The Sound of An Astronaut Crying

Black Book 82, August 2, 2013

My old neighbor came up the alley and said, “Here, I brought you a piece of an astronaut. I found it on the seashore. I was down at the Duraboy early this morning and some of the fishermen said the moon was stirring up the sea and dragging fragments of astronauts up onto the beach. When I got there I had to contend with the usual gaggle of villagers with their plastic buckets, every one of them trying to make a quick buck.”

I told my neighbor that I didn’t want a piece of an astronaut in my house. The piece of an astronaut the old man held out to me looked like a bleached croquet ball. Perhaps it was a bit smaller and more irregular than a croquet ball, but it was spherical. I could tell the man was disappointed by my refusal.

“Since the government left, people have been down there every day for the last week poking around for a piece of an astronaut,” he said. “They’re hard to come by. If I’d known you were going to reject it I would have sold it to one of the urchins and made a few bucks.”

As he was standing there talking he was tossing the piece of the astronaut from hand to hand, and this had roused the curiosity of my dog.

“I’m serious,” I said, “I don’t want the piece of an astronaut in my house. It gives me the creeps. A woman over in Corona said on the radio that she had a piece of an astronaut in her house, kept it beside her bed, and that in the middle of the night she could hear the astronaut crying. She said it sounded like a transmission from a tiny transistor radio she used to have as a child. So, no thank you. I have a hard enough time sleeping.”

The old man took a few steps away from me, cackled, and tossed the piece of an astronaut into the bushes in my backyard.

“I am mortified,” I said, and the neighbor merely laughed and waddled away down the alley.

I went back in the house, but for 12 hours my dog wouldn’t sit still. He was up all night pacing, and obviously wanted to go out into the backyard to investigate the piece of an astronaut. The idea of that sickened me, so I went out there in the night with a flashlight and a shovel, found the piece of an astronaut, and buried it beneath the lilacs.

The dog slept beside the backdoor for three straight nights and woke me on the third night with his howling. It was a pitch-black night, no moon to speak of, and as I stood out on the back deck I could see the piece of an astronaut, glowing faintly in the dark and rolling slowly, almost imperceptibly, across the yard. I could just make out the muffled sound of the astronaut’s voice, almost as if he was still tumbling around somewhere in space. I listened for a long time, and I concluded that the astronaut was reading a very sad letter to his wife.

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Listen, listening listens,
it doesn’t just hear.
It’s more than what goes
in the ear. Loud and clear
applies to meaning as much
as volume, and is a phrase the truth
holds dear.
It is an art to take things
to heart.