb could contain all of this and she designed her 250-JX5 to prove it.

The 250-JX5 detonation plan required a pre-attack of several hundred firebombs to be detonated before the primary weapon strike. Not only would this weaken infrastructure before the primary weapon was launched, but it also created a soft, soothing pianissimo-like opening, similar to Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 in E-Flat major. Katie always loved how the horn joins the strings in a quiet dance, like two birds floating in the sky during the beginnings of an unexpected rain, crisscrossing together as they look for shelter, before the orchestra comes in to take everything to a higher level. It reminded her of a man she made love to while in college at MIT - a standout experience because there were so many disappointments during her time at that school.

The guy wasn’t her physical type. Waifish with long hair that covered his eyes, he looked like a lead singer in an emo band. But he was charming and confident, and she was craving and curious, so they went back to her apartment. Naked, he looked even skinner, and his bony body accentuated his rather large nose. “Like a bird,” she thought. Despite his appearance, he was strong and took control in a thoughtful way. He held her tight, gripped her close, completely present and in no hurry. She could feel he loved her body more than anything in that moment, and she had a fleeting thought of them as two birds in the air. She never saw him again after that night, and never thought about him as much as she thought about the two birds. It was a feeling she often wished she could re-experience, tried to on a few occasions, but failed. Not now, though. The birds finally came back in the most beautiful way.

Hundreds of bomblets fell from the sky, spinning as they dropped. The sun was setting, and orange light bounced off the dark green bomblets’ shiny metal exteriors. Katie admired the colors - the oranges and greens signifying rebirth and fertility - and hoped others would see the beauty she saw.

The first bomblet hit about 500 feet from Katie, across the street in front of a Chase Bank. The impact hit a woman pushing a stroller with twins. It tore her arm off and set her ablaze. Her body immediately began melting from the heat and dropped to the sidewalk like a flaming plastic bag. A gargled scream, more a confused, final breath than a plea for help, escaped from the woman’s head before her entirety succumbed to the fire eating her alive.

Katie watched the woman die and her heart felt full of life. The woman was a young mother, full of hope and love - and her story ended at the perfect time. No degradation from old age or isolation from decayed family ties. A high point of harmony, the way everything should end. Perfect. And now, something new would take that place. A new story. A new opportunity for more hope and love. This is what Katie wanted everyone to understand as more bombs fell and more fires engulfed the city and more screams saturated the hot, smoke-filled air: All of this destruction would only give way to something better, more beautiful and more meaningful.

Katie kept walking as fires grew, debris from buildings fell, and the sky grew dark from ash. She watched a homeless man burn and was glad his misery would end to give way to something better. She watched the barista who made her latte run out of the cafe before the building collapsed, only to get hit by a car speeding down the street in a hopeless attempt to escape the tidal wave of bombs and flames.

The driver kept going only to run into the back of a garbage truck, totaling his own car and likely killing himself. Two people acting irrationally, responding to chaos with more chaos, and only making things worse for themselves as they refused to accept fate and anguished themselves despite the inevitability of being burned and crushed to death. It was ugly and discordant, but watching it all end - the people living lives with no purpose other than eating and shitting in a place dominated by concrete blocks with no purpose other than facilitating more eating and shitting, either directly or indirectly - seeing it all finally come to an end made Katie felt like her heart was about to burst out of her chest.

She stopped. She took in the sights and smells of ubiquitous death, she watched blood flow down the streets, body parts fly through the air, and smiled. It was exciting. Something new was unraveling and she felt like she did when she was a child opening a Christmas present.

The cluster bombing ceased. The city was punctured. Now was the time for the main part of the show: Katie’s 250-JX5.

The sky darkened as the C-130 bomber jet entered the airspace like a clunky white refrigerator with wings blocking out the sun. A classic plane that has needed very few style adjustments over the past seven decades since its creation, and Katie felt honored to have such a revered warplane drop her baby onto the masses.

The plane seemed to fly in slow-motion just for Katie as she looked up with awe and saw the bomb bay doors open, revealing the shimmering metal encasing of her creation. Her purpose and her savior.

The 250-JX5 had a spherical shape so that the blast would be omnidirectional, showering explosive energy evenly throughout its reach. The bomb spun as it fell from the sky sunlight dancing all over it, like a pianist’s quick and agile fingers playing Ligeti’s L'escalier du diable, unpredictable harmony coupled with an accelerating spiral of dark mystery, and the song she listened to the most while designing the 250-JX5. Katie could hear the music in her head - the first time she had been able to do so in a long time. Seeing her bomb fall and hearing the music she designed it to made her feel whole again. Just in time, too, because it was all about to end.

The 250-JX5 detonated in the air, creating a giant cloud of hot energy that sucked the world in and breathed out white and purple fire. Everything burned. Tires on cars melted into black puddles as the car bodies glowed like charcoals in a fire. Floods of fire bellowed from the windows of every building across the city as the structures staggered from the heat and collapsed from bomb’s pull. And the few people still standing in the streets were helpless as skin melted off their bones - the final action of their bodies before their bones disintegrated into dust.

Katie could hear every piece of music ever made and feel every orgasm ever had. The entire universe ran through her and she became a part of it. It was all encompassing and beautiful. Everything she ever wanted to feel, ever did feel, ever would feel. It wasn’t sensual or pleasurable. It was all so much more than that. It was everything combined and it added to a beautiful nothing.

Outside of bomb equations and musical pleasure, nothing had ever made much sense to Katie. All she knew was that she wanted the world to be something else.

And now, it was. But now, it was over.

💣💣💣💣💣