Little Wet Rocketship Copyright © 2019 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #69, May-Jun 2019

When I was a boy, growing taller and taller in the Fifties, cowlick when I combed my hair, ankles stretching below the bottoms of my pant legs, wrists pushing past the cuffs of my shirts, higher and higher pencil notches against the doorway leading into our dining room, I thought that at some point in my life I'd be living on another planet. It was in all the newspapers, and some black and white TV shows, and later in colorized cartoons. I figured instead of a planet with mostly craters I'd choose a planet with lush jungles, because likely there'd be more opportunities to gather food. Even as a kid, I was smart.

I also thought I'd become a famous writer, living in a house of my own design, admired and loved throughout the world. That people would read my words years after my death, holding one or another opened book of mine in front of their eyes as they floated upside-down on the long flight from Earth to the Mars colonies.

I challenged my cousin Janet, two years older than me, to draw comic panels that told a story. Let's see who does best. Janet was coming of age, and one time when I went down to our maternal grandparents' home, we helped them with chores, she was in our grandmother's downstairs bedroom, basically a large closet, given our grandmother could no longer climb the stairs because of her Parkinson's disease, and poor little Janet's young eyes were adorned with so many layers of mascara, eyeliner and makeup she looked like an Egyptian queen, but not in a good way. Everyone inches towards adulthood differently. We took up the comic panel challenge across the warmth of a Summer, her doing pretty well in June and July, but then faltering out in August, through the start of September. By the time school was starting back up, her entering high school, me still in the chalky blackboards and crazed nuns of grammar school, she admitted I was much better than her at the comic panels, and gave up.

While I was still in grammar school, sitting at my blonde wood mini-desk a few rows back from the tall teacher's enthusiastic lessons, I'd turn to a fresh page in my notebook, and carefully write down the titles of my future novels and short story collections, next to each title adding the year it would be published, years and decades into the future, even though these future books existed as titles only, with no idea on my part what their content would be. But it was a reassurance to this little boy it was such a long list.

I would look at it sometimes when I felt discouraged, or lonely.

Around that same age, I bought a toy space ship with my paper route money.

The toy was a small red rocket made of plastic, which you could fit onto a blue plastic launching pad.

The rocket had an opening in its bottom. You held the rocket upside down, filled it in the darkening evening with water from a green garden hose, then slid it upside down onto the blue launching pad. Once it was wetly secure, you'd use the straight-line pump at the back of the launching pad to push as much air up into the rocket as possible, increasing the pressure within the rocket until it was ready to burst, pointing it at the sky, then slide back the tab holding the rocket to the pad, so the rocket would shimmy up into the air above the release of pressure.

The rocket itself was a wonderful, plastic ruby color. It was shaped in an art deco style, like something from a futuristic poster from the nineteen-twenties, with, around its bottom, three oversized fins that in the elegant utilitarianism of their lines looked positively pre-war Germanic.

The key of course was pumping as much air as possible into the upright rocket, to get it to soar as high as possible. I can still recall how I'd clench my teeth, face turned sideways, forearm vibrating, trying to force just one last pump up into the ruby plastic.

I never became a 'household name' writer, like Stephen King or Danielle Steel. Poor, stupid me. And I never will. People who enjoy my writings, follow my career and buy my books could probably fit into a large elevator, like the ones they have at hospitals, where some people are carrying a brown cardboard tray of coffee cups, some people are standing next to sisters they haven't seen in four years, and some people are standing alone in a back corner of the elevator, crying quiet, warm tears. I never felt my feet walk across the roughness of another planet's soil, gait awkward because of the unfamiliar gravity, and I never will.

Like a lot of you, I did my best. I gave up on my writings many times, shoved them into a closet, banishing them, punishing them for making me believe they were worth anything, then pulled them out a month or so later, all these moving limbs and mouths, like dialing a former lover's number at three o'clock in the morning, hiding with your voice that you've been crying, saying, Hi. It's me. Does any part of you still love me?

Writing isn't easy. Trying to perform the greatest magic trick of them all, taking a blank piece of paper, nothing up your left sleeve, nothing up your right sleeve, then putting marks down on that page that someone you might not even know will pay good money to print. Hoping people you don't know, will never meet, will shiver or laugh or wipe tears away sideways reading your words.

It's the greatest magic act of them all.

So in this column I salute all of you who are writers. Whether you're highly successful, or occasionally published, or are still working towards that first acknowledgement. I salute that you spend hours and hours of your alone time pulling out a pen, putting a piece of paper in front of you, aim that pen, and keep at it until all these sentences spurt out. I salute you that you hope what you have to say might resonate in another person you've never met, and never will. And that what you write will affect that person. Will touch them. Will be remembered.

We are all brothers and sisters in arms. Someone said once the best description of what it's like to be a writer is the title of Tony Richardson's 1962 movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. That's us.

Aim as high as you can. Even if you don't reach the height you want, at least you got your words off the ground. Up there. And that in itself is enough.

I bought my spaceship in the early Sixties, while the Soviet Union was still ahead of us in space launches. I knew my little rocket could never reach the moon, but I thought I could pump so much air up into it, the rocket would trail up into the clouds, which to me, then, at fourteen, seemed the most romantic notion in the world, that something in my hands could touch, pierce, the late evening drifting clouds.