Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour.

The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights.

space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet.

even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That’s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.

the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing. That seems to be the only thing – and, granted, it’s changed everything, but all the same. We’re a few flint-strikes ahead of everything else, that’s it.