As I mentioned in passing in a recent post on the forthcoming flick “Interstellar,” I have another idea for a short story. This one is not set in the far future, but only a few years down the line. No fantastical new tech, no aliens, no hyperdrive or zombies… and no world-ending drama.
Below, in good old blog-text-format, is the first page and a half or so of the tale, as scribbled out since last night. Minimal editing so far. But I am curious if this interests anyone. If so, please comment.
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Mockingbird
“Shit.” Fred didn’t wait for the rest of the numbers to be rattled off on the TV over the bar; it was already clear that this lotto ticket – like the hundred or so before it – was not going to be a winner. Sighing once again, he tore it in half, and in half again then crumpled the shreds into the disused ashtray a few feet down the bar.
Gordi the bartender shrugged. “You’re wasting you money on those,” he said, nodding towards the sad remnants of the lotto ticket. “It’s a tax on dumb, you know.”
“Yeah,” Fred replied, a little sadly. “You know me, I live in hope.” He frowned.
Gordi chuckled. Of the bars two dozen or so regulars, Gordi placed Fred at the Number Three Saddest position. Number Two was sitting next to Fred, well on his way to being three sheets to the wind. Number One was in the hospital. If what he’d heard was true, within a few days everyone would get to move up a notch in the rankings.
“So how are ya, Bill,” Fred said to Number Two while leaning forward onto the bar.
“Meh,” Bill muttered into his mug. “Same old, same old.” He took another chug of his beer and leaned back on his stool. His tired eyes glassed over, losing focus as he looked up towards, but not at, the stained ceiling tiles. Fred noticed the look in Bills eyes and knew what was coming. In fact, he looked forward to it.
“Damnit,” Bill said to nobody in particular. “I usedta be somebody.”
It started off the same way, every time. Bill would launch into one of his drunken rambles; Gordi would move off down the bar while Fred would pay attention. Gordi had heard it all before. Bills tales of his years as an engineer held no appeal for him, especially when the bitterness crept in about the last few years of his career. But for Fred, the tales were a welcome diversion from his own life story, full of nothing but a job he hated in a cube farm he despised, an ex-wife and kids who wanted nothing to do with him and an apartment so small it’d be a human rights violation if it was a prison cell.
Bill had worked for NASA, Boeing, Lockheed… basically the entire American aerospace industry. He had devoted his life to the conquest of space, and for a lifetimes efforts had found himself drunk, unemployed and unemployable. Years devoted to projects, late nights, long weekends and a family left unseen, only to have those programs cancelled on the cusp of success drove him to distraction, despair and then to drink and divorce. Fred empathized greatly with the older man. While he did not have Bills education, nor did he work in aerospace, he, too, had wanted to go to space. But he hadn’t the talents needed to become an astronaut, nor the skills to become a scientist or engineer, nor the money to simply buy his way in. So, he was simply a fan of space exploration, and in many ways envied Bills life. But the way it all sort of curled up and died at the end of Bills career… here, too, Fred empathized. And so Fred dutifully listened to Bills yarns about rocket engines tested in the deserts of the Southwest and the swamps of Mississippi; launch vehicles designed but never built; missions to the planets that never left the drawing board. For decades NASA had gone nowhere but low Earth orbit, and for a while there it had looked like private launch companies might open space to regular folks, but the costs were so prohibitively high – especially after the regulations, litigations and bankruptcies that followed the crash of a spaceplane full of rich celebrities – that there was little hope of civilian space flight lasting much longer. And with the economy in yet another recession and politicians on one side of the aisle using the opportunity to blame all the troubles on rich people wasting money on such things, society as a whole had largely lost all interest in space.
A few hours later after the bar closed and the patrons worked their ways home, Fred would collapse into his small bed and dream the dreams that Bill had given him. And when he woke, for a brief moment he remembered being an adventurous spaceman, and it made him smile; then he remembered that he was nothing of the kind, and that made him sad. And so every Friday night, Fred would stop at the gas station, pick up a lotto ticket and then go to the bar to have Bill fill his head with broken dreams. And so it went for years.
…
Gordi dutifully tuned the TV to the local station covering the lotto drawing, shaking his head at Freds silly insistence upon buying the damnfool things. Well, he thought to himself, if people didn’t buy damnfool things I’d be out of business. And so he didn’t give Fred too much guff over it.
Bill had had an early start. He was already deep into a monologue about how rockets could be made smaller and cheaper, how during the “Star Wars” days he had been involved in the design of dirt-cheap vehicles that would be needed to launch the thousands of space-based missile interceptors that Reagan assured the world the US was working on. “With the manufacturing capabilities we got now,” he slurred, “we coulda just printed the damn engines. Fiber wound the whole structure all at once in a lazy afternoon, gone home early and got drunk with the wife an’ kids.”
Bill rambled on. But for once, Fred was not paying any attention. Instead, Gordi noticed that Fred had watched the Lotto drawing on the TV with a look of confusion. Fred looked at his ticket and rather than tearing it up, he folded it and put it in his wallet. He frowned at his beer, lost in thought.
“Win something this time?” Gordi asked. “What, five bucks?”
“Something like that,” Fred answered, distractedly. Standing up from his bar stool, he put a few bills down on the bar, placed a hand on Bills shoulder for a second, bringing the old mans monologue to a stop, then simply walked out of the bar.
…