The Peculiar Trajectory of Space Objects

by Nicholas Cook

Voyager 1
Nothing’s farther out of the solar system than Voyager 1. And even that still talks back. So I wondered what she meant when she wrote let’s keep in touch. I imagined her looking into outer space for something blinking, not quite sure what was a star.

Voyager 2
Her brother was older by a minute. We sat on his bed, rocket covers and all, everything taking off, sucked into the vortex that was his new ceiling fan. “Why is that so strong?” I asked, but he didn’t answer, said it was okay if I wanted to touch him.

Pioneer 7
Telemetry’s just a fancy word for data transfer. In school they talked about the tail of Halley’s Comet, how it’d be back in seventy years. More time than Pioneer’s been alive. The entire comet eventually worn to a stub. My teacher played his favourite song, I Dreamed a Dream. “People disappear into the ground all the time,” he said. “Not like it’s a world away.”

Mariner 9
When I closed my eyes I imagined levitating under the sucking power of her brother’s ceiling fan. Air enveloping me like a reverse descent into the red planet. The soil was so dry they had to delay imaging from Mariner 9 for months. We learned a body underground will take ten years to decompose, add in the coffin and you’re up to fifty. “Satellites are just pieces of metal eventually falling to Earth,” I told her brother when he started crying.

About the Author

Raised in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, Nicholas Cook has lived in New York City and San Francisco before settling in an 80-year-old house in Dallas with a grey-faced greyhound named Jane. His fiction has appeared in 100 Word Story, A Quiet Courage, New Flash Fiction Review, Camroc Press Review, and elsewhere. He works in technology and drinks too much iced tea. He’s currently at work on a novella-in-flash. Find him at nicholascook.com.