Astronauta
Short Fiction by Karen Pierce Gonzalez
If you enjoy this feature and would like to see more, let me know with a comment, 💌 share, ♥️ like, or better yet, a 🔄 restack!
You can purchase Written Tales Magazine in print or digital, or become a paid subscriber and download your favorite editions. To view our upcoming stories & poems, please visit our publishing schedule calendar.
Drip, drip, drip. Silvio hears it. The sound of lunar water finally reaches him. Months of tracking the Chadrayaan-I space probe pays off for the 8-year-old who maps out the vehicle’s orbit to and from the moon. He vibrates. The pulse of success, of what infra-red sensors now prove, means he’s close to his wildest dream.
Slipping undetected out of the fifth-floor Via Madonna apartments in Florence, he stands in the shadows of 18th-century architecture and grins. The spacecraft’s news encourages the wispy boy’s hope of being an astronaut, possibly leading the first Italian expedition on the moon. In his heart, he knows it is time for his beloved country to have a front-row seat at the European space programs table.
He cannot wait.
At the Arno River between old Florence to the more modern Oltrarno district, Silvio glances back at the Duomo cathedral with marble wings shrouded in the amber glow of the night lights that tourists love. Crossing the Ponte Vecchio Bridge, he glides his small hands over medieval stones and thinks again of the Chadrayaan-I. It’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper spent years circling the satellite. Reports confirm ice on the southern and northern poles, untouched by sunlight, has pockmarked craters filled with frozen liquid.
Again, Silvio does the math. In the three days it takes the Chaydrayaan-I’s to travel back to Earth, he has noticed a new moisture in the air. Each day wetter. Does anyone else notice?
“There, hear it now?” He’d told his mother that morning as she filled the washing machine. “It’s like the way the shower head dribbles after the water’s turned off.”
“Silvio, I don’t hear anything. I hope you’re not making this up to get out of doing your chores.” She measured the laundry soap. “We’ll get your hearing checked.”
“No, it’s fine,” he had turned away. She tussled his light brown hair and told him, “Don’t be late for school,” she told him.
To his older brother Bruno, he had explained as they got dressed that morning, “Water on the moon means we can live there!”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” Bruno, combing his hair for girls at school, half-listened.
As Silvio gets off the bridge, he shivers. Eyes gleaming, he’s already read every article he could find about the quest and knows that, over time, theories about water changed. Now it’s been proven, he mutters. He knows the drip drip drip he hears might sound crazy. How can ice water escape the moon’s gravity and survive re-entry without anyone detecting its presence? He decides, his young mind racing to understand, that chunks of moon ice splattered against the vessel’s outer layer and stuck like glue until it entered the earth’s atmosphere.
It’s not supposed to happen, but it can. He tells himself that stranger things than this happen all the time in alien movies and comics.
Grinning, Silvio runs to the unlit Parco Prospect. A student of celestial curiosity who does not play field games with other boys, he is out of breath. Panting, he climbs into a swing, leans back, and opens his mouth. The drip-drip-drip is closer now; it perches on the outer edges of his ears. He zips up his parka, closes his eyes and pretends he is in the space suit he will wear one day on a lunar colony.
As the night darkens, he shudders as the air around him grows colder.
“Lunar ice is below -250 degrees Fahrenheit,” He had earlier told Bruno.
“As long as that doesn’t stop me from going out with beautiful girls, you can believe whatever you want.”
“-250 degrees Fahrenheit.” Silvio repeats that fact as he tucks his hands inside the parka’s pockets and shivers. He wonders what it would be like to be in suspended animation during space travel.
Now, hours past bedtime, the third grader’s eyelids droop. He pumps his legs to keep the swing moving, to stay awake, but they become heavy, and start to grow numb.
Just before midnight Bruno, on his way home, spots Silvio at the park. “Silvio? What are you doing? Brrr… aren’t you cold? Take my jacket.” He places it over his younger brother’s stiff shoulders. “You asleep?” He taps Silvio on the arm to wake him up. “Time to go home.”
Silvio does not move.
Bruno peers into his face. A drop of frozen water hangs on the edge of a frost-bitten smile.
“Silvio?” He grabs a hand. “You’re as cold as ice.”
Karen Pierce Gonzalez is an award-winning writer whose non-fiction, prose, and poetry have been widely published. Her chapbooks include Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs (Kelsay Books), Sightings from a Star Wheel (Origami Poems Project), and the forthcoming Down River with Li Po (Black Cat Poetry Press). In addition to her literary pursuits, Karen is a visual artist and folklorist.