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NYCMMM Short Story Contest 2010 - Round 1
Once again I entered the NYCMMM Short Story Contest. It was trickier this time; I checked my prompt, and found this:
Heat 18
Genre: Mystery
Subject: An Astronaut
...yeah.
I got one idea first, just an image of an astronaut waking up to find himself alone on a spaceship with no sign of his crew. That quickly morphed into a Mars landing gone awry, with a CIA base and all sorts, but the writing never really went anywhere; there were too many plot holes.
Then it was going to be a number of mysterious disappearances at Kennedy Space Center, seen through the eyes of a KSC SWAT officer. I gave that up after half an hour, when it became apparent that it was a bollocks idea.
But then! At nine PM on Saturday, seven hours before the submission deadline, I had an idea. It didn't have to be a big mystery, did it? So I started thinking of small, mundane mysteries. Mysteries about little things that could flummox someone for a short while, like forgetting where they've put the car keys or finding a missing sock.
The result was this:
"Is there anything you'll miss during your stay on the ISS, Doctor Wishart?" the lady from Fox News had asked me.
Some questions are just too easy.
The thrust from the solid rocket boosters hit me right between the shoulder blades, kicking me back in my seat as we rose into the sky. I wouldn't walk on Earth for five months, and I already knew I'd celebrate my return with a barbecue and a nice, big, juicy steak. And some quality time with my wife a bit later on in the evening, but that's not the sort of thing you can tell the press about.
Either way, STS-138 is now, it seems, a go.
You always hear on those documentaries about how amazing the view of the earth is from up here. And yeah, it's pretty. But, well... somewhere down there is my house. And when I get back, I'm having a steak.
Can't sleep.
Want steak.
We'd cooked our own food before we left, and I'd kept one foil container right at the back of the freezer. A special one. One for when I couldn't take it any more.
I cracked the lid off.
It had been frozen, the sauce had congealed – it had been pretty thick to start with – and the potatoes were rubbery. It wasn't good, but it was better than nothing.
It was supposed to be steak. It wasn't very good, to be honest, after four months in a freezer and reheated in a rubbish little galley stove. But at least it was steak.
Going home soon. Missing home, missing Erica, missing steak. So close and yet so far...
Dammit, where's my steak?
"Speed is three-four-oh kph. Ninety feet. Fifty. Stand by."
"Touchdown."
The shuttle jolted as we touched down. The air brakes deployed, our deceleration making the T-38 chase planes seem to zoom off ahead of us into the distance.
"Speed at three-four-oh. Pop the chute."
It's an exciting thing, a space shuttle landing. It's probably just as well the Yanks don't let me fly the thing, though; I built an Airfix model of one when I was twelve, stuck a firecracker up it and 'launched' it out of my dad's study window. It didn't go well.
Another jolt, this one from the braking chute pressing me forward into my harness. I tried to ignore it and focus on the landing.
"Three hundred. Two sixty. Two twenty... One seventy. One twenty... detaching chute."
He pressed the detach button. The shuttle surged slightly, but then continued slowing as the brakes slowly brought us to a crawl.
"Houston," the shuttle commander said, "we are on the deck and all's well."
"Atlantis," the voice came over the radio, "power down and wait for the hydrazine to clear. Welcome home."
When I get back to Dorset, I'm so having a steak.
Okay, I couldn't wait. It's American beef, not a patch on some decent Angus, but I'm past caring. They've finally let us leave the medical centre at KSC, so I'm back at the house they've given us here on the base, and I'm going to have a steak.
There are more debriefings tomorrow. More checkups. More paperwork. But, dammit, I have the evening to myself. Erica's not back from wherever it is until eight. I have a steak, a barbecue, about sixteen pounds of top-quality charcoal, and a bottle of that dishwater the colonials call beer. I have my dog, my TV, 6,300 kilometres of Earth in direct contact with my toes (well, separated from my toes only by my sandals and socks, which is a damn sight better than 340 kilometres of sod all), a comfortable British summer temperature in December, and the mother of all sun chairs.
I sauntered into the kitchen, got the steak out of the fridge, and returned out to the barbecue. A nice thick layer of charcoal, a healthy squirt of lighter fluid, a match –
Oh, bugger.
The matches were gone. That was the last box, Erica had forgotten to buy more, and I hadn't got to the shops because, oh yes, I'd been in bloody space for half a year.
I knelt down to check under the barbie. They weren't there. Our ineffably daft dog, Gromit (Erica named him, all right? Don't blame me), had been in the living room eating the coffee table all afternoon, doubtless the result of one of those unfortunate bacon accidents that Erica will swear blind didn't happen. Oh no, she says, she's always careful when she eats lunch over my coffee table books, she says, or would be if she ever did, she says, because of course she knows how much I hate food stains on books. Or so she says.
Where was I?
Oh yes. The matches.
I could have forgotten to bring them outside, in which case they lived in a drawer in the kitchen. So I checked.
They weren't there either.
Any other time the mystery would have struck me as trivial, but today my steak was on the line, and I'd have contracted Sherlock Holmes himself for the job if he hadn't been long dead.
And, y'know, fictional.
The first step had to be to search the kitchen and terrace; it would be embarrassing if it had just been moved to a different drawer. The second step – once I'd ruled out calling the police, which even to me seemed slightly excessive – was to compile a list of suspects.
Erica was the obvious one; she'd had full access to my matchbox for five months. She had the opportunity, but motive seemed elusive.
Then there were the neighbours on either side, Asplund and the Lechasseurs; one Swedish, one Canadian, NASA seemed to like putting us 'guests' together in nice little clusters. But neither of them had really had the opportunity, and the tiny bit of my brain that was still rational insisted that they didn't have any motive either.
The milkman? He smoked, so he could have use for matches, but didn't really have any opportunity. Same with the postman; he never seemed to get anywhere near the house.
A sharp BANG interrupted my thoughts. I looked up, and saw a thin cloud of light grey smoke drift from behind Lechasseur's house. I briefly thought caps were being popped in bottoms, as they seem to call it here, but when I noticed a passing MP give the cloud a look of long-suffering contempt without showing any impulse to draw her gun, I realised I probably wouldn't find myself in a gunfight today.
I started slowly edging my way toward the corner, then caught a whiff of the smoke. There was something... familiar about it.
A suspicion began to form in my mind.
I picked up my pace and rounded the corner. There, on the paving slab, lay a ruptured cylinder of red, charred paper. And a burnt-out match. The smell was stronger here, too; the unmistakable, wonderful scent of firecrackers, cherry bombs and juvenile pyromania.
A giggle drifted round the next corner, then rustling, hurried footsteps. I sprinted to the corner, then found myself screwing my eyes shut and coughing as I ran straight into a thick cloud of acrid, stinging smoke.
I ducked down below the smoke and pushed through; a glance back revealed half a ping-pong ball smouldering on the ground, billowing smoke. Another burnt match lay beside it.
He had to be close.
Lechasseur hadn't struck me as a particularly clever man the few times I'd met him – a biologist or psychologist or something, one of the soft 'sciences' – but the Great Match Robbery seemed beneath him in mischief (but somehow above him in skill). Asplund perhaps – you could never really be sure with Swedes, they're cunning buggers – but again he'd never struck me as the type to go skulking around, letting off bangers.
That only left...
Yes, of course. It had to be. My old nemesis. First the cling film all over my car, and now this. At last, I would confront my Moriarty. At last, I would –
Where did that come from? Sod it, kids are kids, and Billy Lechasseur – or whatever his name was, 'Billy' was near enough – was no worse than most. Certainly in terms of pyromania he was nowhere near as creative as I once had been.
That said, he was standing in the way of my steak, and if he'd used up all the matches I'd strap him down under one of the solid rocket boosters just in time for the next launch.
Tracking him down after that realisation was easy. I just followed the trail of smoke, bangs and charring. I lost the trail at a crossroads halfway down the road; then I spotted a cat running in terror and set off in the direction it had come from.
Suddenly I saw a banger lying on the pavement, its fuse still fizzing. It exploded a moment later, but I was already past it and off in hot pursuit. He had to be here...
A bush next to me shivered.
I thrust my arm up to my shoulder into the foliage, and yoinked out the giggling sprog.
"Aha!" I crowed, triumphantly. "We meet at last!"
He goggled at me.
"Mr Wishart, what are you talking about?"
"You, young scamp! Absconder with matches! Denier of steak! You shall rampage no more! Inspector Lestrade, take him aw-"
Reality intruded rather rudely, reminding me – quite against the delusion I'd talked myself into during the chase – that I was not, in fact, Sherlock Holmes.
"My matches," I blurted, recovering admirably. "You have my matches."
The kid raised an eyebrow. "You said I could have them!"
"...what?"
He nodded vigorously.
"You said! I asked if I could take the matches! You were moving your table, I asked if I could take the matches, and you said 'Sure, kid, go ahead'!"
A promising pyromaniac, perhaps; young Lechasseur was not a budding impressionist, if his skill at doing an English accent was anything to go by. But his memory was jogging mine, and I was getting a horrible feeling that he just might be right.
"That was the matches you were asking about?"
"Uh-huh."
"The bit where I absent-mindedly went 'Uh-huh, sure, whatever'?"
"Uh-huh."
Bugger. There was nothing I could really blame him for, except perhaps not being psychic enough to realise I wasn't paying attention. Or maybe he did realise and was playing me. But, well, it'd be hypocritical of me to blame him for that.
"I need them back now," I said, trying to balance 'stern' and 'kind'.
His gaze dropped to the matchbox, his face suddenly drooping.
"All of 'em?"
I would be strong. I would get my matches back. I stood, silent, with my hand out until he reluctantly dropped the box into it. He started to slouch away, but...
Well, an interest in exothermic reactions should be rewarded. I rummaged in my pocket and pulled out a one-dollar note.
"Hey, Billy?"
"Sean."
"Sean. Here." I pressed the note into his hand. "Buy a lighter."
His face brightened, and with a cry of "Awesome!" – or some such – he ran off towards the shops. I raised an eyebrow for a moment, then remembered my steak.
My steak.
My lovely, juicy, not-quite-as-good-as-it-would-be-if-it-were-British steak.
I set off 'home' at a brisk pace with my matches.
I had them. There were, on inspection, only three matches left in the box, but I had them and they were mine. Clutching the matchbox tightly, I went back to the barbecue, struck a match and dropped it in amongst the coals.
Nothing happened.
A quick sniff established that the lighter fluid had evaporated; easily remedied with a fresh squidge. A second match, and the stuff caught. I put the matchbox with its last lonely little match down on the garden table and turned around for the –
It was gone.
The plate was empty.
I slumped, dejected, to my knees as I saw the tell-tale doggy dribble on the plate. The well-chewed rubber space shuttle lying, forgotten, by the knocked-over plastic chair. The wagging tail sticking out from behind the shed.
Five months of dreams came crashing down on me. Five long months of freeze-dried ice cream, recycled water and vacuum toilets. Here, at least, the mystery was simple.
"GROMIT!" I screamed.
I'd really wanted that bloody steak.
Feedback is very welcome indeed. Oh, except for remarks on the godawful construction of "Either way, STS-138 is now, it seems, a go." I know, I hate it too. It's convoluted and unnecessarily roundabout. If I rewrite this story, that bit will change to "Either way, it seems STS-138 is now a go."
But any other feedback is very welcome. :-)
Heat 18
Genre: Mystery
Subject: An Astronaut
...yeah.
I got one idea first, just an image of an astronaut waking up to find himself alone on a spaceship with no sign of his crew. That quickly morphed into a Mars landing gone awry, with a CIA base and all sorts, but the writing never really went anywhere; there were too many plot holes.
Then it was going to be a number of mysterious disappearances at Kennedy Space Center, seen through the eyes of a KSC SWAT officer. I gave that up after half an hour, when it became apparent that it was a bollocks idea.
But then! At nine PM on Saturday, seven hours before the submission deadline, I had an idea. It didn't have to be a big mystery, did it? So I started thinking of small, mundane mysteries. Mysteries about little things that could flummox someone for a short while, like forgetting where they've put the car keys or finding a missing sock.
The result was this:
STEAK
He'd had meals that were out of this world.
Now all he wanted was a steak.
He'd had meals that were out of this world.
Now all he wanted was a steak.
"Is there anything you'll miss during your stay on the ISS, Doctor Wishart?" the lady from Fox News had asked me.
Some questions are just too easy.
* * *
June 18, 2011
17:05 UTC
17:05 UTC
The thrust from the solid rocket boosters hit me right between the shoulder blades, kicking me back in my seat as we rose into the sky. I wouldn't walk on Earth for five months, and I already knew I'd celebrate my return with a barbecue and a nice, big, juicy steak. And some quality time with my wife a bit later on in the evening, but that's not the sort of thing you can tell the press about.
Either way, STS-138 is now, it seems, a go.
* * *
July 30, 2011
12:00 UTC
12:00 UTC
You always hear on those documentaries about how amazing the view of the earth is from up here. And yeah, it's pretty. But, well... somewhere down there is my house. And when I get back, I'm having a steak.
* * *
August 26, 2011
03:35 UTC
03:35 UTC
Can't sleep.
Want steak.
* * *
September 4, 2011
19:38 UTC
19:38 UTC
We'd cooked our own food before we left, and I'd kept one foil container right at the back of the freezer. A special one. One for when I couldn't take it any more.
I cracked the lid off.
It had been frozen, the sauce had congealed – it had been pretty thick to start with – and the potatoes were rubbery. It wasn't good, but it was better than nothing.
It was supposed to be steak. It wasn't very good, to be honest, after four months in a freezer and reheated in a rubbish little galley stove. But at least it was steak.
* * *
November 23, 2011
23:50 UTC
23:50 UTC
Going home soon. Missing home, missing Erica, missing steak. So close and yet so far...
Dammit, where's my steak?
* * *
November 27, 2011
21:53 UTC
21:53 UTC
"Speed is three-four-oh kph. Ninety feet. Fifty. Stand by."
"Touchdown."
The shuttle jolted as we touched down. The air brakes deployed, our deceleration making the T-38 chase planes seem to zoom off ahead of us into the distance.
"Speed at three-four-oh. Pop the chute."
It's an exciting thing, a space shuttle landing. It's probably just as well the Yanks don't let me fly the thing, though; I built an Airfix model of one when I was twelve, stuck a firecracker up it and 'launched' it out of my dad's study window. It didn't go well.
Another jolt, this one from the braking chute pressing me forward into my harness. I tried to ignore it and focus on the landing.
"Three hundred. Two sixty. Two twenty... One seventy. One twenty... detaching chute."
He pressed the detach button. The shuttle surged slightly, but then continued slowing as the brakes slowly brought us to a crawl.
"Houston," the shuttle commander said, "we are on the deck and all's well."
"Atlantis," the voice came over the radio, "power down and wait for the hydrazine to clear. Welcome home."
When I get back to Dorset, I'm so having a steak.
* * *
December 1, 2011
17:27 EST
17:27 EST
Okay, I couldn't wait. It's American beef, not a patch on some decent Angus, but I'm past caring. They've finally let us leave the medical centre at KSC, so I'm back at the house they've given us here on the base, and I'm going to have a steak.
There are more debriefings tomorrow. More checkups. More paperwork. But, dammit, I have the evening to myself. Erica's not back from wherever it is until eight. I have a steak, a barbecue, about sixteen pounds of top-quality charcoal, and a bottle of that dishwater the colonials call beer. I have my dog, my TV, 6,300 kilometres of Earth in direct contact with my toes (well, separated from my toes only by my sandals and socks, which is a damn sight better than 340 kilometres of sod all), a comfortable British summer temperature in December, and the mother of all sun chairs.
I sauntered into the kitchen, got the steak out of the fridge, and returned out to the barbecue. A nice thick layer of charcoal, a healthy squirt of lighter fluid, a match –
Oh, bugger.
The matches were gone. That was the last box, Erica had forgotten to buy more, and I hadn't got to the shops because, oh yes, I'd been in bloody space for half a year.
I knelt down to check under the barbie. They weren't there. Our ineffably daft dog, Gromit (Erica named him, all right? Don't blame me), had been in the living room eating the coffee table all afternoon, doubtless the result of one of those unfortunate bacon accidents that Erica will swear blind didn't happen. Oh no, she says, she's always careful when she eats lunch over my coffee table books, she says, or would be if she ever did, she says, because of course she knows how much I hate food stains on books. Or so she says.
Where was I?
Oh yes. The matches.
I could have forgotten to bring them outside, in which case they lived in a drawer in the kitchen. So I checked.
They weren't there either.
Any other time the mystery would have struck me as trivial, but today my steak was on the line, and I'd have contracted Sherlock Holmes himself for the job if he hadn't been long dead.
And, y'know, fictional.
The first step had to be to search the kitchen and terrace; it would be embarrassing if it had just been moved to a different drawer. The second step – once I'd ruled out calling the police, which even to me seemed slightly excessive – was to compile a list of suspects.
Erica was the obvious one; she'd had full access to my matchbox for five months. She had the opportunity, but motive seemed elusive.
Then there were the neighbours on either side, Asplund and the Lechasseurs; one Swedish, one Canadian, NASA seemed to like putting us 'guests' together in nice little clusters. But neither of them had really had the opportunity, and the tiny bit of my brain that was still rational insisted that they didn't have any motive either.
The milkman? He smoked, so he could have use for matches, but didn't really have any opportunity. Same with the postman; he never seemed to get anywhere near the house.
A sharp BANG interrupted my thoughts. I looked up, and saw a thin cloud of light grey smoke drift from behind Lechasseur's house. I briefly thought caps were being popped in bottoms, as they seem to call it here, but when I noticed a passing MP give the cloud a look of long-suffering contempt without showing any impulse to draw her gun, I realised I probably wouldn't find myself in a gunfight today.
I started slowly edging my way toward the corner, then caught a whiff of the smoke. There was something... familiar about it.
A suspicion began to form in my mind.
I picked up my pace and rounded the corner. There, on the paving slab, lay a ruptured cylinder of red, charred paper. And a burnt-out match. The smell was stronger here, too; the unmistakable, wonderful scent of firecrackers, cherry bombs and juvenile pyromania.
A giggle drifted round the next corner, then rustling, hurried footsteps. I sprinted to the corner, then found myself screwing my eyes shut and coughing as I ran straight into a thick cloud of acrid, stinging smoke.
I ducked down below the smoke and pushed through; a glance back revealed half a ping-pong ball smouldering on the ground, billowing smoke. Another burnt match lay beside it.
He had to be close.
Lechasseur hadn't struck me as a particularly clever man the few times I'd met him – a biologist or psychologist or something, one of the soft 'sciences' – but the Great Match Robbery seemed beneath him in mischief (but somehow above him in skill). Asplund perhaps – you could never really be sure with Swedes, they're cunning buggers – but again he'd never struck me as the type to go skulking around, letting off bangers.
That only left...
Yes, of course. It had to be. My old nemesis. First the cling film all over my car, and now this. At last, I would confront my Moriarty. At last, I would –
Where did that come from? Sod it, kids are kids, and Billy Lechasseur – or whatever his name was, 'Billy' was near enough – was no worse than most. Certainly in terms of pyromania he was nowhere near as creative as I once had been.
That said, he was standing in the way of my steak, and if he'd used up all the matches I'd strap him down under one of the solid rocket boosters just in time for the next launch.
Tracking him down after that realisation was easy. I just followed the trail of smoke, bangs and charring. I lost the trail at a crossroads halfway down the road; then I spotted a cat running in terror and set off in the direction it had come from.
Suddenly I saw a banger lying on the pavement, its fuse still fizzing. It exploded a moment later, but I was already past it and off in hot pursuit. He had to be here...
A bush next to me shivered.
I thrust my arm up to my shoulder into the foliage, and yoinked out the giggling sprog.
"Aha!" I crowed, triumphantly. "We meet at last!"
He goggled at me.
"Mr Wishart, what are you talking about?"
"You, young scamp! Absconder with matches! Denier of steak! You shall rampage no more! Inspector Lestrade, take him aw-"
Reality intruded rather rudely, reminding me – quite against the delusion I'd talked myself into during the chase – that I was not, in fact, Sherlock Holmes.
"My matches," I blurted, recovering admirably. "You have my matches."
The kid raised an eyebrow. "You said I could have them!"
"...what?"
He nodded vigorously.
"You said! I asked if I could take the matches! You were moving your table, I asked if I could take the matches, and you said 'Sure, kid, go ahead'!"
A promising pyromaniac, perhaps; young Lechasseur was not a budding impressionist, if his skill at doing an English accent was anything to go by. But his memory was jogging mine, and I was getting a horrible feeling that he just might be right.
"That was the matches you were asking about?"
"Uh-huh."
"The bit where I absent-mindedly went 'Uh-huh, sure, whatever'?"
"Uh-huh."
Bugger. There was nothing I could really blame him for, except perhaps not being psychic enough to realise I wasn't paying attention. Or maybe he did realise and was playing me. But, well, it'd be hypocritical of me to blame him for that.
"I need them back now," I said, trying to balance 'stern' and 'kind'.
His gaze dropped to the matchbox, his face suddenly drooping.
"All of 'em?"
I would be strong. I would get my matches back. I stood, silent, with my hand out until he reluctantly dropped the box into it. He started to slouch away, but...
Well, an interest in exothermic reactions should be rewarded. I rummaged in my pocket and pulled out a one-dollar note.
"Hey, Billy?"
"Sean."
"Sean. Here." I pressed the note into his hand. "Buy a lighter."
His face brightened, and with a cry of "Awesome!" – or some such – he ran off towards the shops. I raised an eyebrow for a moment, then remembered my steak.
My steak.
My lovely, juicy, not-quite-as-good-as-it-would-be-if-it-were-British steak.
I set off 'home' at a brisk pace with my matches.
I had them. There were, on inspection, only three matches left in the box, but I had them and they were mine. Clutching the matchbox tightly, I went back to the barbecue, struck a match and dropped it in amongst the coals.
Nothing happened.
A quick sniff established that the lighter fluid had evaporated; easily remedied with a fresh squidge. A second match, and the stuff caught. I put the matchbox with its last lonely little match down on the garden table and turned around for the –
It was gone.
The plate was empty.
I slumped, dejected, to my knees as I saw the tell-tale doggy dribble on the plate. The well-chewed rubber space shuttle lying, forgotten, by the knocked-over plastic chair. The wagging tail sticking out from behind the shed.
Five months of dreams came crashing down on me. Five long months of freeze-dried ice cream, recycled water and vacuum toilets. Here, at least, the mystery was simple.
"GROMIT!" I screamed.
I'd really wanted that bloody steak.
Feedback is very welcome indeed. Oh, except for remarks on the godawful construction of "Either way, STS-138 is now, it seems, a go." I know, I hate it too. It's convoluted and unnecessarily roundabout. If I rewrite this story, that bit will change to "Either way, it seems STS-138 is now a go."
But any other feedback is very welcome. :-)