Moonshot: new flash fiction... "flown anyway, too early, too late, with no chance at all"

This is a stunning piece of flash fiction, a masterclass in how to encapsulate a good story, characterisation and emotion in just 750 words. Andrew W. McCollough PhD writes science, culture, science fiction, fantasy, and quirk. (Love the "quirk" bit.) He is published in Scientific American Mind, Nature, and other academic journals.


Moonshot
by Andrew W. McCollough

The night was beautiful bright the day Billy decided to go to the Moon. They laughed at him then, Pa, brothers, they laughed at him, only ten, to try, and locked him, stupid, outside till after dinner. 

They forgot well past. 

He watched, cold on the porch, he and stuffed Ruffy dog – Pa drunk, Ma sunk on the couch, brothers cuffed and cowed-watched through the smeared glass and waited, waited, waited. 
 
When midnight came he took the rusty lock-nail from Ruffy's torn paw, picked the kitchen door, and crept past the TV couch to his room for a last check of pinned plan, drawn on white sheets in crayon, his flying dream of wires and bobs, spinning knobs, wings and blimp and rocket ship for him and Ruffy dog to fly the high, aching way to the moon.

Tonight, tonight, after all the long summer of sneak and steal bottle rockets, balloons, windup balsa airplanes, mechanical flapping bird toys, the attic grandfather clock, his brother's electric train tracks, Pa's bedside alarm; of hide and build in the trash pit fort behind the garage, safe under loose tarps and strewn branches; of thought to concoct his magnificent flying machine.

A few odds and bits of things to finish – fish bowl, fresh battery, steel ball bearing plucked from Pa's garaged truck – then fit through the dog door to the covered pit. The almanac said tonight the supermoon, the moon's closest approach (no need making it harder than it was) so he with ball bearing in hand threw back the tarps and climbed aboard. 

She was a miracle of rare device, powered of clockworks, with gas bags, bits floating and whirling and chuckling, a battery hamster deep within the springs and cogs, winding madly. Wings wide, she crouched, wires taught, round glass sights sought and found the singing silver destination moon.

His alarm clock rang time and he dropped the steel ball bearing down the trigger track to tick, tack, tock all the flips and switches throughout the machine's twisty turns and convolutions. The ball shot out the bottom, red-hot from electric friction on the track and struck the warning bell.

The countdown started, each pendulum swing of round steel drop in the mahogany grandfather clock rigged to trip a single gong.

Bong! 10, 9, 8,  he worried most about speed, height, a fall back to earth, but the moon, The Moon, high and silver and clean called to him as no distant sea or far mountain top, he must go! 7, 6, 5, his Ma, brothers, Pa, on the couch in blue glow but he had his stolen sandwiches packed, his red rocket thermos bottle cocoa-filled, so he's fine, he's always been fine.

4, 3, 2, last chance to quit but he'd rather die than go back or look back and just see, over there THE MOON, bright and close and looming over the high-pitched roof beam and the silver highway beckoning for 1!

Ignition!

Sirens blared, bottle rockets flared, the house-lights full on and Pa running with his gun, brothers, Ma, blinking, stunned, all too late, too late! The springs sprung, pendulums swung, rubber bands wound tight, supercoiled, unspun and the great machine trembled, leaped, dove up up up into the blue-black, star-specked moon drowned sky bearing him and fuzzy-stuffed Ruffy dog in their oilskins and fishbowl helmets high high on wish and dream and hope to outrun all that down there.

But hope and wish and dream is no substitute for rocket science, or engineering, or the cold calculus of oxygen and temperature and speed. 

He flew high, higher than any ten year old boy in a home-built rocket ship had any right to fly and the worst was not to die but that they were right, in the end.

The brightness grew, the silver moon, and filled his eyes and throat and chest with the yearning of a dream, seen through thinning air, so clear, so close, too far. But there was not enough air in his leaking fishbowl helmet, though more air than down there, his warming blankets not thick enough, the cold too cold but not as cold as his narrow bed. Almost, his reach was, not enough, but further than ever before. 

When the ice silvered his eyes he was not discontent.

​So he died, just below the top of the sky, alone, in close company with all others who'd flown anyway, too early, too late, with no chance at all.