Alcatraz Slithers Stars – Short Story

There’s a freeway ramp I take that slithers on its own.

Breathing, it leads a line of cars astray.

It cuts the lanes in half and squeaks me up a spiraling staircase.

Four high and bright white lights. They line the twisting ramp, they show me the way to my sleeping quarters, night after night.

Now, each one of the lightning bugs on a stick, the simple background streetlamps, flicker. They have grown upset.

Each light flashes at its own pace, and as I ascend, I enter a nightclub-

I glow and breathe with other beings, I sweat, booze infects my pallet. Music so loud my ears ring, so loud that a deafening silence is created in my internal bubble –

Then, I am on stage-

But alone, and singing the saddest song, the light shines and gives me recognition, a spotlight attuned to the chords on my guitar, a light blue cascades over my thin body and dulls down to a purple. Lonely souls would die for my crying position-

Then, I am a man alone in a car driving up an on-ramp, the lights above me flickering-

Then I am in a spaceship and the year is 2275. Humanity has tried its best, but we are only down to three ships, and all of them have mechanical issues. Locked in a silver box, millions of light years away from Earth, we are essentially floating away the last of a fascinating species.  We figured out so many problems and only ended up with more.

It’s going to be years before we find another asteroid with the metals we need, all the scientists say so, but our politicians continue to tell us “We are putting every ounce of manpower into the repairs, and we are making immense progress”. I scoff. Progress is relative, assholes. I have the smallest room in the ship and share it with another man who reeks to high hell. He has the scraggliest beard and clips his toenails in the walkway and they end up everywhere- so often that I’m amazed I haven’t slit his throat. And now, as we both take in oxygen, the lowest beings to do so, the lights begin flickering. I open my hatch door and find something peculiar. “It isn’t just our room with the light issues anymore.” I tell Robert. Robert the old bastard used to be an artist, and designed pieces for the lead spaceship in our fleet. Ever since the accident, he seems to have gotten closer and closer to getting ejected. I return every other day to him sobbing up a storm in our room and find slash marks on his wrists when our lights do decide to work. I don’t like him, but getting rid of him sounds pathetic. And I’ll speak to him occasionally. You can hate someone and try to strike up a chord every now and then. I mean, if you don’t fucking speak every light year or two, they push you out the ejector- we learned a long time ago not to allow any Nutcases on our ships but sadly had to relearn the lesson. Classic humanity, I guess.

But I shiver thinking of the Nutcase that took down “Alcatraz”, our fourth ship. She was the best performing by far, and everyone looked at her with admiration out of our beaming windows, windows that became broadcasted by her lights, even in the vast darkness of space. And then just four years ago a prisoner was let loose. The Nutcase slit the throats of 10 guards, and 13 more crew members were killed. Then the beast booked the whole triumphant ship, with all its bells, whistles, and God damn kazoos, into a single black hole. The end. Every prestigious captain was squeezed into paste that would have looked like Spam. Every glossy and upkept silver panel, every state-of-the-art technology, all the grant money and vision building that had made our expedition possible in the eyes of the Lord, all of it was in Alcatraz. All of it crushed into debris we weren’t even able to see, let alone use. Poof. A single news event on our Hologram TV’s, and we lost every drop of hope that started our expedition. We lost every molecule of saliva that had kept us going.

We are ship #2, never given a name. And our whole craft enforces a low hum, just beneath the ear. Like a fly that keeps returning, a buzz that almost enters the cavity every single time. We are, annoying like that, still alive like that, scrappy. We were like that. Before the damn thing happened, and the lights began flickering like mad. Scrappy.

Then, the spaceship morphs as the light flashes again, my guitar on stage becomes untuned and the audience leaves, the lights are turned on- all the pinks and greens and mixes of beats and exploding vocals of the “top 40 hits” – it all escapes. The darkness hides, and the beings of each shadow, the life from each song and gloss from each panel transmit themselves into the plainest freeway you’ve ever seen.

The road slithers me off at the next exit.

Thanks for reading, subscribe to be notified when a new blog goes live!