The Rocketship 4
0 Comments | Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand, Jan 1, 2009 | by MARRIS David
The fourth part of the Press Summer Fiction series appears today. The Rocketship is a six-part series by Christchurch writer David Marris.
Born in the UK, Marris was raised and educated under the nor’wester. He has worked as a copywriter in and out of agencies and currently works as a publisher in the education sector.
He has self-published two books of poetry and has had a number of poems published in the poetry journal, Catalyst.
The Rocketship is his first published short story and is part of a sequence of stories influenced in one way or another by the arch wind.
. The rocketship stood impressively in the morning sun, and, if anything, the graffiti gave it some street cred, a sense of permanence and even belonging.
Tony came over after lunch but not even his “too cool for school” enthusiasm could reignite Ollie’s joy. His mother’s words buzzed around him the whole afternoon, a persistent wasp drone zipping in with “I really don’t like it. I really don’t like it.” He didn’t tell his friend about the control panel he’d found, and for all of Tony’s attention, he never noticed the grid of squares that seemed so obvious to Oliver. Instead, the two of them played around it, pretending they were US Army troops called to an alien crash site where they waited for the alien to emerge and start blasting them with a ray gun.
About three o’clock they were driven inside by a blast of rain. “Alien acid rain,” Tony called it. “Another despicable weapon of terror.” The acid rain became more persistent as the afternoon grew older and Oliver fell asleep on the couch while Tony raced a Ferrari in what seemed an endless series of circuits on the TV screen.
When the crash came it startled them both. “Wow, did you see that?” Tony said. Oliver sat up, heart racing, feeling disoriented and nervous.
“What?” he managed.
“One huge flash of lightning. Right overhead. The whole room lit up.” Oliver went to the window where thick pencil lines of rain were drawing down from the dark sky. The rocketship stood firmly against the storm, glowing with a wet sheen. “I washed it today,” he said.
“It’s your fault then. Dad always reckons it waits till he’s washed the car before bucketing down.” There was something not right about it though. There was a mist like steam rising from the orange metal, hot breath on a winter morning. Which couldn’t be right, not with how cold it was. Unless . . .
“How close was that lightning, Tony?” “Right overhead.” “Was there much before? Did you count it as it was coming closer?” “No, I was racing. I’m in the lead with two laps to go.” The mist breathing off the metal surface was fading. It now looked like any other vehicle in the rain, heavy drops ricocheting off. “Where’s it gone?” Oliver whispered.
“What?” “The lightning – where’s it gone?”
When Tony’s Dad picked him up at five, Oliver was still thinking about the lightning and the possibility that it had struck the rocketship. But he kept his suspicions to himself. If it got back to his Mum there would be one more reason for it disappearing back to the Rivertown home for old furniture and alien space craft. His mother rose long enough to fix sausages, beans and mashed potato, the standard Greenway Saturday night fare. They ate while the news broadcast doom, gloom and violent death from around the globe. Then after clearing up, his mother apologised for her headache and drifted back to bed with nothing more said. When the rain finally stopped, Oliver was in the middle of The Day the Earth Stood Still on Sci-Fi Saturday. It was too dark to go out and see if there had been any damage to his rocketship, but he was sure that it would be fine.
It turned out he was wrong, but not in the way he expected. Some time during the night, while Oliver dreamt of a giant robot living inside his rocketship, his brother had paid a visit to the backyard with a can of black spray paint. The word “Sissy” was tagged twice in rough script. It was almost unreadable, so badly was it done, but for Oliver, who had worn that nickname almost daily for the past year, it was legible enough and as good as a signature.
He sat down on the concrete pad, ignoring the cold wetness soaking through his jeans, and cried. This had been the brightest thing in his life; now it had been ruined by his brother. And it would continue to be the target of Duncan’s vandalistic tendencies, assuming of course that he was allowed to keep it at all.
His mother came out dressed in a house coat, a look of thunder on her face. “Who did this?” she demanded, ignoring the tears still sliding down his face. “Duncan,” he said.
“Rubbish. Duncan would never do such a thing. And he wasn’t even home. You need to stop blaming your brother for everything. It’ll be that Miles boy down the street. The one who tagged the school.” Oliver didn’t try and argue but he did wipe his face with his hands as a small glow of hope flared in his belly. How Duncan was going to kick himself for this
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