Aurora's Wheelchair

Aurora's Wheelchair

Aurora's eyes sparkle
with "a 35 mile an hour consciousness.
Nothing under 35 miles an hour registers on her retinas.
She has been in motion since the day she was born.
She started with the baby carriage,
went to the roller skates, went to the skateboard,
now she's in the car,
and she's headed for the wheelchair.'

Then one day, the scientists nanomerically spliced
an oxygene atom, creating a new form of aerodynamic energy. In 3 years, stratospheric dwellings were designed and sold to the public. Aurora was spellbound by the advertisement:
   'Are you tired of boring sunsets, limited horizons,
    and the confinements of being earthbound?
    Discover a new perspective of this world
    on the Argo...completely self-contained...'  

Aurora turned the voice off and imagined leaving the Earth. She had always been repulsed as a child at the sight of dirt, and asphalt as an adult. She scoffed at Johann Wyss who had only been able to imagine a Swiss family living aloft in a tree like monkeys.
Selling all her earthly possessions, she bought an Argo.
Aurora went to live on the edge of space.

The scientists could not logically explain why the Argos began falling from the sky. The structural, mechanical flaws remained an insolvable mystery. Only metals and plastics survived the impact with the Earth. No corpses were found in the nanoparticles of debris descending from an altitude of 15 miles above the Earth.

Aurora's ship did not fall from the sky. The scientists were ominously silent, except to say that Aurora's ship would eventually fall, and that Aurora was a nanocorpse that had exploded on the walls and windows of her Argo coffin. There were ethical arguments about mankind's existential place in the Universe, the cost expenditures involved in grandiose selfishness, and the force of gravity that strangled the Earth.

Years later, charged with luminous solar particles,
Aurora's ship glitters in the night sky
like a man-made star.
The scientists cannot comprehend
why Aurora refuses to fall
from her isolation
on the edge of space...