Fireworks For The Forgotten [Wraith]
By noon the sky already smells like lighter fluid and cooked meat, that strange summer incense of patriotism flavored with charcoal and cheap beer in plastic cups,
Grills hiss in driveways, flags snap from porches that normally fly nothing except rent notices and pizza menus rolled up.
Somebody on your block has been testing illegal fireworks all week, little practice explosions breaking the night like anxious coughs,
Now the day itself stares back in red white blue from every discount banner, every grocery endcap, every gas station lot packed with folding tables and knockoff cloths.
You spend the morning pretending this is just another long weekend, folding laundry while the TV runs a parade across the screen,
High school bands sweating in polyester uniforms, politicians in convertibles forced to smile like wax figures, waving to a crowd already shifting on blistered feet, already keenTo get to the part with the barbecues and the warm potato salad and the cousin who always brings the conspiracy theories with the same devotion as store-brand chips,
The commentators talk about sacrifice over footage of rolling flags and old cannons, then cut to an ad for zero-percent financing wrapped in patriotic scripts.
Out in the park, kids run with sparklers like they’ve been handed little comets on sticks, leaving bright trails in the humid air,
Their parents shout half-hearted warnings about safety while topping off cups, arguing about which burger is theirs and who stole the best lawn chair.
Everywhere you look, there’s red sauce, red Solo, red stripes, red meat, red faces turning toward the sun with reckless pride,
There’s a soundtrack of country songs about freedom blasting from somebody’s truck, all steel guitar and pickup metaphors, never once mentioning who died.
You can’t help doing the math—not the official numbers, just your own private tally printed in invisible ink across your skin,
Names you knew, gradeschool faces that never made it past twenty-five, eyes that once rolled at homework and now live in folded flags tucked into closets thin.
You remember one fireworks show from years back, sitting on a blanket with someone who shipped out in fall,
He laughed at the noise, said the blasts made his chest feel like a drum, said he wanted to see something bigger than this mall.
He never got to see the way the sky looks when a whole city goes quiet right before the first shell rises,
Never got to stand on this same grass trying not to count how many young shoulders are missing from the crowd, how the uniforms now come mostly in plus sizes.
The official speeches will frame it as “honoring our brave,” as “the price of being free,”But you’ve watched enough people come home hollow-eyed to know some bills are structured so that only the poor pay the fee.
As the sun slides down, the park fills with lawn chairs and folding blankets and bug spray haze,
Smoke from early fireworks hangs low between the trees, a makeshift fog that turns the crowd into moving silhouettes, half-haloed in chemical glaze.
A drone buzzes overhead, capturing the perfect aerial view, this grand river of humanity sprawled out in matching shirts from the big-box store,
It’ll be cut into a montage set to swelling strings and posted online tomorrow with a caption about “unity,” ignoring which faces were politely edited from the lore.
When the first rocket is launched, everybody hushes as if on cue, that trained reverence for gunpowder in the shape of celebration,
You feel it in your ribs anyway—that hungry lift, that anticipation—because you are not immune to spectacle, just allergic to the narration.
The shell goes up, a single bright scream tearing through the dark, then breaks open into white fire pouring outward like a wound,
For an instant the whole park is silver-lined, every face thrown into stark relief, every line around every mouth and eye clearly tuned.
You see the veteran on the bench snap his jaw tight, hand gripping thigh, pupils blown wide by the flash,
You see the kid with headphones cling to his mother, body a stiff arc as each boom lands like a hammer crash.
You see your own hands against the denim on your knees, knuckles pale,
You hear the crowd roar approval as the next volley screams up, praise for the pretty echo of artillery and shrapnel in a sanitized tale.
The sky becomes a layered bruise of color, shell after shell splitting open like overripe fruit,
Gold willows drip down and vanish before they hit the treeline, red chrysanthemums flare and die, blue stars crackle in pursuit.
The people around you chant “USA” with that blunt edge that always sounds too much like a dare,
They film each blast as if fireworks have learned a new trick since last year, as if the important thing is that everyone sees they were there.
Behind the explosions you swear you hear other sounds, small and insistent,
Not the echo-off-the-hills voice of the blasts themselves, but thin frayed threads of cries that won’t stay distant.
In the trailing smoke, faces almost form—eyes in the clouds, silhouettes with helmets and dog tags that don’t quite exist when you blink,
You tell yourself it’s just the brain making patterns out of chaos, but the air around your ears buzzes with names you never say out loud, thoughts you pour straight down the sink.
Down by the river, the reflections of the fireworks stretch and twist on the dark water like burning flags dragged across oil,
Every burst above has a ghost twin below, warped by tide and trash and the slow boilOf everything no one mentions in the toast: drones over far-off villages, cages at borders, laws written in ink that never seems to fade,
But tonight all that is folded neatly under an extra layer of pride-flavored frosting, plus a discount on grills in the holiday parade.
A child sits on their father’s shoulders beside you, hands sticky with melted bomb-pop, red blue white streaked down their chin,
They cheer for each explosion with a joy that hasn’t read a history book yet, lungs full of smoke and sugar and the certainty that they will win.
You feel this ache then—not just anger, not just cynicism, but a strange tenderness for their unbroken belief,
A wish that they’ll get to grow up without half their classmates vanishing into uniforms and hashtags and folded flags and grief.
The finale hits like a panic attack disguised as applause, everything in the sky going off at once in a rapid strobe of light and thunder,
The crowd oohs, ahhs, holds up phones, kisses, claps, sways, clutches strangers’ arms without wondering what they’re clinging to under.
Part of you wants to scream, to stand up and shout names instead of slogans, to pull the plug on the whole electric dream,
Another part just sits there, letting the color wash over your tired eyes, whispering to the ghosts in the smoke, “I see you. I see you between the seams.”
When the last ember fades and the sky goes back to black, the applause breaks out like a nervous breakdown turned polite,
People gather blankets, herd kids, complain about traffic, joke about diets starting “tomorrow,” swallow the weight of the night.
A few stray sparks drift down like slow orange snow, disappearing before they touch anything that might burn,
Leaving only the smell of sulfur and hot plastic and the sharp tang of truths everyone chose not to turn.
You walk home through streets full of debris—spent shells, bottle rockets, trampled flags fallen from car windows,
The pavement glitters with that fake festive dust that will cling to tires and shoes and gutters and eventually slip into distant rivers and shallows.
Someone’s singing the anthem off-key on a balcony, lighter held up like it’s still the eighties and they’re at a rock show,
Their voice cracks on “free,” wobbling in the humid air, then turns into a laugh with no real joy below.
At your place, the TV runs footage of fireworks in every major city, spliced together into one big sparkling lie,
Each announcer talks about “unity,” about “coming together,” about “the strength of the human spirit,” never once asking whyThe camera never lingers on the faces of the people who flinch, the ones who leave early, the ones who close the blinds and put on old movies to drown out the noise,
Never once mentions that freedom without honesty is just a slogan on a T-shirt sold next to plastic swords and war toys.
You mute the sound and watch the bursts in silence, each flash painting your living room in a different shade,
You lift your drink—not in blind salute, not in mindless rage, but in a small, private toast to everyone who paid.
Not just the ones who wore uniforms, though they’re in there, every scar, every missing limb, every head full of static at night,
But all the unnoticed collateral—families, strangers, kids who grew up in the blast radius of decisions made out of sight.
The glass clinks against your tooth, an imperfect ring that still feels more honest than any trained anthem line,
You whisper, “To the brave, to the broken, to the ones who saw through the show and tried anyway, even when the whole thing felt misaligned.”Outside, another illegal firework screams up from someone’s backyard, a last defiant streak of light splitting the hour,
Then the night finally settles into what it was before all the noise: a long, dark stretch of country and city full of complicated love, rotten roots, flawed power.
You draw the curtain, but in the reflection you catch your own eyes lit with the faint leftover glow,
In them lives both the kid who once believed every spark was a promise, and the adult who knows most of them fall before they ever hit ground, burnt out in the show.
Somewhere between those two, you find a strange kind of pride—not in flags, not in bombs, not in slogans yelled above grills and games,
But in the quiet freedom to see the whole mess clearly, to hold both the fireworks and the ghosts in your gaze without pretending they’re the same.