Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one.

and it isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded – grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.

companionship is our consolation for being trivial.

Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.

But the day I watched a video of the first moon landing with my father and uncle, well, it was my father’s face. He seemed to be full of this wanting, him and my uncle, like it made their own lives feel both empty and full at once. I didn’t like it. It put me off. To think of my dad’s face all hungry and lacking. Nell thinks she knows it, that look, a look men get watching sports, football, say, in support of a team that affirms them by winning and then straight away negates them, because the glory belongs to the team, not the man sitting on the sofa who will never, now, be on a team like that.

They’ve got here, is what they think. You get here and your life starts anew and everything you brought along you brought in your head, and unless it’s needed it stays in your head because this is it now.

and how, in that grief which she couldn’t even begin to understand, she buried herself in an obsession. Her father thinks she might still be burying herself in it now.

He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude.

I’ll cut you a deal, Chie says to the mice. I’ll come back and see you this evening if you get on with learning to fly. You can’t keep clinging to the bars of the cage for the rest of the time you have, which isn’t long I must tell you. You’re going to crash into the Atlantic Ocean in a couple of months, and if you survive that you’ll then be analysed in a lab and swiftly sacrificed to science. Got to let go, might as well do it now.