The tragedy started with a stupid name, followed by a worse fate. The President and his cronies cooked up the idea that it was a fight for freedom! A move for patriotism! The Americans ate that shit up. Patriotism must be the last refuge for fools. Because any damn fool could see how absurd it was. They called it the American Space Station. The A.S.S. It was an Earth-sized halo spinning outside the polar orbits of Earth. A giant, glowing, glory hole on the wall of the dark, Truck-stop bathroom of space. I called it the A.S.S. Hole. But nobody shared my humorous sentiments. Patriotism was nothing to joke about.
The tragedy happened in a matter of seconds. The spacefarers occupying the A.S.S. became casualties to its explosive mass defecation. Five hundred million humans dead, in one soundless poof.
The news reported them as a mesh of intertwined humans floating along the Kármán Line outside the atmosphere of Earth. I thought I’d see a knitted scarf of carcasses wrapped across the gob smacked face of the moon. Or a shadowy chain of linked bodies imprinted upon the sun. But they were not visible from where I stood on Earth. Scanning the night sky with a telescope, I saw a dingleberry-like shadow hanging on the thread of the all-seeing moonlight. But that could’ve been space garbage. They too, were space garbage now.
The Americans left in throngs. Massive, innumerable lines of people waiting to board those big cruise ships. Giant erections of space exploration aimed at the A.S.S. They looked like tourist as they waited in line. A role Americans played so naturally. Like they’d been tourists their whole life. They even wore sun hats and Hawaiian shirts as if going on a cruise. Their permanent vacation to their island in the sky. To build a better way. They were pilgrims escaping the non-American footprints stamped across their land for a purer A.S.S. And nothing was purer than the A.S.S. in space.
My friends yelled to me as I watched them board the ship, “Are you coming?”
I said, “I needed to get my Hawaiian shirt first!”
They all gave a thumbs up. That was our last encounter. I never spoke of my dissidents. I didn’t want to lose our friendship. Then the A.S.S. exploded.
I awakened the next morning to the news describing the tragedy of the day. The occupants aboard the American Space Station were annihilated by a Suboptimal Helium Accelerative Reaction Transfer. A S.H.A.R.T. The President and his self-labeled species of True Americans were evacuated from the annals of life in one, split-second, devastating blast.
Afterwards, the ones left behind, like me, took part in a memorial to respect and remember the victims of the S.H.A.R.T. tragedy. Despite their abandoning us, some of us truly mourned and forgave them. But most of us forgot them completely. Even when we wore our Hawaiian shirts on the same day each year to remember them. We still forgot.