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Dollars from the Sky

A short story exploring the meaning of time, love, and loss.

By Steph NicoPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Dollars from the Sky
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Return

The sunlight hurt his eyes. For thirty years, he had longed to feel the sweet warmth of golden rays on his face and now they hit an angry glare against his cataracts. The autumn breeze felt alien against his skin. Men in jackets emblazoned with the NASA insignia whispered to his left, while across from him a hatch opened on the twin space shuttle. Maude stepped out. He marveled at how well she had aged.

There was a crowd of reporters writhing behind a thin line of celebratory silver tape. Everything was loud, except the whispering men. They stood huddled with clipboards and furrowed brows. Occasionally one would send a furtive glance his way.

He hadn’t noticed he was staring at Maude until she turned and caught his eye. Her thick brown braid whipped across her shoulder as her hazel eyes widened. Concern colored her features. He saw her lips form his name with the unsteady belief of a child questioning the identity of her mother when she awakes from a nightmare.

“Tim?”

He knew he must look awful. He had tried to trim his beard and tame his wiry hair, but the result resembled a mad scientist emerging from his laboratory after days without sleep. He moved his mouth as if to smile, but his muscles betrayed him and set themselves firm in a hard grimace. It had been difficult to complete the return exercise regiment. He felt a sudden weakness in his legs and leaned his tall, slim frame against the railing of the stairs.

The bright light of the sun had triggered one of his headaches. A dull pounding thudded in his temples followed by a blaring pain behind his eyes. The earth seemed to roll beneath him.

Which way was up? In space up had been a construct, but now he was subject to gravity and its mysterious power. The sun was swimming in his vision, a kaleidoscope of bright lights twisting into the darkness of unconsciousness as he slid down to the ground. The last thing he heard was a sentence carried by the breeze.

“Something has gone terribly wrong.”

It had been spoken by one of the NASA men.

By Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash

Reverie

Pain in his arm. Sterile air. Was he back on the ship? Consciousness seemed a funny thing at the moment. Blurs of lights and faces and loud noises. He shut it all out and slipped inward.

His mind was a wonderful land of infinite imagination that he had perfected over thirty years of solitude aboard the spacecraft. Her face appeared as it usually did, freckled, blue-eyed, framed by soft ringlets of golden curls. He thought of their picnic the day before the mission began. Memory became his reality.

She looked at him with all the care of a mother holding her newborn child.

“Won’t you be afraid?” She asked in her lilting way.

He had felt safe in her concern. They promised their love amidst the heavenly scent of Carissa shrubs in Healy Heights park. When he returned, there would be a quick engagement and wedding. The three years of his mission would be long, but they vowed that they would cherish their memories and hold on to the bright hope of a future together.

Regarding her question, he wasn’t afraid of anything in space; the aspect of being alone was his sole worry. There would be the weekly communications with mission control, but they would be merely typed messages pertaining to the mission’s status.

He knew there would be plenty of learning to occupy him and Moleskine had donated 100 small, black notebooks. Over the years of his botched mission, those notebooks had saved his life time and time again. He had inked new knowledge, novel thoughts, and poetry across every page.

His favorite notebook had no white space. He had filled the margins, the covers, and the spaces between the lines. In the first hour aboard the shuttle, he had taken the now precious book from the shelf and gently inscribed these words:

This is the spot for all the dreams I have of you and me. I love you, Blaise.

Blaise. Even her name suggested her sweet innocence and purity. Out of all the women in the world how had he been so fortunate to receive her golden love? He hadn’t known on the ill-fated day his mission began that those dreams would become his sustaining force when the expected three years somehow became thirty.

“Tim?” A familiar voice interrupted his reverie.

He opened his eyes. The pain no longer came from the sun but from the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead. He seemed to be in some sort of hospital room. An IV was attached to his arm and standing by its pole was his twin sister, Maude. Her mouth curved to a small smile as she saw that he was awake, but the smile was quickly replaced by a worried, thin line. She inhaled sharply then proceeded to speak in her sensible way.

Something had gone wrong with the twin’s mission. NASA was calling it the Twin’s Paradox. During the mission, three years had passed on Earth, but only two years had passed for Maude. Thirty years had passed for Tim. It had to do with inertial frames and time dilation. Special relativity. The calculations had been wrong. Acceleration had been overlooked. They missed the theoretical observer. Her words spun through Tim’s brain. He felt sick and suffocated as reality caved in on him.

“You’re younger than dad, but older than mom. They want to see you, but headquarters recommended they wait a week to let the news sink in.” Maude explained.

“I don’t understand.” Tim’s voice was a whisper.

Maude did her best to offer a description. It made sense if you thought of an odometer. Two cars could leave the same spot and travel for the same amount of time, but one could travel slow while the other traveled fast. When they returned, their odometers would show different distances traveled. The slow car would have only a few miles, while the fast car would have many. If Tim had an odometer that measured time, then he was like the fast car that had many miles, but instead of miles, he had accumulated many years. The analogy helped, but he was still having trouble believing the reality.

“It’s like that phrase we always say when we were late, ‘Time is a construct.’” She said, “Your construct is just more advanced now than the rest of Earth.”

NASA was giving him $20,000 upfront and a monthly stipend for the rest of his life to compensate for the unfortunate occurrence. They wanted to know if they could do anything else to ease Tim’s acclimation to Earth. Tim had been completely still as he tried to process Maude’s word, but he suddenly jerked as a thought came to his mind—He was thirty-three years older than Blaise.

How would she love him now? He wanted Maude to leave. He needed to be alone in the misery of this realization, but Maude had something else to share. It was a letter from his love. He took it from her hand and paused. He didn’t want to open it with her there, but it was apparent that Maude wasn’t leaving until he did. The envelope looked as if it had been opened and resealed. He glanced at Maude and she flicked her eyes away. She had already read the letter.

Tim resigned himself to read it. It was short:

Tim,

If you’re reading this you’ve returned from your mission. I hope you achieved the scientific advancements you so desired.

Unfortunately, I can not be there to welcome you back to Earth. Indeed I do not know if shall see you again at all.

Shortly after you left, I connected with Roger at a party. You remember him surely. The army man. I felt so lonely at your absence and Roger was so kind. We fell in love and married this past winter. We are expecting a baby next April.

Thank you for the fond memories. I smile as I remember your sweet words. How fun it was for us to dream of love and marriage. What were we thinking! Three years is a long time to be apart.

I hope you will be happy for me and I wish you the best.

Sincerely,

Blaise

A single tear fell from Tim’s eye.

“I never liked her anyway,” Maude stated.

“Tell NASA I want a helicopter ride over the city,” Tim said flatly. “Gravity down here feels too heavy.“

By Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Reconstruction

The helicopter pilot knew who Tim was. Everyone had heard of Twin Paradox in the last forty-eight hours. What the pilot wasn’t prepared for the weight that seemed to emanate from the slender man in front of him. Tim leaned heavily on a cane, but instead of a sense of frailty, the apparatus seemed more like the staff of a wizard suggesting a mysterious power.

The pilot met Tim’s eyes as they shook hands. He found the clarity of Tim’s gaze to be imbued with an otherworldliness. The pilot leaned his head forward while at the same time taking an inadvertent step backward; he felt both drawn and repelled by this astronaut man. He fumbled through the routine instructions and the whirlybird soon began an uneasy climb toward the sky.

Tim noticed the sideways glances from the pilot. He was aware of the nervous hesitation that saturated the pilot’s routine script about various landmarks in the city. It was something he knew he would have to become accustomed to; the morbid curiosity people would have for his predicament. He sighed.

They were approaching Healy Heights now. Tim felt the weight of the small, black notebook in the pocket of his flannel. He knew the heaviness of baseless dreams. Each page was filled with faulty constructs of hope and broken promises of love that had served their purpose but no longer fit the reality that faced him.

The time had come to let it go. He opened the book and ripped the pages from the spine in methodical chunks, grabbing a section then sticking the papers under his leg so they would not blow away in the doorless helicopter.

The pilot saw the violent tearing out of the corner of his eye. What was the senile man doing?

“Sir, please stop. Loose papers can be dangerous.”

The instruction went unheeded. Tim ripped out the last section of pages and paused for a moment.

The pilot noticed a flash of sudden movement. The astronaut was struggling to lift a duffel bag from the floor beside his seat! The duffel bag was an unassuming tan canvas material, about two feet long by roughly a foot wide and high. How had it got there? Had the strange thin man been holding it the whole time?

It seemed full and, apparently, heavy. The pilot thought back to showing Tim where to sit. They had strapped the cane behind the seat. How had the fellow managed to sneak in a large, weighty bag?

“Sir, please put the bag down! It’s not safe!”

A twinkling of laughter was the only response as Tim unzipped the bag and began tossing handfuls of money out of the chopper. Twenty-thousand dollars and 192 notebook pages succumbed to gravity’s power and rained down on Healy Heights park, an unexpected precipitation.

Up had been a construct in space, but here it was reality.

Money means something to someone, Tim thought.

He knew it might mean something to him at some point, but for now—It was just as unreal as the dreams in his notebook.

“Que sera, sera,” Tim said as he looked at his tour guide.

The pilot’s eyes met those of the old man and, for a moment, he detected a mischievous gleam, but whether he glimpsed the wisdom of a sage or the insanity of a madman he was never sure.

fantasy
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About the Creator

Steph Nico

studies philosophy. reads books. drinks coffee. does yoga. writes words.

Find my philosophical thoughts and yoga shapes on Instagram: @philosoyogi

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