A Lover’s Balloon Ride Over an Ocean of Flame

Gibbons Rufus Wellington presented himself to the wife of Harold Beauchamp Utt, the cartographist from Le Flies.  Inviting Lucy for a quick spit of a lick in his balloon, the two departed for Munchinghouse Meadow.  
Gibbons had plans. An innovating aeronaut of early ballooning, Gibbons foresaw a future where ballooning would be a routine feature of everyday life, where clap-happy aeronauts would bubble ubiquitously about the skies of all the major cosmopolitan centers of the world, a future when ballooning would feature the opportunity for not only sunset viewing, marriage proposals, and whale hunting, but also, and this was where Gibbons’ true passion bloomed, amateur surgery.  A time when well-intentioned, but unexceptionally educated personages of a certain social class could dally away warm afternoons adrift on the breezes performing obscenely unnecessary bodily intrusive medical procedures. 
“Harry will be away the whole afternoon,” Lucy whispered lasciviously, stepping into the spacious wicker basket of Gibbon’s balloon.
“Delightful,” responded the man, boosting Lucy upon the operating table he had custom installed.   
The pioneering aeronaut reveled in the delights and dangers of ballooning and amateur invasive surgery and the two rose into the blue sky as Gibbons made the first long, shaky incision across Lucy’s sternum.  She, of course, screamed, loudly, very loudly.
However, Mr. Utt was no fool. Having graduated summa cum laude from the prestigious Tlon and Uqbar College of Cartography Mr. Utt was a man of astute observation. When his wife’s once flawless countenance, Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, began to feature a growing number of rather grotesque scars that never seemed to heal, giving her an appearance of, he flinchingly admitted to himself, the very maps with which he whittled away his life, his maps, with their jagged and rambling lines of borders and topographic elevation.  When he began to observe her scared and jagged face he surmised correctly that his marriage had reached a certain stage and he began to plan accordingly.
Of which planning and its apocalyptic execution consisted: Mr. Utt, dressed in a plain coat with light-colored trousers, hid in the lush foliage bordering Muchinghouse Meadows watching his wife step into Gibbons’ balloon.  Upon liftoff, Mr. Utt stepped forth, removing from an inner pocket an elaborately constructed device upon which pulsated a large red button. Ah, the archetypical button of doom! 
     Chuckling maniacally. Mr. Utt pushed the button activating a series of events, much too convoluted to explain at present, that set the entire world ablaze.   
     As the global flames crackled, killing countless billions, including the malicious Mr. Utt himself, Lucy and Gibbons realized, in an instant, the dreadful situation in which they found themselves, for with a world on fire, there was nowhere to land.   
     This conundrum was metaphoric to the lovers.  
     However, more scientifically, even allowing that a miraculous island of unsinged loathing existed someplace for the two to alight, even allowing this contingency was futile, for the world fringing flames sent wave after pulsating wave of sizzling air skyward pushing the soaring balloon higher, every higher into the dark ether of space and time where all lovers, it is now known, perish. 
     They, of course, screamed, loudly, very loudly.