This Rocket Ship is Undoubtedly Going to Explode

timothy froessel

HARBOR PULLS OUT A PACK OF CIGARETTES and his last-leg lighter from his back left pocket and lights the first one he manages to grasp his fingertips around. From his back right pocket, he pulls out a deck of cards. Swiftly. Jack of clubs, two of clubs, eight of diamonds, two of hearts, ten of diamonds, four of clubs, queen of diamonds. It is at this moment that Harbor realizes he doesn't exactly remember how to play solitaire, but that doesn't matter now. Nothing matters now. Not the lighting of the cigarettes, not the luck of the draw. Not the proximity of the stars nor the air he has left. This is because, as you may have gathered from the title, this rocket ship is undoubtedly going to explode.

Harbor the Spaceman. Harbor the Explorer. Heroic Harbor. The kids had a few different names for the planet’s newest astronaut shortly before his launch, shortly before he is to turn into nothing but millions of pounds of fire in distant space. A promising young cadet when he first entered the Astronet program, he quickly rose to challenges and then up the ranks to become the youngest astronaut in Astronet’s history. Now, he has replaced the beloved Captain Kilowatt as the head astronaut in the planet’s program on their missions to the sun. 

At the launch party, engineers assured him safety wasn’t even a concern. They insisted that all the bolts were screwed in tightly and all the wires were triple-checked and secure. One particularly antsy scientist promised Harbor five different times that he wouldn’t ever even need to activate the backup battery, as the trip around the planet and to the sun was a riskless trek that Kilowatt had done dozens of times before. But as he surfs the astronet now, he’s come to a strikingly unfamiliar situation, one that no amount of safety procedures or psychological evaluations could ever prepare someone for: he’s about to die. When the intercom went out, he assumed he would still be able to safely procure a few capsules of sunbeams and then guide his way back to his home, even without communicating with base. When the lights started flickering, he danced the lever to activate the backup battery, but that battery didn’t seem to help the brightness beam back. It wasn’t until the engine briefly paused that Harbor realized he was in big trouble, and by the time both of the batteries were prematurely drained, he knew he had a fate to accept. 

Harbor paces around the rocket ship. Distractions have made themselves a tough thing to find when death is imminent. He can flicker the lighter and shuffle the cards and look at the unnamed stars all he wants, but he thinks of his home like a long lost love right now. 

Panic instills itself in many folks, although some of the more optimistic scientists at the launch site, unaware of the chaos they’re soon to witness, still think that Harbor could procure some of the sunbeams and get back safely. Most, including Harbor’s wife, are separate from the optimistic folk and realize that something must’ve gone wrong. Rumors spread across the site. Some frame Kilowatt as a saboteur trying to force himself back into the program. Others spread a story that one of the head scientists had warned the entire launch committee that the new types of bolts were almost certain to melt away from the heat of the rockets and cause the ship to disassemble mid-launch. I’m here to tell you that none of these tall tales are true. No ill-intent was ever to be read in this short story. This is merely just a freak accident caused by nothing more than a few wires malfunctioning, butterfly-effecting their way into the slow, certain dismantling of this rocket ship.

And so, as those track-meet wires fuse and defuse and refuse in an endless cycle of last hope here on the rocket ship, Harbor’s wallet emerges from yet another back pocket. He opens it up, showcasing a picture of that wife, Elegie. How she was delicate. My, oh, my, she was sweet. So sweet she could rot the teeth straight out of his mouth with whatever compliment she’d shower him with. Harbor realized this during their second date when, after Harbor spilled an entire boiling cup of coffee on himself, Elegie did the same in solidarity.

They met under darkness but they saw the light in each other’s eyes, each other’s windows. They’d knock on each other’s doors, hold each other’s hands, wear each other’s laughs. The look in his eyes when he saw her, and vice versa, all the same. There’s a pair of unnamed stars to Harbor’s left now, stars that won’t even be properly discovered until a couple of years from now. I invite you to close your eyes and imagine a pair of eye-like stars, gleaming a little bit brighter than the rest of the stars around them with a twinkle that says something delightfully calming. Just as you were (or might’ve been—I hope your eyes were closed), Harbor spent those seconds staring at those stars as they traveled past the ship’s windshield, pretending they were Elegie’s. Pretending that she was there saying “goodnight” or “I love you” or “stop taking up so much of my side of the bed” one final time. Pretending that this rocket ship wasn’t undoubtedly going to explode. 

Depending on who you’d ask, the two of them met at different times. Harbor would swear that she just showed up at his doorstep one day, and who was he to deny the prettiest woman he’d ever seen a glass of lemonade and a peach? An offering of a quick snack turned into a starlit picnic, inspired by her picnic cloth dress, where they each told each other passed down stories about who the sun was. Elegie, on the other hand, insists they met a day or two earlier at the observatory where they had a brief conversation, although Harbor couldn’t remember this interaction at the very beginning of their bloom. Harbor eventually remembered that chance encounter at the observatory, just as Elegie suspected he always did, but stayed committed to the bit just to twist her arm ever so jovially. 

The picture in his wallet is from a Kilowatt launch party a few years prior. Harbor laughs thinking about what happened. His smile lines age for one of the final times. Towards the end of the party, Elegie fell face first into a bowl of fruit punch, tinting her face the color of anger. He laughed as it happened and then helped her up, escorting her to no place other than the photo booth. They laughed and laughed and laughed until their noses started to bleed and kissed and kissed and kissed until the blood and the fruit punch on each other’s faces were indistinguishable from one another, and there they were, in a vertically elongated picture in his wallet, looking like red aliens when they were definitely not red, and, depending on where you come from, possibly not even aliens. Even in my transcendent state, I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as destiny, but there’s something lovely about how two of their sweetest moments came as a result of spilling drinks on themselves. 

The engine howls out some unfamiliar, unsavory tune once again, snapping Harbor out of his daydreaming and back into his fate-seeing. All the rattling on the ship shakes itself into a full chorus of noise. The unorganized cards on the floor softly beckon, while the empty capsules break and show themselves to be a shaky disaster waiting to happen. Just as Harbor finds himself engrossed in another daydream, this time thinking about a trip to the observatory he took with mother when he was younger, several of those sunbeam-less capsules collapse onto the floor. Harbor spins into the corner to avoid the glass sledding down towards him. The glass gets caught up in the deck of cards, cutting many of them. The joker gains a slit in his eyes. As the glass shatters, so does any final hope that the mission could be a success. Only one capsule doesn’t break entirely, and even that one has a crack in it.

Harbor has come from a world that’s had no light for years. When the sun set one night, mother sat in a chair, twiddling with a piano she had scarcely been known to play. And on the next day, the sun never rose. The planet had stopped rotating, the ballerina dancing on its axis taking a break, and they were forever shipwrecked on the dark side. Life went on. There wasn’t any alternative choice. Night and day blurred. Clocks ran out of batteries. Milkmen loosened the precision of their schedules. Children would sit atop streetlights and tell stories passed down from their parents and grandparents about what the summer sun used to feel like or how flowers used to bloom.

Harbor’s mother quite possibly had the best flowers. Mother must’ve been some expert gardener with a secret recipe or two because her sunflowers wouldn’t just bloom. They’d turn into something like rockets themselves and shoot up, taller than the buildings or the streetlights, practically reaching the heights that the rocket ships strove to get to. What a sight it was, but when the rotation stopped, they couldn’t last much longer. As it was, most of the sunflowers had trouble during the nights, even the summer nights, not to mention the cold, cold winter nights. They wilted away without a chance to even enter the ring. Mother, distraught with compassion, didn’t last much longer herself, but until her death pillow was fluffed and probably even after hiding six feet under, she thought of the sun like a buddy, her best buddy with whom she spent a few too many lonesome afternoons gardening or getting a tan with.

They talked about sunlight a lot. But not in full. Full is an awfully hard thing to be when you’re forgetting how the sunbeams felt more and more every second. Soon enough, only the most memorious of folks could remember something as simple as a highway during the daytime. That song blasting from the stereo. I won’t bother naming any particular song, because you undoubtedly have that song engraved in your soul, and no song that I could possibly guess would be that song. 

Some of the older folks could remember zooming down to the premiere spot to watch the sunset or taking a trip to the shorelines during the beginning of the season of the heat, and those folks were the ones who could remember how it felt to have that one song blaring beyond volume constraints as the sun greeted them like a relative on the other coast greets you for the first time since you were four or five. And, without fail that relative would admire how tall you had grown. When the sun greeted the older folks, the only thing they had grown was resentment towards a lonely, lonely winter. 

As their global solar panels raced towards their final page, the courageous Kilowatt spearheaded the movement to save their society. They could sorrowfully live without the flowers blooming, but there’d be nothing left but sorrow when the solar panels reached an epilogue. Backed by the observatory, it was his effort that led to the expansion of the observatory into a full-fledged launch site, and once all the streetlights had gasped their final breath, their crew snuck into the junkyard to lasso up all the old, rusty foreign cars and use their bits and pieces to create the very first rocket ship, a construction of a miracle more than it was a construction of technology. 

Elegie was at the very first launch with her folks, when even after all the nails had been bitten and all the tears had been shed, that junkyard ship returned with some sunbeams and a promise of liveliness for this broken-hearted planet. Boosted by high hopes and a space program that could launch even higher, the entire world gathered once a year, with a few less nails bitten off each time, to watch Kilowatt do the unfathomable again and again.

Harbor’s ship, which would appear much safer than one made out of junk scraps, has now disappeared from view of the planet, as Elegie runs out of fingernails to bite. She’s been at every launch, before Harbor was in her life and before Harbor was a cadet himself, and she’s been nervous a lot in her life. Whenever any of her pets ran away and whenever a day or a week seemed to pass by just a little bit too quickly she would feel nervous, but this is something bigger. Terror. Horror. Petrification through clear-colored lenses as the only man she’s ever loved disappears outside of the atmosphere. Nobody on-ground fully understands what is happening or how it could possibly be unfolding. They’re not even thinking about how they’re going to procure the next batch of sunbeams, or if anybody would even volunteer to do it without a bargain from the scientists, from the gods, or from both. They’re not really even thinking about Harbor and the rocket ship that is undoubtedly going to explode. Shocked up the hill and back down, I don’t think they’re capable of much thinking at all.

Harbor, on the other hand, spends these moments panicked from all the thinking. There is no escape hatch, no back-up plan, no rescue ships, no unfathomable boundless creature that can intervene with a saving grace of a hand from the interdimensional zones to show the man you’ve come to know as Harbor the way out of this predicament. There is just Harbor the Spaceman, Harbor the Explorer, Heroic Harbor, the slow decay of the engine carrying him, and whatever he’s left with for his final moments of life-before-death. Harbor has accepted his fate, he did that long ago, back in the beginning of this story when I was still ticking away the clock by talking about this man and his past. But just because he’s accepted his fate doesn’t mean he’s calm. Far from it, in fact. Uneasy, unsteady movements mark the shaking of his legs as the joker in the deck of cards in front of him stares. The joker grins. He laughs. He laughs at the mortality of a man. Harbor stares back. And the joker laughs again. He laughs through the scar on his face. He laughs at the blood and the guts that are about to be ricocheted off of stars that haven’t even been named yet when this rocket ship undoubtedly explodes. 

With an anger I’ve never seen in the entirety of his life, Harbor picks up the joker. His breathing intensifies, his tears are shed. His vocal cords go full throttle as he screams, cursing out the card that dared to laugh at him. He rips the card in half, tearing it at the scar, and drops it in midair, leaving it to umbrella down to the rocket ship floor. He breathes in an increasing amount of fear as something unusual presents itself to him. 

Ahead of him, right on track, Harbor stares straight at something he’s never seen before. As all the anger dissipates into nothingness, something in the distance glows, and all that nothingness dissipates into bewilderment. It shimmers on, a diamond in space, violently pulsing out everything that makes the universe. Of course Harbor’s heard of it, his line of work depends on it, as do most of the stories that get passed around from household to household on that planet he calls home. But nonetheless, with every passing day it became a little less conceivable to believe it actually existed. Every passing funeral does away with a memory of its glow that can never be shared again, and every painful birth hurts the collective belief of its radiating heat. It floats there, emotionless as any ordinary inanimate object, but it’s diligently extraordinary and it’s as animate as any living person Harbor has ever grown to know. 

The sun. 

Teardrops waver down Harbor’s face. A sun could never cry but a son could, and a son does, those teardrops collecting themselves in the ridges of his smile lines. That goofy, otherworldly smile that he inherited from his mother. Gone is the joker, gone is the jesting, gone is the anger, and coming back are all the stories and all the memories. 

Harbor’s first memory. The final day his kind had ever seen the sun. Mother, hitting random notes until she struck a chord that sounded pretty. The day-old Harbor, stationed in the crib adjacent to the instrument, awoke at that moment and listened to mother hitting notes so freely and loosely, as the earliest of all his memories started to form. She must’ve been passing time for quite a while before she looked to her side to see baby Harbor staring straight back, blinded like a rocketeer in sunlight, waiting for the notes to return to sound. She laughed, how mother often did, with a smile that could stretch from coast-to-coast. She was always self-conscious about her smile, gigantic as it was, but Harbor would tell anyone with a set of ears how he’d kill to see it only one more time. She kissed Harbor on his forehead and laid him back to sleep, as she returned to her sleeping quarters.

And now? Mother’s loosely constructed piano medley begins to replay one final time. Therein lies that song for Harbor, a collection of random notes engraved in Harbor’s soul, each as beautiful as it is uncalculated. Like an album closer, it reverberates, bouncing off all of his ribs like the cage itself were an instrument. The perfect closer, the perfect ending, it washes fear off of the beach in his mind as he waits for all of his teeth to lose their grip from the strength of his pure smile and fall off, one by one, landing next to the joker and the cigarette and the broken glass. In a cacophony of emotion, he sheds one final tear and sniffles one final time as that great big smile perseveres and overcomes any other impulse that Harbor may compulse towards. It may have taken him the entirety of one cold, cold life cycle, but he’s finally seen that great orb in the sky that mother never stopped believing in.

He was wrong about something, a thought he had near the beginning of the story. He thought that nothing mattered now, but he decides that he was wrong. Staring at the sun, feeling such a thing as unfabricated, true warmth, and damn near blinding himself, he decides that everything matters just as much. His mother playing the piano. The streetlight kids and the trips to the observatory and the stories he’d never get to tell again. Elegie. Elegie again, and for an infinitely lasting third time, Elegie. It all matters so, so much. He jitters his feet in excitement, almost stepping on a shard of broken sunbeam capsule as he recollects himself, feeling embarrassed. He does it as if he knows that I am watching and that you’re here reading along. That gigantic, otherworldly smile that he inherited from his mother comes back to bid adieu to the world, as Harbor thinks about everything, and everything that matters. 

And this, my dear, is the end of the story, as death often finds itself to be. For all intents and purposes, this ship could have already exploded. It doesn’t matter how much longer Harbor lasts. His fate is penciled in and he’s due for the afterlife, whatever it may be, if it may be. 

I feel envious of whatever it is one might consider life. Envious of breaths, mistakes, loves and being alive. Left out of having scars on my body and bruises that just appeared on the playground one day and made my knees and shins their homes. I’ve never found that sound, that particular sound that, to my ear, was just a little bit more lovely than any other auditory sensation. I’ll never get to care, I’ll never get to cry, and I’ll never get to regret. And, staring at a rocket man going through all of these at once, it dawns on a consciousness that everything matters, and that everything will always matter. Every bruise will have one of those metallic playground slides that it plowed its way into, every sound will coordinate a symphony of its own pure energy, and every fiber of my being, if I can even be considered being, will never get to have any of that. And maybe I’m thankful for omnipotence, but maybe it feels sadder to never get to be grateful for mortality. 

Oh, to be in the rocket ship that is undoubtedly going to crash. Oh, to be drinking from the fountain of memories so much that my life doesn’t even need to flash past my eyes as the engine sputs out its final song. 

Oh, to be.