Sunday 7 June 2020

'Space Trip' by Linda Irish

Fixtures and fittings are not included but Pres says we can sort those out after.

Lately he’s been saying that a lot.

“Are you experienced in handling spacecraft, then?” asks the seller, whose rickety looking semi sits awkwardly with her claim to be a master builder.

“Stand aside,” says Pres, unhooking the tiny hatch with a self-conscious flourish.

His hands are shaking slightly, and I wonder again if we were going about this in quite the right way.

Feet first, as my mother would have said.

It would have been so much simpler to send our vital essence instead, to Mars, or the moon, or as glitter sprinkles across the galaxy, but we kept missing the submission windows.

“Can you pass me a spanner, love?” asks Pres, from within the flimsy metal casing, his voice carouselling elusively around my head.

The seller loses interest and starts an air-video call with some ban-fake-green agitators. 

Isolation pod holidays were popular earlier in the century, only falling from favour when so many of them disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of space and never returned.

Other technologies took over, then; personalised and multi-flavoured security fields.

Nobody else wanted this patched up curio, but Pres and I made a vow: to greet our ancient Earth, just once, through the faraway prism of unbroken promises.

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