The following is a short story that sets up a universe that I’m currently writing a collection of short stories in. I hope you enjoy it.
There was a rocketship outside town. One of the old ones, like you seen in a comic in the 1950s. It was only bout the size of a trailer. Barely big enough for a family, really only meant for two. It was on its belly, so there weren’t no main access doors, but there were portholes all the way round it, and over time most of them had been screwed off. You couldn’t break the perma-glass without fancy equipment, but with enough time, a crowbar could pop off the safety ring holding the whole mechanism in place. The rigors of space were one thing, the whims of intrepid middle schoolers were a whole nother.
Astra-Dean was gonna get in there, she swore it. Her brother Michael said the big kids had all tried but were too big to fit through the porthole. And all the little kids were too scared. Not Astra-Dean. She weren’t scared of nothing. ‘Cept snakes. Mama told her how to tell the regular ones from the venomous ones but she could never remember which was which and just figured she ought not bother with any of them. ‘Sides, there weren’t gonna be no snakes in a rocketship. Supposedly a dead body, but no snakes.
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Space travel had been all the rage when Earth was ending. They found all these other Goldilocks planets, and suddenly we knew how to get to ‘em. They’d been saying for years that Earth wasn’t gonna be habitable forever, so off humans went. Scientists were first. Well, really it was like the olden days. Test pilots were sent off in stasis chambers at top speed—we were only traveling near-light back then—and they get dropped onto a planet just to make sure we can survive. And we did! So first the test pilots, whose only jobs were to keep breathing, then the space scientists. Then the engineers. Then they was hiring for off-world construction and space travel was gonna open up to a new class of people! Roughnecks and rednecks got jobs building housing complexes and water systems on planets with names like “Freedom” and “Endurance.” We were really bad at naming things. But once everything was ready for folks to start moving, not everybody had a chance to go. Space travel was expensive. Even when the lightspeed engine got invented and things were supposed to even out, it still ended up being the super-rich getting first pick of where they wanted to live. Then the really-rich. Then the regular-rich. Pretty soon we had a handful of planets that really only lacked one thing: poor people.
Some folks figured we’d be better off, even if no one else ever got to go to the new planets. And they were sorta right. Relatively speaking, poor people weren’t nearly as poor no more, and people who had been comfortable before were now the top of the food chain. That was just in America though. Most countries had formed science alliances with other countries and sent families to the new planets via lottery. Of course the super-rich still managed to go first, but it was only here that they were paying their way above the table, not below it.
Huge ships were built in orbit. They were bigger than the biggest aircraft carriers. They carried eight thousand people at a time, traveling faster than light. It was a year’s journey, and everybody but a small crew was kept in stasis and woken up on arrival. At least, that’s how it went at first.
They tried real hard to keep the faster-than-light engine under wraps. But with organizations all over the world figurin’ it out, it ended up not bein’ all that difficult to get your hands on the schematics. What if you didn’t have to spend a small fortune getting your family on one of the government ships? And the era of the personal spaceship was born.
They didn’t make them very well at first. A lot of folks died. It was all illegal at first, and no two places built them the same. But then the government finally said to hell with it and legalized the whole thing and threw some safety standards out for good measure. Like the times of the three point seatbelt, everything got a little safer. Then everything got a little cheaper.
There were still billions of people on Earth. Even with a few million on other planets, and more leavin’ everyday, it was still a lot. But the ones that left seemed to take so much with them. It had taken a long time, but before a single thing had been built off-Earth, some decisions were made. It weren’t easy decisions, neither. Folks got real mad that for so long everybody knew what was wrong but nothing was being done about it. Things got rough. Some people called it revolution. Some called it war. In the end it was decided that the new Earths weren’t gonna just be copies of the old. No more billion-dollar companies. No more dollar-a-day factory workers in distant warehouses making cheap crap for middle America. The people who owned those companies weren’t too happy with the news. Factories shut down. Businesses closed. Supply chains collapsed. A lot of folks died. Again. While all those rich folks were leaving Earth, everybody left behind had to rebuild a life on a planet that nobody knew if it would survive or not. But amazing things happen when you start shutting things down. Earth thrived. It took some years, but finally the planet wasn’t in danger of burnin up no more. They was still shipping people off by the thousands, and would be for decades to come, but Earth was breathing again.
It was chaos for a good long while. All the workin parts were there, all the infrastructure, but everybody was in shambles. Half the world’s governments was on a different planet and there weren’t no mad rush to be holding elections right off the bat. It was apparent that they—whoever they were—hadn’t thought everything through before gallivanting off to outer space. But survival was what humans were built for, and they did. They survived with fewer luxuries, but they survived. A new avenue for survival had arisen: space.
Everybody knew where the new planets were. And it ain’t like you gotta take left turns in space. Everything is just a straight shot. You gotta be real careful with your trajectory so you don’t miss what you’re aiming for, but if you’ve got a ship that’ll do course corrections even that ain’t the end of the world. Humans had figured out real-deal space travel and pert near everybody wanted in.
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Astra-Dean had a plan. She had a backpack full of supplies. Flashlight. Rope. Snacks. Pocketknife. Umbrella. Gloves. Another flashlight. One of those clunky instant cameras where the photo just pops right out. She’d even spent her own savings to get extra film for it just for today. She wasn’t bringing nobody with her. This was a solo adventure. She’s pretty sure Michael would have tagged along if she’d asked but she didn’t want anyone with her, at least this time around. She didn’t want nobody to see if she failed, or worse, chickened out. She was going there right after school. It was lightly misting, threatening to turn into real rain, so she didn’t think anybody would be making their way to hang out at the rocketship today. She really hoped not.
The ship was in Rocket Holler. Cause of course it was. It’d been there so long nobody knew what the place was called before it was there. It was about a mile from the school, on the other side of the old state park, so Astra-Dean started walking as soon as the last bell rung.
“Hey! Where you goin?” her brother Michael yelled.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, not even turning around to look at him.
“Uh huh. Sure. You better be home by supper or Mama’s gonna ground us both.”
“Yeah yeah.”
Astra-Dean walked on, gripping her backpack straps. Nobody followed her. She walked down the street, away from school, until she got to the main highway. She walked east a ways until she came to a crude path between the trees. This would take her around the border of the park. She stopped to tie her shoe and continued down the path. It was wide enough for a small car if the driver was adventurous enough. The trail had definitely been made by feet and not cars, though. It was evenly downtrodden across the whole track, instead of having two divots from wheels.
The fence that marked the edge of the park was torn loose from its post from years of youth misuse. She easily slipped through it. The path cut through some fairly thin woods until it dropped off steeply into the holler proper. Astra-Dean half-walked, half-slid down the grassy slope until the earth beneath her evened out. There it was. Just a few yards away in all its rusted glory. She walked slowly towards it. She’d been here dozens of times, but never alone, and never with the plan to get into the thing. Leaves and sticks crunched beneath her sneakers. She was barely breathin. She stopped and shook her head. What was she doin? Nothin out here was spooky. It was still broad daylight.
“Get a grip, AD,” she mumbled to herself. Hitching her backpack up higher she marched right up to the ship. One of its porthole covers was on the ground a few feet from it. The perma-glass was cracked, but not broken. It was deep in the ground, only half of it sticking up. She nudged at it with her shoe. It didn’t budge. Astra-Dean walked right up to the ship until she was close enough to touch it. She didn’t yet. Just took a few big breaths. She finally reached out and ran her hand over the hull. The parts that weren’t rusted were still smooth. It was a steel-blue color now. She wondered what it had looked like in its heyday. She bet it was beautiful.
She stepped back to look at the whole ship. Nobody really knew how it had gotten out here, but the way its belly was half buried in the earth, it didn’t seem like it had come willingly. She walked around it, her hand running along its hull. She stepped around its external thrusters, her hand skipping over the spider-web covered maw of its main engine. The other side was in the same shape, rust covering it from the ground to about Astra-Dean’s nose. She had to reach her hand up to be able to keep off the rust. On the far side were open portholes, too. The only visible one that was still intact was back here, close to the ground. The portholes were spaced out about every couple feet. They were wide. Her shoulders would fit through one easily. Probably.
She’d thought carefully about which porthole she was going to attempt. One of Michael’s friends had made fun of her, but the last time she was out here she’d taken a couple pictures of the ship so she could decide ahead of time which one she wanted to try to fit through. Kids had been climbing on the thing for ages so it weren’t hard to get all the right angles. The porthole on top would have been the easiest to get through. The whole mechanism was pulled clean off the ship, leaving just a smooth hole behind. A few brave kids over the years had stuck their heads in through it to see but it was too dark inside. There was probably a time of day when the light came through just right that you’d be able to see what was inside, but it weren’t any time of day that kids were out runnin around in. Anyways, she couldn’t use the top porthole. Sure, she could get in that way, but gettin out would be a whole nother story. She didn’t know if there was anything in the ship she could climb on, so it wasn’t worth the risk. She still considered it for a moment. She’d brought rope for a reason, after all.
She shook her head and moved back around to the other side of the ship. She knew where she was going in from. She’d still have to partially climb up the ship to get in, but she was confident she could get back out. Astra-Dean had very nearly brought her mama’s little folding step stool to school with her in her backpack, but she figured that was a little cross the border of suspicious. Mama would not like the idea of her trying to climb into the old rocketship. She didn’t really want her kids hanging around it at all, truth be told. She thought it was dangerous. Astra-Dean just figured she believed the rumor that there was an old, decomposed body still in the ship and didn’t want her kids near it.
Astra-Dean didn’t know if she believed about the dead body or not. Surely someone would have found real proof of it if it had really been out here so long. But then again, no one knew what was inside the old thing either. Had someone before her gotten in? Did they take pictures? She knew a long time ago there was cameras that didn’t need film and you could just carry around in your pocket. Her history teacher swore up and down her grandparents had one when they were young. But that was Before. Her teacher said that so many things changed when all the factories stopped that when things started up again we couldn’t go right back to how things were. We had to start over. We had all the knowledge but not the resources so computers couldn’t fit in your pocket no more. Astra-Dean had a hard time imagining it. She struggled to see how the big, square monitor that sat on the desk in their living room could ever squish down to be small enough to carry in her backpack, much less a pocket. Seemed like a crazy, but awesome, thought to her.
She thought about the Before times a lot. It was her favorite part of history. It just seemed to her like everything was happening at once and it was happening then. Some of it was scary, like the plague. But then she’d read bout huge music festivals and how the internet got to the point that the whole world could laugh at the same joke. That part of the non-fiction section of the library was her favorite. She’d read about how people used to use their pocket computers to reunite lost dogs with their owners and get left-behind toys to little kids. She’d read about protests and marches and how kids just a few years older than her big brother were dead set on changing the world. And they did. To a certain extent, she supposed. They couldn’t stop the inevitable from happening, but maybe that’s just what it means to be inevitable. Astra-Dean didn’t know.
The rocketship wasn’t from the Before, she knew that much. There weren’t personal ships like this until decades later. She wished she could look up who made it, but any identifying marks were either buried in the dirt or had been eaten away by rust. Astra-Dean loved a good mystery. She loved not knowing the answer to something and getting to track it down. Her brother said she was a nerd. She didn’t care. She done what research at the library that she could. Her best guess put the ship at about 50 years old, but she couldn’t know for sure. She wanted to know so bad though. It was eatin at her. This belonged to somebody once. It meant somethin to somebody, she just knew it.
She walks around to the porthole she’s chosen for entry. It’s about head-level to her, but she’s been practicing on the monkey bars for weeks now and she’s certain she’s got the strength to hoist herself up there. It’s unfortunately not one of the ones where the entire window mechanism has been torn off. Just the inner bit that held the perma-glass in place. There’s still a metal ring bolted to the exterior of the ship. And it ain’t like the hull is just a thin slice of metal. It’s thick, made out of all sorts of alloys her science teacher is always rambling on about. There’s insulation too. Space insulation. All that sort of stuff was way more streamlined by the time this ship was built, but there will still be a good 8 inches of hull before she’s in the ship proper.
Astra-Dean pulled her gloves out of her backpack. They were just knit winter gloves but they were all she had so they’d hafta do. Making sure her backpack was secure, she reached for the porthole and pulled herself up.
Oddly enough, the personal spaceship industry made the world feel a little more normal, all things considered. There was factories again, albeit different ones than there used to be. They weren’t cheap enough for everyone and there weren’t no used ones floating around, but they were still a pretty big deal. Even though Earth weren’t on the edge of burnin up no more, plenty of people still wanted out. The new planets meant new opportunities and chances at new lives. Some folks were lucky enough to get on the government ships that were goin out. Others poured their savings into a ship of their own.
There were two ways to travel in a personal spaceship: the long way and the short way. Both of em technically took the same amount of time but one felt a lot shorter than the other. The short way was for rich folks who could afford to put stasis chambers in their ships. Stasis chambers looked kinda like, well, kinda like caskets. Which was weird considering you went in them to sleep for a long time. Rich people got the royal treatment when it was time for their launch. They were placed in medically induced comas and then put in the stasis chambers that kept them that way for the entire journey. If for some reason they happened to wake up and the medical protocols in the chamber couldn’t put them right back under, the artificial gravity automatically kicked on and there were plenty of supplies to last the remainder of the trip. Otherwise they spent a year asleep.
If you weren’t rich enough to afford stasis, you got to take the long way. These were the folks who spent the trip awake, living out their lives in a tiny vessel for the full year and change it would take to reach the new planets. The number of people you were taking determined the size of the ship. The biggest were around 20,000 cubic feet and could hold a family of eight or so, depending on ages and size. The smallest were maybe a third that size and were a snug fit for two. The smaller ones were about the size of a single wide trailer. All the ships, no matter the size, came with the ability to create artificial gravity, but the smaller ships could only have it on part of the time. Most people chose to sleep in zero gravity and then be awake while the gravity was on.
It took a certain mental fortitude to be able to calmly live in a spaceship for a little over a year. Not everyone was up for it. If you were put in stasis it was no big deal, but people who couldn’t afford that option usually had to go through a psychological examination before they were cleared to even buy a ship. It was all part of the financing application. A new normal for folks trying to find a better life. Those that passed the tests and filled out all the forms and signed away whatever property they owned on Earth that wouldn’t be coming with them, those got to experience the excitement of living in space.
Using the toes of her sneakers against the rusty hull, Astra-Dean was able to pull herself up and into the open porthole. She got her head in first, then her right arm, then her left. She pushed on the interior walls of the ship until more of her was in than out, and she went tumbling face first inside. She landed next to an ancient looking stationary bike. She could barely see it in the dark of the ship’s interior, but very few things in the world were bicycle shaped other than bicycles.
The floor beneath her was slightly damp, and she could feel it start to seep into her jeans. She stood up and pulled her backpack off her back. She still had her school things in it, unfortunately, but she shuffled those aside and groped around until she found what she was looking for: her flashlight. Her mother had a battery-operated camping lantern that she’d wanted to bring, but it was too conspicuous in her backpack so she’d had to leave it. Shame. She took a deep breath—the air in here tasted musty—and turned on the flashlight, half certain that she was about to be face to face with a rotten corpse or a skeleton.
The first thing she saw was the stationary bike. She stepped closer to it. In her reading she knew that some form of exercise equipment was mandatory on all spacecraft that people wouldn’t be in stasis on. Something to do with spaceflight atrophying musculature or some such. She reached out to one of the pedals with the toe of her shoe. It didn’t budge. The whole thing was rusted even more in-place than it had been. She turned the beam of the flashlight slowly to the right. Next to the bike was a big object built right into the ship. She couldn’t tell what it was made of but it wasn’t rusted like the bike. There were words stenciled on it. She stepped closer, shining her flashlight right on them. “WATER TANK” it read. She reached a shaky hand out and knocked her gloved knuckles against it. It sounded hollow. All the water must be long gone.
The chemical symbol, H2O was written beneath the label. Every time she saw something like that she thought back to science class, her teacher explaining how everything in the universe was just made up of atoms. Sometimes Astra-Dean felt like one day she was just gonna shake apart and become a shambling pile of protons, electrons, and neutrons.
She knew from her excursions to the library that ships like this had huge water tanks taking up one part of the ship. Everything got filtered and reused so you didn’t actually have to bring a whole year’s supply of water with you, but you still brought a lot. This was a ship that people would live on, not a stasis ship, obviously. Those were 90% storage and definitely didn’t have bikes. That also explained why it looked like it was upside down from the outside but was actually laying on its “bottom” from the inside. She knew the main access door was in the nose cone of the ship, as you had to be seated and buckled in there during takeoff. Cause the nose of the ship was “up” while it was on Earth, you couldn’t be in the living part of the ship until you was in outer space. Otherwise you’d just fall and land on the back wall.
Continuing to turn to the right, She saw a heavy-looking door with no window. It had a lever handle. She reached out and pulled it. It moved, but barely. Sticking her flashlight in her teeth, she used both hands and yanked on the handle. It turned with a loud click. Her eyes widened. She hadn’t expected it to move.
“What the heck…” she mumbled around the flashlight. Shrugging to herself, she tugged hard at the door. It came open so easily she fell back on the floor, her flashlight dropping and rolling away towards the now open door. There was a hiss of air as the door swung open. She pulled herself up and took a slow step towards the door. Crouching down, she snagged her flashlight from the slightly soggy floor. She stood slowly, shining her light in front of her. The beam of light fell on what looked like it was an instrument panel. Astra-Dean stepped forward until she was in the doorway.
This was the nosecone of the ship, the cockpit, she could tell. Everything was angled towards the front. Instead of windows there were screens everywhere. Most of them cracked. There was two chairs with elaborate buckles on them. Both were empty. Astra-Dean breathed a sigh of relief. No dead body yet. The air seemed a little less musty in this room. The door must have been shut tight for a long time. There weren’t much dust everywhere either. She stepped between the chairs and stepped up to the array of buttons and gauges on the panel that jutted out from the angled walls.
Fuel gauge. On empty. H2O. On empty. There were what musta been a hundred switches and buttons that she could tell once lit up. Switches labeled things like “OCS/AUX” and “MAN/AUT.” That one was switched to “MAN.” Curious, she reached out and flipped it. She jumped back, bringing her finger to her chest. It’d shocked her. She shook her head and turned around to leave the cockpit.
Remembering something, she turned back around and swung her backpack off her shoulders, dropping it into one of the pilot chairs. She pulled off her now damp gloves, stuffing them inside the backpack once she unzipped it. She rifled around inside until she found the camera she had brung with her. It was boxy, with a long strap she slipped over her head. She stepped back into the doorway, a half-step, really, considering how small the space was, and brought the viewfinder up to her eye. She pressed the button but nothing happened. She looked down at the camera in her hands, turning it around and over. Her mama had taught her how to use it ages ago but it had been a while since she’d done it herself. She fiddled with the various bits of it until one thing gave way and opened down in the front. It whirred. She brought the viewfinder up to her eye again and pressed the button. This time it worked and in just a moment an undeveloped picture was popping out of the front of the camera. She took it out and gave it a little shake before tossing it into her backpack and pulling the backpack back over one shoulder.
She walked back through the doorway, her flashlight beam ahead of her. Noting the stationary bike to her right, she turned left. Two boxy machines were stacked on top of one another. She giggled when she realized what they were. A washer and dryer. They even looked similar to the ones in her own home. Even in space nobody wanted dirty clothes. Butted up next to the washer and dryer was a cabinet of some kind. It looked wooden, with two doors that met in the middle. She carefully reached out and tugged on one of the doors. It swung open.
Clothes. At least that’s what they probably was originally. Now it just looked like damp, moth-eaten hunks of fabric on hangers. They smelled super musty and kinda gross. Astra-Dean flinched when she saw the spiderwebs draped across the corners of the closet. She weren’t scared of spiders the way she was snakes, but she still didn’t like them none. She opened the other door of the closet for a better look. Taking a step back, she pulled the camera up to her face again and snapped a picture.
Sweeping her flashlight and turning further to the right, she nearly collided with something. She jumped back, skittish at the prospect of things looming in the dark that she couldn’t see, before relaxing. It was a table. A booth, really. Two bench seats and the table in the middle all seemed to be made out of one continuous piece. It was perpendicular to the wall, with the back of one seat sitting flush to the curved hull. Stepping around the bench seat a little, it was obvious that this was the kitchenette of the ship. There was a little stove and sink even. Astra-Dean figured that it wasn’t out in the middle of the woods it would have felt homey. She knew people had to live in ships like this for a year or so to get to the new planets. She hadn’t ever thought of the fact that they would have to make the ship a home for that long. She took another picture.
The comfort one could expect while living in space for a year or so really depended on the ship you’d be spending your time in. There were all sorts of designs and models out there, though they all followed the same basic construction. They differed by style, and whether or not they came with all the bells and whistles. When it come to spaceships, bigger don’t always mean better. Some of the biggest ones they made were boxes on rockets. They had sleep pods and bathrooms, but nothing above the bare minimum to get you to your destination alive. The littler ones weren’t necessarily better neither. People called em “shoeboxes in the sky” cause of how tiny and cramped they were. Some of the smaller ships were okay though. They were made for couples or small families. You might not get a lot of privacy in a ship like that, but it wouldn’t be too bad if you really liked the person you were flyin with.
Some of the ships were notorious for their various problems. SB88s tended to wobble on launch until they were well clear of the tower. FTHC-7s were discontinued when three of them just exploded on the launchpad over the course of a month. G-625s were known to occasionally just not launch at all once they got to the launch pad. This was partly because they wouldn’t launch unless their fuel tanks were full (technically a safety feature so you didn’t run out halfway through the launch) but their gauges were notorious for not being accurate unless the ship was sitting nosecone to the sky. Yet it had to be fueled on its side. You might “fill up” a G-625 only to set it upright and the gauge to tell you that you were missing a quarter of it. That being said, you could also maybe burn some of the fuel on an attempted launch, leave maybe an eighth or so of a tank of fuel still in it but when you laid it down again the gauge would read empty. But once it was on a truck, that wasn’t really a problem. It wouldn’t be a problem unless the automatic launch sequence was started again, which, without people in the ship, wouldn’t happen.
Occasional problems or not, the smaller ships were cheaper of course, too. Not that that always helped folks. Buyin a spaceship wasn’t like buyin a car, or even a house. It was a lot of money for something you were only gonna use the once. First thing you had to do was decide what was makin the trip and what was staying behind. Own a house? Land? A car? Well you can’t take it with you. So these sorts of things were generally written over to whoever was selling the spaceship and they kindly let you continue living there until your launch day. Usually.
And then there were those poor folks who sold what they could, packed what they could fit, and were all strapped into their ship on launch day only for…nothing to happen. Sometimes, not too terribly often, ships just didn’t launch. But it might burn too much fuel to try again, so the ship either needed to be refueled so you could try again or the whole launch was scrapped. Some people didn’t have enough money to buy more fuel. And they had usually sold everything they had to buy the spaceship already. What then?
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She turned around to see what was on the other side of the ship from where she was standing. It was a curved door that had fake wood paneling on it like she seen at her friend Nova’s house. There was just a normal-looking doorknob on it. With her flashlight in one hand, she reached out and gently turned the knob. It turned with ease, so she pulled on the door. It swung open to reveal a small room with a tile floor. Pointing her flashlight up, she saw a rusted showerhead. Below, she saw an old-fashioned fold-down toilet. There was a mirror on one wall. Her flashlight beam was briefly reflected back to her in it.
Stepping away from the bathroom, she continued left. A reflection of her flashlight caught her eye and she startled. What looked like two, cylindrical, chrome caskets were attached long side to the wall. Sleeping pods. These had always kinda freaked her out when they learned about them and their differences from stasis pods. People on ships this small only had gravity in shifts. They usually decided to sleep in zero gravity and go about their “day” shifts with gravity on. So they slept in these pods, where they got strapped in so they didn’t just float around in their sleep.
Swallowing loudly, Astra-Dean reached out for the seam of the pod, and tugged. It swung open so quickly she jumped back, just knowing a dead body was going to pop out at her at any moment.
Nothing happened. The pod door, or maybe it was a lid, swung open on creaky hinges and stopped. There was a long, unzipped sack-looking thing inside, open to reveal a series of buckles and straps. She closed the pod, flicking her eyes to the second one. Should she check it or just let it be? She licked her lips, chewing on them for a minute. She stepped over to the other pod and slowly opened it. It looked identical inside to the other. She let out a breath. Closing the pod, she gripped her flashlight with her teeth and took a picture of the two pods. Her camera flash briefly lit up the logo etched into the pods, that Astra-Dean hadn’t managed to see with her flashlight. The logo read “G-625.”
She was near the back of the ship now. The back wall was all storage cabinets. She knew from her reading that the main engine was behind there somewhere. It would have angled inward, in the same direction of the nosecone of the ship. She stepped up to one of the storage compartments. If there was still clothes in the closet, would there still be stuff in storage too? She weren’t going to be able to reach the topmost one, but the one on the bottom had a handle that was about mid-shin height. She squatted down, careful to keep her butt off the damp floor, and reached for the handle. She felt it move slightly when she pulled so she tried again, harder this time. The cabinet came open with a hissing sound like when the cockpit had opened. It must have been shut good for a real long time.
There were boxes inside. Astra-Dean couldn’t tell what they were made of but they obviously weren’t cardboard. She pulled one out and, realizing it was light enough to carry, she brought it back across the ship to the table she’d found. The tabletop was mostly dry, except for maybe a fine layer of mist that had managed to come in from the same porthole Astra-Dean had. The box was sealed with some kinda tape. She tried to peel it off with her fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. But Astra-Dean had come prepared. She felt around in her backpack until she came up with her pocketknife. She carefully unfolded it and pressed the blade to the tape, wanting to open it but not wanting to hurt anything that might be inside. She pulled the blade across the tape, the sound loud in the empty spaceship.
She carefully opened the flaps of the box and peered inside. The box was full of large envelopes. Flashlight in her left, she reached with her right hand and pulled an envelope out at random. Handwritten on the envelope in big, blocky letters was the word “wedding.” Frowning, Astra-Dean set the envelope on top of the box then flipped it over to find the opening. It was closed with a spring wrapped around a little metal brad. She unwound the string until she could open the flap all the way. Without looking, she reached inside. Whatever was in there felt thin and almost papery. But slick. She grabbed a few and pulled them out and set them on top of the envelope. They were pictures. Wedding pictures.
They had at one point been in color, but had faded with time. The first one was of just the bride, standing in front of a brick building with what looked like a red door. She was halfway facing the camera and the train of her dress was cascaded around her. She was beautiful. The next picture was of the bride and she assumed the groom at the front of a church, staring into each other’s eyes. Astra-Dean felt like maybe this was something she wasn’t meant to see. Like this was for someone else. She stuffed the pictures back in the envelope, the envelope back in the box, and the box back in the storage compartment she’d found it in. She shut the compartment door as hard as she could, hoping she hadn’t too terribly disturbed the memories within.
If you were unlucky enough to have a ship that didn’t launch, and unlucky enough to not be able to afford the fuel for another try, there weren’t many options left for you. You could try to sell whatever meager possessions you had left, or you had to sell the ship itself. Most dealers would buy back ships that didn’t launch for way less than they’d originally been sold for. So it’s not like you could sell the spaceship and then get your house back. You didn’t get enough money for that. Instead most folks were left to significantly downsize from their previous living arrangements, while also having to deal with any plans they’d made for the new planets. You could easily sell whatever plot of land or apartment you’d been hoping to inhabit, but the money wasn’t much.
So there you’d be left, no house on Earth and no way to get to the new planets, watching as the ship of all your hopes and dreams was carted away on a truck down the highway. They’d said you could collect your things from the ship back at the dealership. But if the straps holding the ship on the truck came loose in a turn and sent the ship careening off into the woods and the truck nearly into oncoming traffic? Well then you’d really lost it all.
Astra-Dean turned around from the storage cabinets and looked at the ship. There was really only one more section she hadn’t investigated. There was a squishy looking couch against the gently sloping wall. Beyond the couch was a faux wall, there to give the ship a feeling of separate rooms, probably. On the wall, which was more wood paneling like the bathroom door, was a picture frame. She walked closer to it. It was a cross stitch that said “Home Sweet Home.” She tried to nudge it, but however it was stuck to the wall, it wasn’t coming down. She stepped back to take a picture of the whole set up. Tilting her head to the side, she thought for a moment. She backed up to the back wall and took a picture. Then she walked to the cockpit door, turned around, and took another picture. She wanted to be able to see as much of it as she could when the pictures developed. She figured a couple that were already in her bags probably had already but she was gonna wait till she got home to check.
She sighed. She guessed her exploration was really done now. She didn’t know how she felt yet. Yeah, it was rusty and gross and cobwebby in places, but there were no dead bodies, no big secrets. She turned back to the porthole she’d come in through. She shoved her flashlight back in her backpack, making sure it was zipped all the way up. She shoved the backpack through the porthole first. She gripped the sides of the porthole, and a few things went wrong.
They’d actually gone wrong quite a while before. Ya see, if there was one switch in a G-625 that you didn’t want to flip while it wasn’t on the launchpad, it was the one that took it from manual flight to automatic flight. MAN/AUT. Automatic flight is exactly what you want on the launchpad. You don’t have to remember some crazy start-up sequence, and instead the computer does all the hard work for you. But G-625s, with their gauges that lie and rocket fuel that doesn’t degrade over time, you don’t ever want to start up the automatic flight while it’s just, say, lying out in the woods.
The spaceship, having spent that past who-knows-how-long lying dormant in the woods, makes one final trip. It’s not far. Its engine only ignites for a moment but it’s enough to send it another fifty yards into the holler. The force is enough that Astra-Dean hits the back wall with enough force to crack her head open and break her neck. Turns out there really weren’t all that much rocket fuel left in it. Just enough to ignite the external thrusters completely and for the main engine to sputter to life for a brief few seconds. Enough that the ship spins, tossing around Astra-Dean like clothes in a dryer.
A few hours after Astra-Dean should have reasonably been home, her brother spills the beans that she was probably out investigating the notorious spaceship. It's really raining by then, but her mama drags Michael out into the woods to retrieve her, thinking the girl is in a world of trouble. They arrive in the holler, wet and angry at the young girl, to find the smoky remains of some foliage and no spaceship. Astra-Dean’s mama screams. She nearly faints thinking the absurd thought that her daughter has gone to space without her.
They don’t realize she was in the ship until they find her backpack. The photos, all things considered, are beautiful. None of them are particularly well lit, the flash too bright for the foreground but not reaching to the back. But they’re careful documentation of her adventure nonetheless.
The search party eventually finds the path of destruction, and then finally the ship. It’s upside down from what it had been, and the nosecone is deep in the wet earth. The main access doors are bare to the forest air for the first time in decades, but they’re rusted shut. They hafta wake up a welder. It’s getting late.
They get the exterior doors open then the interior doors—the ones that opened up in the floor that Astra-Dean never even noticed—and her mama’s wails could be heard hundreds of yards away. It was the head wound that killed her, and it wasn’t instantaneous. She bled out more and more with every spin and bump until her little body just didn’t have any more to give.
In the aftermath, nobody knew what to do with the spaceship. Its Ship Identification Number went back to a now-defunct ship dealership. There’s nobody to collect it. It belonged to no one. The forest it’s in don’t belong to nobody. It’s just county land. They can’t afford to haul it out and scrapping it would cost more than what it’s worth. Serious people have serious discussions for a day or two. Somebody, maybe a deputy, maybe just some kid, tries to set fire to the interior of the ship but everything is so fire-retardant that nothing happens. The rain clears out most of the blood after a while. They fixed the fence at the edge of the park property and left the hunk of spaceship to rot in peace.
And nobody goes to Rocket Holler no more.