An Object in Orbit (the end)

serial fiction, wherein the author makes a confession

Photo by Luc Tribolet on Unsplash

You are reading the final installment of the serial story An Object in Orbit. Go here to start at the beginning.

We started with the bodies, which happened to be the bodies of mothers. At that moment of inception, in the bedroom with the clothes strewn across the floor and the coffee cooling on the bedside table, we had an idea of the kind of story it was. The story was within grasp, almost.

Then the husband went out for pizza. And then we checked the email, and then we decided to go downstairs and do the elliptical, because the elliptical is there, and it helps to get one’s heart rate up. Running is better, but…Each month for the past nineteen years, we have added running to our to-do list. Nineteen times twelve equals two hundred twenty-eight. Two hundred twenty-eight times, consecutively, we have believed that this was the month we were really and truly going to take up running. We have never taken up running.

While rotating our legs on the elliptical, which does so much of the work for you that it can hardly be called exercise, we watched a streaming program about a billionaire who had sent his car into orbit. Thirty-one minutes on the elliptical (medium incline, level 4, interval setting), and then we checked the news, and then we checked the state of the planet (hot, holey), and then we checked to see how far our minor holding of cryptocurrency had fallen (31% in the past hour).

How can one be expected to tell a story when the bottom is falling out? We checked the email again, made the mistake of opening the message from the genetics testing company. They had analyzed our spit, which we had mailed to them in a tiny vial along with a payment of ninety-nine dollars. They had bad news. Not terrible news, just bad news, about the kinds of weaknesses, mental and physical, to which we were genetically prone.

Then we came back to the story and wondered, what kind of story is it? The bodies? The mothers? What bodies? What mothers? But we did not know. The story had gotten away from us. We had lost the thread.

The husband comes home with the pizza and asks, “What have you been doing?”

There is a list on the fridge, a list you make every day, as if every day is a new day and not merely another rotation in time and space, a repetition of the undone. Today, like most days, nothing has been checked off the list. No bills have been paid, no laundry put away, no progress made on the novel, no dishes stacked in the dishwasher, no training for the imaginary marathon we will complete as soon as we take up running. Even the child has not been fetched from the playdate where he is surely bouncing on the trampoline, that bit of future space junk. So, it is perhaps not unreasonable for the husband to ask, “What have you been doing?”

Not because he wants to control you but because, in this era of wasted time, one needs to be encouraged to offer an accounting.

We began with a story that began with a body. We became distracted. The story became something else. How does one find one’s direction? The story is not the problem, is it? Even the space junk, which, truth be told, consumes us, morally and environmentally speaking, during many waking hours, is not the problem. It is obvious that we are the problem, our endless distractibility, our desire, every second, to move on to something else. We are neither aerodynamically nor directionally sound.

Every day, we ask of ourselves, of our lives, of the universe at large: What kind of story is it?