They were giving her everything she needed to build the rocket. Bolts, sheets, fusion conversion unit, fuel pipe, sparkers. All of it in the package, sliding down the ramp towards her. Anna watched a Ganglian worker push the box away from his truck, where it landed in the barn entrance, half in shadow. 

Beetles crawled around the doorway, segments of their long brown bodies glowing bronze in the sun. Anna watched the worker turn, get into his truck, and drive away without a word. That would be the last Anna saw of the Ganglians for twelve days. 

She tore the lid open. A sheet was taped inside. “Anna 51628: To be returned if incomplete 96.84, and worker 51628 to return to usual duties.” The glare of the sun landed hard on her shaved head. Inside the greenhouses, hydration sprays pulsed through polycarbonate sheeting. At the near end she could make out two shapes: men standing side by side, their hands in the rhyberry branches. They were picking the green-gold fruit, and laying them into punnets. The Ganglians didn’t like their berries crushed. Even a single bruised fruit meant a whole box discarded. The work quota was eight punnets a day. Work over quota, and you could earn an extra stamp on your clock card. 20 stamps for a bottle of vodka the size of a bottle of nail polish. 40 for a sanctioned hour off work. 500 for a rocket. 

Inside the box, lifeless dials were mounted on a board. They met a curved tube shaped like an exhaust. There was a sound in a corner of the barn, and Anna turned to see a man wearing goggles, working on his own kit. He had the metal sheeting welded together in a long hexagon. The pieces formed a narrow column too thin, too close, for an adult to get inside. Wiping his brow, the man pushed his mask back. “Hello there,” he called. “You here building your rocket pack?” 

Anna allowed the components to fall back into the box. They landed with a soft clatter. “There aren’t any instructions,” she said. “I don’t know where to start.” 

“Come down,” he said kindly. “Have a look at mine.” 

His corduroy trousers were scorched, burned flat with sparks from the work. Between his feet stood a small engine. What looked like a thick rubber band held one cog to another. The whole mechanism together was no larger than a driver for a toy train. “Is this it?” she said.

Talk in the sleep tins said a rocket could get you home. Back to Earth, with its high waters and scorched ground. It was a place Anna had once been desperate to escape. Live the life of your dreams on Ganglian-A, the advertisements had promised, and Anna had believed it. She and a friend, Urtka, had scrabbled the money together to pay the passage to get here. Anna had got hers hustling pool. Urtka, staying out late in the evenings, had brought home a 20 here, a 20 there. Anna hadn’t wanted to ask how she’d come by it. 

The carrier they’d come in was a vessel shaped like a tumble-drier drum. Anna had ridden with somebody’s feet in her nose, and somebody else’s child under her armpit. The air had been too stuffy to waste it talking. Feeling the metal tremble through the mass of bodies, Anna had been able to make out the top corner of Urtka’s ear, squeezed next to a beard and an elbow. Coming past Mars, past Saturn, or so Anna imagined, Anna felt the sides grow cold, and tried to count the Earth days. If there was a toilet none of them ever found it. She rounded Pluto with somebody’s urine dripping down her cheek. It is close now, she told herself. It is close. She thought it worthwhile for what awaited them at the other end. 

Weeks later, a corner of the ship hit solid ground. The bottom end opened, and their bodies shaken out. As she fell, Anna saw arms and legs frozen to the sides of the can, torn loose from their owners. She landed on a pile of the dead. Scrambling free, she’d seen Ganglians in work uniforms shovelling corpses into a pit by the landing pad. It looked dug for the purpose. Anna climbed to the top, and saw Urtka’s lifeless form tumbling into the hole. Work started on the second day. 

The man said: “I was an engineer, back on Earth. And sometimes little things can pack a punch. They’re more powerful than you’d think, to look at them.” Up close his rocket looked even more like a child’s toy. 

“This doesn’t look big enough for a dog,” she said. 

He smiled sadly. “You catch on fast,” he said. “Most people don’t realise until they’ve put their own together. They hope it’ll seem different out of the box.” There was a mark around his eyes, a red rim left by the goggles. “Twelve days off work isn’t to be sniffed at, though. I come here as often as I can afford to. It’s the best reward you can buy, I think.” 

There were tools mounted on the wall beside him. A hammer and a wrench hung on hooks besides a screwdriver and a set of pliers. “Well,” she said, “that’s not enough for me.” 

Anna took an adjustable spanner from the rack. There was a gap in the barn wall, and you could see the greenhouses through it. She could see the spray from the irrigation system splashing against the insides of the plastic. The silver bolts gleamed in the heat. They lashed the sheeting to the frame and held the roof and walls steady. Anna looked down at her own hands, dry and cracked from working all day in the wet. She imagined loosening the bolts, seeing the greenhouse lid slide loose, the copper glare of the nearest star shining on the workers’ skin as the walls and roof fell down. 

Down in the corner of the barn, the man hammered tacks into their homes in his project. 

Anna slid an adjustable torque-wrench into her pocket. “I’m going to work outside,” she said.

SJ Bradley is a writer and teacher of creative writing from Wakefield. Her novels Brick Mother and Guest are published by Dead Ink. The Life of Your Dreams’ is taken from the collection Maps Of Imaginary Towns, (Fly on the Wall Press, 2024)

Illustration by Lorna Miller.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the four stories we’ve published since September. We’re looking for more. As we said in our original call-out: “We need stories set in workplaces, estates and decaying city centres; stories exposing abuses of power, corporate calamities and government deceptions, stories powered by the hopes, fears, experiences and imaginations of working-class writers.” So, please send us your stories. They can be in any genre — literary fiction, sf, crime, horror, satire, fantasy, romance, hardboiled comedy … whatever you’d like to explore. We are keen to read submissions from female writers. Contributions are voluntary, and any profit will support the Morning Star.

Stories, of up to 1,600 words, should be submitted to: Morningstarshortstories@gmail.com.