Astronaut
by Jordan Taylor
He would have hated his own funeral.
It was one of those solemn, teary small-town affairs, and was held in the Spring Hope Baptist Church, the one his mom used to go to and that he hadn’t stepped foot in since sixth grade. The sanctuary was paneled in dark wood broken by stained-glass windows showing a very Caucasian Jesus shepherding some fluffy sheep, grimy with age. White lilies, pumped as full of formaldehyde as the body in the casket, glowed in the corners, making the air sweet enough to choke on. The organ was ironically horror-movie perfect for a funeral, groaning and screeching through hymns that he wouldn’t have known the words to.
They had thought about sitting me with family, but apparently which family was too hard to figure out; his dad and his stepmom sat in the front row on the left side of the sanctuary, his mom and older sisters on the right, as divided as ever. His dad had his Harley-Davidson jacket on; his mom had on a form-fitting black Christian Dior dress that probably hadn’t been outside of her closet in at least a decade, and shouldn’t have been now. I ended up in the back row with the boys and Kate, all of us squirming on the hard mustard yellow cushions, worn slick by ages of bored attendees. We were the only color in a sea of black and gray adult mourners, all dressed in candy Chuck Taylors and flower-print miniskirts, tight jeans and band T-shirts, a row of hipster Gandhis in silent protest.
When the pastor stood up to speak, his young face and expensive gray suit looked oddly incongruous with his setting. I focused on his white hands hanging out of his dark sleeves, gesturing in the thick air above the wooden casket, so I wouldn’t have to let my gaze drop to where Jude lay in a box, dead. The pastor droned on and on about what a wonderful son he had been, a wonderful friend, a wonderful student, a wonderful boyfriend, this man who had never met him, speaking in the background to the rhythm of Joey’s shoes drumming against the wooden pew, Kate's and Dave’s whispers.
There hadn’t been a wake—for that, at least, I was thankful.
Of course, it’s hard to have a wake when the body’s been burned and broken almost beyond recognition, as I’m sure his was. The guy in the other car had been drunk, was being prosecuted for manslaughter. I wasn’t sure I cared if he was ever convicted or not—a sentence wouldn’t change the fact that I had spent last night puking into the toilet again, that there was nothing left of Jude’s car but twisted metal, and nothing really left of Jude at all. Jude had been on his way home from visiting me, and I had waited up all night for a text that never came—a text to say that he was home and going to bed, a text to say that he’d found another science article that he wanted me to read, a text to say that he loved me, anything. Instead, his dad had called my house around 3 a.m., to ask if Jude was spending the night and why he hadn’t called to say so. The police had found him an hour later, dead and smoldering on the asphalt of a back road. I wondered if Hendrix knew yet, somewhere in his crazy little cocker spaniel mind, that Jude was never coming home this time. That he wasn’t off hoboing, or hiking, or holed up somewhere with his telescope. He was gone.
The pastor ended his eulogy by talking about how now Jude was in a better place, until I wanted to stand up on the yellow cushion and yell that he had never believed any of that, that he was a highly evolved being that came from electrons that were created during the Big Bang, that if he was in a better place, I hoped it was being reborn in some distant galaxy he’d never heard of and could be the first to explore. When the offering plate came around, I borrowed a pen from Kate’s purse and scribbled a note on the corner of the bulletin—“The Church is a money hungry institution!”—to rip off and drop in among the crinkled dollar bills, just because I knew it was what Jude would do, so someone had to do it.
We didn’t go with his family to the cemetery, but ran, bright streaks of color in the sudden sunlight, to Joey’s old sedan as soon as the organ finished laboring over the final hymn. Hendrix was hanging his curly black head out of the front window, panting impatiently. The full bottle of vodka clanked on the back floorboard as Joey blew out of the church parking lot, taking the streets through town at twice the speed limit. Kate held the rocket with the stick between her knees, rolling it back and forth in her palms as she stared out the window. I held the shoebox of photos and mementos, to keep it from sliding around and spilling as we sped around curves.
Jude had never wanted a funeral when he died.
He’d wanted to be cremated and shot into space, his particles exploding in the atmosphere to become just another component of the space dust drifting around our universe. Of course, his parents hadn’t even considered that when he actually died. We couldn’t shoot his ashes into space, now, but we had searched the internet for the biggest stick rocket we could find, and we could do the next best thing.
Our search had started with Googling local suppliers, then the larger companies that supplied the annual Fourth of July fireworks shows. Nothing was quite big enough for Jude. Finally, Dave had found a way to hack Jude’s darknet account, and he found The Screaming Dragon, illegal in 48 out of 50 states, and guaranteed to make the biggest bang for your 499.99 bucks. We had pooled all of our birthday money, and I’d even dipped into my college savings in order to buy the rocket and have it express shipped to Jude’s address. It had arrived just in time.
Joey parked in the gravel next to the baseball field on the edge of town, tires crunching on the rock. I clipped on Hendrix’s leash as we swung open the doors, arms full of alcohol and firework and lighter and shoebox. We made a circle in the red dust around second base, Hendrix straining on his leash as he sniffed the worn white plastic. Joey unscrewed the bottle of vodka, took a swig before passing it around. “Gimme the rocket. Let’s do this before some mom and her kids swing by.”
Kate handed it over, and Joey buried the stick in the dirt with one savage thrust, his face screwed up around the burn left from the alcohol, his eyes already red and watering. I drank deep when the bottle came to me, to give myself an excuse for the fact that my cheeks were wet and my nose was running. I sat the shoebox down in the dust, pulled out the first photograph—one of the two of us asleep in a nest of blankets in his messy bedroom. I placed it at the bottom of the wooden stick and weighted it down with a rock, to keep it from flying away. Kate sat down in the dirt to help me, as Joey and Dave watched, the bottle of vodka hanging loosely from Joey’s hand. More photos joined the first, junior prom and camping trips and backyard parties, along with song lyrics (“Tell me, did the wind sweep you off your feet?”), pages torn out of a book by Carl Sagan (“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love . . .”), and magazine pictures of places on our list to visit (“Explore the beauty of Norway!”). When we were finished, there seemed to be just as much of me piled around the rocket as there was of Jude. My music that he would never listen to and the prom I made him attend, the party where I met Kate for the first time and we ended up screaming at each other in the front yard because I was jealous and she called me a naive poser. All piled around a stick rocket that was supposed to be handled with extreme caution by “authorized professionals only.” Kate grabbed Hendrix by the collar, stepping away, and handed me the lighter.
I gave the three of them time to back up, remembering to breathe as I turned the smooth red plastic over in my hands, then flicked it open to drop its bright yellow flame into the fluttering pile of paper. I raced back to where they waited, backs against the chain-link fence, with just enough time to reach the group and throw my hands over my ears before the world erupted with a whoosh. Golden sparks shot into the air, trailing gray smoke and the scent of burning plastic and gunpowder, before erupting into light, white against the blue sky, so far away that we had to crane our necks to see. Bits of burning paper and ash rained down on the field, drifting in the wind to land, burning, in the grass before winking out.
Somewhere in the background Hendrix was barking his head off; Joey was rattling the metal fence as he sobbed, cold metal links digging into my back. Everything was shaking. I was shaking. Small fires were dancing in the outfield. My eyes blinked flashes of light and dancing sparks, my ears were still rushing in the sudden silence. Kate pressed the cool bottle of vodka into my trembling hand, bits of paper drifting around her face.
“Here. You’d better drink this down before the cops get here.”
Jordan Taylor grew up in a small town in the American South, where she was raised on equal parts Jesus and fairy tales. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Kenan, and their corgi, Ein, where she spends too much money in bookstores and drinks copious amounts of tea.
