Spaceman

Horror | Flash Fiction |

Sep 26, 2025

“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” Aristotle

The fluorescent light behind the sign flicked on and off. It was the only light visible in the street. The sun, setting behind the jagged edges of dilapidated buildings cast a pink haze before it was consumed by more purple rain clouds. He looked down at his phone. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. It didn’t make him smile. It didn’t stir anything other than reassurance that things were still working as he needed them to. He switched the screen off and returned to his thoughts, and there were many to court. Alone was where he could think. Everyone, and everything was an interruption.

Your gift is a curse that man covets.

He looked around. A reflex. A behaviour he could put down to simply being the remnants of long-forgotten suspicions twitching a finger, but not showing any true signs of recovery. The words carried no meaning for him. There wasn’t much that did.

No one knew him here. No one knew him anywhere. He liked that. He liked rocking up in some small town, somewhere in the world, where they were either too drugged-up or too sick to notice. Anyone left was too busy looking at headlines about him to see him in the flesh. He supposed he liked people, in a way. Their lesioned, burnt faces were hard to look at; their coughs were hard to hear. He still visited, though. He needed to know what the average Joe of a man desired most, or he had no meaning. As long as there was desire, the cogs would turn, and the hamsters would run, run, run, until the ball stopped still.

Your gift is a curse than man covets.

Seagulls fought on rooftops over scraps of fish, empty food cartons and other substances the distanced, naked eye could not identify. They even pecked a young grey one until it cried out and tried to fly away. There was something wrong with its wing.

He stopped looking because his order was ready. Inside, the television that nearly occupied the entire back wall was showing the breaking news. He lowered his baseball cap. It was him. The headline rolled across the bottom of the screen.

Multi-billionaire biohacker found not guilty of— He looked away. Someone changed the channel. Another photograph of him, and a pretty female journalist asking workers at a factory what they thought about the case. The male worker in the overalls spat on the floor before he said, “I’d like nothing more than to just take a stake to that vampire, know what I’m sayin’? People are dead ‘cause of him. He makes me sick.” Someone out of shot was telling him to be quiet. “Think about it,” they said. “Be grateful,” they said. “No, I will not be grateful,” the man said. “Parasites, all of them. He’s the worst. Man I don’t give a fuck no more. He can kill me now. Ain’t no slave for no one no more.” The journalist, her mouth agape, gestured for them to cut the filming.

The pokey premises were too warm, too close, too pungent. “Marston?” the old Chinese lady behind the counter asked. He nodded, but they both knew who he was. She looked at him with unmoving eyes that made him shrivel inside himself. He took the hot, sweating plastic bag, still holding the piece of paper in his other hand, and fled into the darkness of the dusk outside.

They made no sense at the time, the black and white words staring back at him, freshly burst from a not-so-freshly made fortune cookie at some takeaway on a Friday night. Takeaway. He loved it. This is what the common people did.

He turned the corner.

Neon lights glowed in his peripheral, their artificial joy failing to nestle into his brain. He let the paper fall like the final floating flake of confetti on rain-kissed tarmac. With the help of a light evening wind, it floated along in a black sea, its ripples already carrying stubs of cigarettes and torn lottery tickets, and strokes upon strokes of white flecks: the fruit that the cookies bore, discarded. His little scrap of paper sailed away, its fate lightly illuminated with the rainbow hue of oil residue. The puddles widened in the drizzle, consuming the well-tread dips in the pavement, and the potholes in the roads.

He walked back to his driverless car and got in. He would wait until he was back at the apartment room to open whatever multicoloured delight waited for him in the cartons. He chose the Emperor banquet. The best, he assumed.

Eight cartons. He ate out of two. The contents of the other six grew cold, congealing on the counter. Like all short-lived indulgences he embarked on, he was done, and he didn’t want to keep any souvenirs. Clutter-free equals problem-free. He was proud of that one.

Making sure he had the rental key, he closed the door behind him and carried the bag down the stairs. The bins were outside in the alleyway. He stepped out, avoiding the rush of the waves riding up from the passing wheels.

A jolt of adrenaline straightened his back. He didn’t want to see this. He passed through a blockade of sleeping bags and torn pop-up tents. Hungry eyes watched him. Maybe they could smell it. It was dry here—the walls were too narrow and too high to really let any rain in. A baby was crying, its wails coming from the inside of one of the tents, followed by the shushing of a tired mother.

He acted like they weren’t there, and raised the lid of the bin. The bag landed at the very bottom of the deep container with a thunk.

Without turning to look back, he walked away, back to the apartment. Back to safety. He would get a shower as soon as he got back into the room.

When he was back in the States, his office called his robocaddy while he was taking a swing with some investor from some country he didn’t know—or care—much about. His ex wife was dead. Which one? He asked, not registering the shock in the investor’s face. The first one.

He would send some flowers. That’s what people did when someone died. They sent flowers. It would look good.

Nobody called that week. Not his kids, or their kids, or his other ex wives or ex girlfriends. He would call them later. Not all, of course, but the ones on his mind.

It was on one the morning that his PA, a young woman he didn’t recognise, popped her head in his office to let him know that—no, it couldn’t be. That name belonged to his grandson. The PA, smiling wearily but certainly unsure, looked around nervously. Old age? Are you sure? She nodded. That’s what they said on the phone.

He told her to get out and looked at himself in the mirror, then he moved across the desk and looked at the framed photographs; golf, tennis, successful launches of new ventures… where were his family?

He stood at the windows of the penthouse and looked out into the bleak, smog-filled cityscape. When was the last time he’d seen a tree? He’d never thought about it.

He stood at the grave sides, reading the names etched upon the tombstones. The dates, as clear and real as they were, didn’t add up. Where had he been all this time? The wind whistled down the quiet hillside of the church, a little flutter of white catching his attention. Perhaps a wedding had just cleared things up in there, although the doors were bolted shut. Funny. He couldn’t remember the last time he went to a wedding, or heard the church bells ring. The white-clad building had long since lost its godly gleam, and panels had fallen in, giving way to nesting birds and eventually, no one. Withered, brown ivy held on to what it had once claimed of the tower, and the cross that had once reached out to touch the sky.

It was then that he saw the world as it was. He saw it, and he could not unsee it.

The paper, still fluttering there in dry, thorny stems of bramble, beckoned him to come and look.

Your gift is a curse that man covets.

Man as he had known him, lay dead beneath his feet.

The cemetery, brimming with bodies, had stood for hundreds of years, but it would not stand for a hundred more.

He backed away in horror. His home would be obscurity now. He would be no one, because all he could do was watch.

He roamed. He slept. He observed. He could do what he liked—just like old times—but no one cared. No one could care. No one asked about his scars—the badges he’d earned in his heroic endeavors to call it a day—because no one could ask. The scars were just for him. Their marks on his body reminded him of his efforts. He’d tried everything, after all. The dusty pharmacy shelves couldn’t cater for his insatiable demands, nor could the blades in the kitchens, the deepest waters or the highest cliffs. It was then, when he lay floating on a sea devoid of life, looking at a birdless sky, that he understood what the message said.

He watched the earth as it crumbled beneath him, passing like sand between his fingers.

The swirl of dust that had once been his playground sparkled in the sun.

Alone, he floated in an exposed suspension of nothingness, the stars too far away for any comfort or meaning.

The sun, edging ever closer, was hot enough for his permanent discomfort, but not enough to keep him from staying alive.

He thought of everyone he’d ever known, and it conjured a lump that was neither painful nor pleasurable. It was simply there, forcing muscles to twitch and his stomach to sink.

Immortality, he thought.

He shed a tear.

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