Plastic Planets

Like pearls falling from a waxy silk thread after a sharp tug and even sharper shout, a few plastic planets and a handful of stray stars clatter to the ground, some shattering upon impact. They’re all over the place, rolling across the floor and under his desk, but the seventeen-year-old is either too old or too desensitized to the sound of worlds crashing down to notice.

Why should he care anyway? After all, they’re only painted polymers, and he can always get more of those. He can’t get the years spent on perfecting the model solar system back, but the past is cringey enough without wasting time regretting how it was spent, so he leaves that train of thought alone.

Instead, he wonders if it should come as a relief that he can feel only the barest sense of regret as he stands among the pieces. 'Pathetic plastic warrants synthetic sympathy, a feeling no real person can have,' is what he tells himself as he bears witness to the celestial bodies he had adored in his youth falling from grace and into disarray.

Void of life, light, or any real substance, the globes strewn about the place reveal to him far more than just the model maker’s mediocrity. Cheap plastic cracks to reveal hollow hulls, shards scattered across the floor in such a way that gives away just how lightweight this planetary system really is.

Neptune and Uranus bump into each other incessantly, two blue bumper cars breaking apart with every collision. Saturn eventually ends up sitting next to one of the moons of Mars—Phobos—the two so unassuming in their incorrectness. They shouldn’t even be close to each other, previously separated by inches meant to represent light-years. And yet when the universe—or galaxy, in this instance—came crashing down, this celestial odd couple made this particular part of the floor their joint resting place.

Jupiter’s eye stares listlessly out into space, watching helplessly as its love, Juno, slowly comes to a standstill in the furthermost corner of the room. Mars, glowing crimson in the dim light, is split neatly in two, halved along the seam its manufacturers created during its gestation. A splinter of Earth’s greenery lies near one of the halves, creating a fruity illusion. God’s forbidden fruit, a Rust-Red Delicious made out of iron, magnesium, and a touch of “life”—funny, but false.

He notices how even in their broken state, the segregation of the planets remains, with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars’ pieces all within arms reach of each other. The other moon belonging to the Red Planet, Deimos, is more loyal than its sister, and slowly stops just outside of its natural orbit. If he tries hard enough, he can almost picture it reaching out, fingertips made of silicate just missing the gravitational lifeline that kept it tethered to Mars for millennia. 'So much for familiarity breeds contempt,’ he thinks, exhaling with enough force to convey what little amusement his general sense of apathy will allow.

Teenage angst and disinterest aside, something pushes him to nudge the faux moon into place, his faint sigh of relief heavy enough for both him and the satellite. Whether it’s the memories that flood his mind’s eye or the collective g-force of these terrestrial fragments, he can’t say, but whatever it is, it is enough to have him try and salvage what he can.

He tries piecing the planets back together, the process painful in more ways than one. Plastic doesn’t cut as cleanly as glass, but it hurts just as much. Worldbuilding is a slow and difficult task, one he is ready to leave to God once Mercury falls apart in his hands again for what feels like the billionth time. Time for a new plan.

He tries a different approach, crafting new worlds out of the old, supplementing supplies from minor moons, splintering stars, and some tape. Each cosmic creation is stranger than the last, the otherworldly abstractness of it all bringing a slightly begrudging smile to his face. In the end, the wreckage of nine planets spawns five new and improved globes, each with its own unique technicolor terrain and a name he’s ashamed to say out loud. Indifference is swept into the trash along with the scraps, replaced with a secretive satisfaction that thrums under his skin and warms the surface of the plastic long after the new planetary system is set up on his dresser.