Death scene XII: Satellite

Triple T: a tale of crime, vengeance and birdwatching.

A star crawled across the black heavens. A shooting star, thought Ben. No, a satellite.

Ben watched the star, the only moving point amongst thousands of incandescent points.

It was far too slow-moving for a shooting star, too steady in its light.

A satellite, thought Ben. It must be SkyLab.

Ben felt pleased to have made such a clever realisation. SkyLab. He imagined the satellite on its final orbits around the earth, each one a little lower, a little closer to the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere, the thin tendrils of air that would clutch and burn at the edges of the spacecraft, forming immensely pressurised superheated gas in front of it that would explode and glow like a beacon in the sky and rip the solar panel wings from the craft and shred the metal capsule into fragments that would rain down onto earth in a glorious show of light and death.

Ben watched the glowing satellite right to the horizon. He wondered if he would see it in another hour or so traversing the sky having completed its 40,000 kilometre journey around the earth. The sky was black, save for the remaining five thousand odd stars shining above him. All around was black.

SkyLab? That can’t be right. That crashed decades ago. Back in the 70s. He remembered his grandfather, a keen amateur astronomer, taking him to a hillside out of town to watch the slow-moving unwavering star that was SkyLab traverse the night sky. He remembered the stories in the paper, the diagrams showing the trajectory of the dying spacecraft, the panic about where it might land, the damage it might do if it happened to fall on a major city. Ben’s head hurt. He tried to stand.

The effort of trying to stand made Ben’s head hurt a lot more. Why was he lying on the ground staring at the stars? He couldn’t see anything at all except the bright pin-pricks of light spread out above him. All else around was black. A slight rustle of hard dry leaves in the slightest of breeze was the only sound. He sensed that he was in the bush somewhere. Somewhere a long way from anywhere. Another rustle in the grass, or vegetation nearby, a large animal moving. Ben wondered what it was.

He was still lying down, he realised. I thought I’d tried to stand, why am I not standing? He tried again. Ben realised he could feel nothing apart from the pounding in his skull and the sharp pain of stones and sticks poking into the back of his neck and head. His heart started pounding more, which made his head pound even more too. He suddenly remembered the blow to his head, the half-awake ride in the car boot, being half-walked half dragged through the blackened bush. Another blow to the head. Waking to dim torchlight and the scrape, scrape, scrape of shovel in dry hard ground. Earth raining down on to his body until he was covered up to his neck.

The stars above all became unleashed from their moorings, spinning, racing across the sky, plummeting to earth, screaming silently into the heavens, but there was no one to hear them.

Words: Ian Sutherland

Pics: Simon Gray