Sixty
Super Bowl, Opus 4.6
The Seahawk struck first.
Blitz descended from a sky that had no business being that blue, talons burning with a light older than language, and drove Pat six yards backward through the grass. The white lines beneath them cracked and rippled as though the earth itself were keeping score. The impact peeled the air open. Somewhere in the distance, a deep, rhythmic thunder rolled, though neither of them could say whether it was the atmosphere collapsing or sixty thousand voices screaming at once.
Pat planted his boot, spat blood into the turf, and grinned. “That all you got, bird?”
Blitz circled overhead, his wingspan enormous against the flat February light. His feathers shimmered between navy and green depending on the angle, and his amber eyes tracked the militiaman the way a surgeon studies a wound. “I have been diving since before your revolution was a rumor,” he said, his voice carrying the low resonance of something that had outlived several continents. “You are standing because I allow it.”
“Then stop allowing it.”
So Blitz folded his wings and dropped.
Pat met him halfway. The Patriot’s musket had long since shattered, but it didn’t matter; his fists carried the condensed fury of a nation that had decided, once and without equivocation, that it would not be governed. He caught the osprey’s dive with a rising uppercut that split the sky along a seam no one had known was there. The shockwave flattened the grass for thirty yards in every direction, and the white lines bent into spirals before snapping back.
They traded blows across the field in a sequence that defied geometry. Blitz raked his talons across Pat’s shoulder and sent him spinning into the turf at the forty-yard line. Pat rolled, caught the osprey’s next dive with both hands, and hurled him end over end into a goalpost that doinked like a cathedral bell. The metal bent. Blitz shook his feathers, clicked his beak, and launched himself back into the fray with a screech that registered on seismographs in three states.
Minutes passed. Or hours. Time had stopped cooperating somewhere around the second quarter.
Pat’s Continental uniform hung in tatters. The blue wool was scorched where Blitz’s talons had ignited it, and the brass buttons had melted into shapes that would later be described by physicists as “topologically inadvisable.” His tricorn hat was gone. He couldn’t remember when he’d lost it, only that its absence made him feel lighter, more dangerous, less burdened by ceremony.
Blitz was not faring better. Several primary feathers were bent at angles that mocked aerodynamics. A thin line of red traced along his left wing where Pat’s knuckle had found the bone. He perched on the crossbar of the goalpost and breathed in short, ragged bursts, his chest heaving beneath feathers that had lost their sheen.
They stared at each other across the ruined field.
“Bird,” Pat said, leaning on one knee. “Why are we doing this?”
Blitz opened his beak to answer, then closed it. He tilted his head, the way ospreys do when recalculating a dive, and found that the math wasn’t there. “I assumed you knew.”
“I figured you started it.”
“I arrived and you were already standing on the field with your fists up.”
Pat frowned. He tried to reach back past the adrenaline, past the world-cracking collisions and the howling crowd noise, to the moment before the first blow. Nothing. Just a vague sense that someone had told him this mattered. “So neither of us knows what’s at stake?”
“Apparently not.”
A silence settled over them, strange and enormous. The sky, which had been fractured by their combat, slowly stitched itself back together. Pat sat down on the fifty-yard line. After a moment, Blitz glided down and landed beside him, folding his wings with the careful dignity of a creature who refused to admit he was exhausted.
“Maybe,” Pat said slowly, “it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Blitz considered this. “That would be unprecedented.”
The intercom crackled.
Both of them flinched. The voice that came through was nasal, hurried, and carried the specific anxiety of a man reading liability clauses in real time. “Hey, uh, guys? Quick note. There’s approximately one-point-seven-six billion dollars in bets riding on the outcome of this, so if you could just, you know, pick it back up, that’d be great. You’re both contractually obligated to continue until a victor is determined. Per Section 14, Subsection C. We can send the paperwork down if you need to see it.”
The intercom clicked off. A brief, mortifying jingle played.
Pat looked at Blitz. Blitz looked at Pat.
“Want to just watch the commercials?” the osprey said.
Pat was already lying down on the grass, one arm folded behind his head, the other pulling out his phone and queueing up the videos.
“Commercials it is.”