A Short SF Vignette
I live, on the planet
Pluto.
I live like mist, vapor in a kind of impregnable
bright bubble, as thick as the old walls of Troy.
Waiting, I’m always waiting, it is all I know.
I see the cold stars of night and the glitter of
the sun—
At times I see the blue planet called Earth, it is
nearly as old as Pluto.
It is hard for me to explain who I am, when I
really don’t know what I am, or how I came about.
I need comparisons!
And I know of none!
Thus, I cannot explain.
I am lonely and old, I know that.
Sometimes I feel like the thick ice on Pluto, numb.
The atmosphere drifts off the planet like someone
smoking a Lucky Strike in an open bar, I got that information from listening to
old radio waves—
I sense the cool silence of the long days here, as
long as Earth’s week!
Perhaps today is the day I will no longer have to
wait?
A question to myself.
I see a metallic object from a distance.
I hear metal clashing with debris.
I can hear and I can see.
And I hear voices from afar, four-billion miles
away.
“All right” I say, Earth voices are commanding the
object!
Some of the words are familiar; can this object
send a living being down?
It has an insignia on it.
If it lands I will look like a big eye to them.
But the object is just circling Pluto.
What are they doing?
It is a tireless task waiting.
Its construction is weird.
It took seven years to get here!
I’ve waited 10,000-years for this?
Now I know who I am! I think?
And I am nothing like them.
I don’t breath like them, and I am per near
inexhaustible—
Perhaps that’s the price one has to pay for
longevity.
I hear pain and fear and sorrow in their voices,
some rejoicing.
I hear they get sick too, I don’t.
They have happiness that of course is a byproduct,
you need to make someone happy to be happy, it takes two, and this I don’t have
either.
Their probe didn’t even see me, I wonder if I’m
even visible to them?
I think what I am is some gravitational collapse of
what was once a sufficiently compact mass form of something, and I’m the
leftover, but what?
#4914/11-20-2015 (Reedited and revised
slightly, 12-27-2015)
