The rainbow in the sky has anxiety as the planets cry and the moon tips over. His spacesuit is uncomfortable, he thinks, as he floats outside the ship trying to make a repair to a component he doesn’t even understand. He turns his head toward a beautiful blue planet, not Earth, and wonders what it would be like to walk around down there.

“That’s Nebius,” a voice inside his space helmet says.

“How the hell did I even become an astronaut?”

“You faked it. Your life is a hoax.”

“Thanks for the confidence boost, R2-F2.”

“Are you almost finished?”

“Yes. I’m just letting this thing do all the work.”

A small robotic extension is busy making repairs to a golden shield coupling and extension fuse chip cradle lock.

“I hope they realize in Houston that I’m just making things worse up here. I just want to come inside and read a book by a window as space floats by. I’m a dreamer, not a doer.” He taps on his helmet and clears his throat. “Houston?”

“Go ahead Aries 9.”

“I quit.”

It was dawn on the edge between night and day five years later. Wet, buttery grape jelly floats atop an English muffin at a small-town New Mexico diner made of turquoise and tin. The plate is colored used white. It has gray veins. There are bacon and eggs beside the English muffin. A cup of warm coffee near his right hand—the one who was once an astronaut but now someone who travels along the highways and byways of time and space at his own pace. He’s happier now. He makes his own rules. Goes where the stardust takes him. His apartment is white adobe in this place. Second floor with a veranda. It feels like he’s high on devil’s lettuce.

The charms at the door of the diner sparkle in the cold sun. The air smells of desert and leather and cooking. The talk is low, nearly muted. Suspicion flares in random sets of human eyes. Love and wonder bloom in others. Dishes clink in the background. Voices of the workers quickly speaking Spanish float upon the air. A cash register clangs. The door opens, closes. People come and go. Wind intrudes. He looks out the window. Mountains in the far distance are colored purple haze. It all feels like a movie. He gets up to leave…

Then another place in another sector, dimension, dream world. Blue sun beyond black limbs and branches. A walking path. Grass clipped close and the color of winter hibernation. Water, out there, somewhere. Sloshing and icy. Another apartment along the galactic, sporadic, star-studded thoroughfare. These apartments, these stops as he travels through the realms of life and death. He wonders why he keeps dreaming of apartments. Yet they comfort him, somehow. A place to hide and call home. A place to drink too much, a place to sleep and look out a window, a place to sit on the couch and stare at walls, a place to simply exist even if alone. A place to count stars at night as they hover above soft pink and blue lights. The music down below, in the distance. The gathered talk and dance. He somehow wishes but then doesn’t… Fireworks splatter color on the canvas of night. The pops unravel memories. He looks up at the wondrous pitch of the universe, a black yet bejeweled phantom, chariots sparkling, and he knows, the unconventional architecture of his immortal life will always be there, and he will never die.

By

Aaron Echoes August