Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love.

She misses her toughness, her straightness, her distance. She expects that her mother was one of a kind. How many others have lain in a cot while an atomic bomb detonates? Not many. How many others lost their mother to that bomb on a terrible August day? Her mother’s life was quiet and static,

Because we were just talking about this; that these generations don't kniw mwn who've killed men because there was no war that sent droves off to fight like Vietnam. We wondered what is missing from people who have nothing to fear or no memory or firsthand stories that someone has the ability to punch them into place.

you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.

When the six of them talked about their spacewalks afterwards, they described déjà vu – they knew they’d been there before. Roman said that perhaps it was caused by untapped memories of being in the womb. That’s what being floating in space feels like for me, he’d said. Being not yet born.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

Your problem, in America, Roman says, is you don’t put enough condensed milk in things. Actually that’s the problem with the whole of the rest of the world.