Rockets
By Simon Kewin


Danny’s uncle left the bedroom, shooting a warning glare back at him from the door.
Remember. Our secret.
When he was alone, Danny dried his eyes on his Star Trek pillow. The pain was fading now. He kneeled up to gaze out of his window to watch the fireworks bursting in the sky outside. He loved bonfire night. He loved to watch the rockets, brief but beautiful. It was clear this year; he could smell the woodsmoke even from inside. The constellations blazed away like old friends, Taurus and Leo, Orion reclining along the horizon. There would be others watching up there too, he knew. Others he couldn’t see.
His uncle didn’t understand about space, of course. All that nonsense he called it. Get your feet back on the ground. It isn’t real. But Danny knew how things really were. He remembered all the stories his father, his real father, had told him. And finally, tonight, it was time to put his escape-plan into action.
From one of his neighbour’s gardens a rocket streaked a line of white light into the sky before blossoming into a sparkling globe of blue and silver. He felt the faint bang of it on his forehead, pressed against the cold glass. He grinned. He watched for over an hour, until there were no more rockets to see.
He waited a second hour, until everything was quiet. His mother and Dave, the man he now called his uncle, had gone to bed. He could hear his mother snoring. He dressed carefully. It wasn’t the cold that worried him but the heat. He pulled his light-sabre torch from under his bed and clambered out of the window, dropping first to the flat top of the porch, then with a crunch to the garden path below. He glanced back once at his house. It already looked very small. Clicking on the light-sabre he ran off through the clump of bushes at the end of his street to the wasteland where he had built his machine.
He knew he wouldn’t have to go up very far. The edge of space was only fifty miles away. It was further than that to London and he went there often. All he needed was enough power. Enough thrust.
The machine was basically a metal chair, aluminium for lightness, with a few rolls of foam rubber taped to it for comfort. He wouldn’t need anything else. He didn’t need to be able to steer or land safely. He wouldn’t need oxygen. He had tried to calculate how high the ship would take him but his schoolboy mathematics had failed him. None of it mattered. Once he was off the ground, once he was high enough, the aliens would see him. They would come for him and everything would be alright.
He had saved for a year, the money from his paper-round, money stolen from his mother’s purse, birthday gifts, saved it all up to buy the rockets. He checked them one more time now, lashed in bundles to the legs of the chair with wound layers of tape. He had two hundred and four of them, the biggest you could buy, Comets and Supernovas and Spacewarps. Great, fat tubes, taller than he was before he cut their sticks off. He had had to be careful. He wasn’t supposed to go out on his own. He’d spent weeks visiting different shops on his way home from school, buying three or four at a time so as not to attract suspicion.
He sat in the chair, strapping himself in with the buckles he had tied to the frame. He shivered, the muscles across his back taut and painful. Above him the stars flickered as if invisible objects were passing in front of them.
He had rigged up a long fuse, a sheaf of wicks that wound around the legs of the chair and up to each rocket. He had wanted to arrange it so that each ignited at the same instant but he hadn’t been able to test it.
He struck a match and lit the fuse. He braced himself into the chair. He thought about his uncle and his mother. The glowing line fizzed slowly around his feet. The explosion of his ascent would be visible for miles, he knew. It didn’t matter. He wondered how his house, his town, England would look from so high up. He thought about his real father, who had himself gone up to heaven.
He felt the chair shake and buck and then, in a ball of blinding light, he screamed up into the night sky.


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Simon writes fiction, poetry and computer software, although usually not at the same time. He has been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. He lives in the UK. His web site is http://simonkewin.co.uk and he blogs about his writing at http://spellmaking.blogspot.com.