The Rapture of Echo Riley

Eyes reflecting the indifferent face of an untold splendour, calling Echo Riley.

Born. A cry lifting up over the 4-3 waltz of electronic beeps and whirs, surpassing the sky to rooms bigger than the world. A fragile head on a shaking shoulder. Stars (dead and to-be) glimmering in baby-blue eyes. Pushed too soon from the nebula, a heart going supernova in the ward next door.

Young and stamping cold feet in a dark field, still premature and wondering when the world starts making sense. See a star, son. Pick one from the masses. Good. Next year, you'll see. It'll be there. Nothing changes in the end.

The excitement of the summer, ten summers, fading. The childhood joy of discovery giving way to anaesthetising drudgery. Every November, hastening to the field and the telescope, picking the spinning, shivering star, watching it wink at him, whisper out of earshot of the forgotten, the forbidden, the unknown.

Older. Waking in unfamiliar rooms among the ranks of the unfamiliar. An alarm clock: an abandoned and redundant indicator that the Earth spins on still, travelling round and round without purpose, without him. Drawing back acid-green curtains to see a nearer star glowing red over a grey haze of cloud-wrack. Like the dot of a laser pointer cast by some absent-minded lecturer against the paling azure firmament. Criss-crossed by contrails and obscured by rising pollution, he watched that baleful sunrise until the light made him turn to his computer screen with a sigh.

Flagging already, his star winked for him no more. Blasting off layers of self in a red-giant fury. Purposes he'd thought immutable were changed and forgotten in the rush of seasons, clamouring voices, time-voids. It was easier to forget and so he did. And when he sat beneath the black sky in alien fields, he saw no longer the glittering halls of beauty up there, but the recursive darkness of the vacuum, down to the Planck-length and Planck-time with nary a speck to intrude upon his heightened, awful perception.

Avenues of survival: going to war, marching and standing under the hot rays of an Earthly star.

Later, flying in the space between heaven and Earth, riding a rapturous twist of metal and death fourteen hundred metres above a fleeing adversary. The stars above almost visible in the failing light, the silent reply to an unasked question. Turning up at the last moment before the payload fell. Twisting vertical, testing his nerve and the nerve of his shivering craft to the limit. Life had almost killed him and now he flew further from and closer to death than he'd flown ever before, nose angled at the deep blue sky.

Flying still farther in a ship made from pieces of sky atop an umbilical line of fire reaching back to the globe that gave him birth.

Layers of atmosphere peeling back like the skin of an orange, the years of his life.

Learning-

Recalling-

Forgetting-

Departing-

The thrice-made sun overcame the frail horizon line as cosmic rays ignited photonic booms in his visor.

Lips parting.

Echo Riley-

Come in.