The broken fence

The rocket left in violence. That wasn’t what surprised him most. Daniel had done the centrifuges and the breath control and the endless hours of training. He had sat through simulations to experience the force and noise that would shake the marrow inside his bones. He’d prepared in every possible way for the brutality of lift-off.

The thing that truly shocked him was the simplicity of leaving earth.

One moment he was held inside the world. Nurtured within its atmosphere. Then the fire raged beneath him, and the metal screamed. And when it seemed that everything would rip apart and come undone, the launch tower simply dropped away.

White clouds streaked past, and the blue sky spun to darkness, as he was severed from his life on earth. A cosmic birth that left him raw and reeling.

For a few seconds there was only room for numbers. For simple calls and trained responses. For pressure, systems and velocity, voices clipped inside his headset, as if the complexities of language had been reduced to basic, working parts.

“Trajectory nominal,” a voice called from the ground.

“Copy,” Elias answered.

Daniel looked towards his crew members. Elias seemed composed and calm, Naomi too, but perhaps they actually felt that way. Afterall, they’d been to space before. They’d experienced these feelings.

He tried to focus on the panel, and the numbers helped to steady him as the shaking lessened very slightly. His body still felt pinned to his surroundings, but the sensation was slowly shifting.

“Stage separation in ten,” said a voice from far below on earth and the numbers carefully counted down.

When the first stage fell away, Daniel felt the clean jolt in his sternum. He clenched his thumb inside his folded fingers as the second engine roared again and the capsule surged further away from everything he’d ever known.

“There you are,” Naomi said, and both Daniel and Elias leaned towards the tiny window, set deep into the capsule’s wall.

Below the world was bending. The flat safety of ground was now a shallow curve that was steepening by the second, and they could see the atmosphere encircling earth. An electric band of inky blue. A line of perfect poetry.

For a second Daniel forgot to breathe. He saw only the curve and then impossibly, his own backyard. The fence panel that he’d meant to fix and his wife Mara, stood barefoot in the grass at dusk. He could smell the citronella candles and hear the buzzing of cicadas.

“This never gets old,” Naomi said, and Mara faded from the moment.

As Daniel leaned a little closer to the window the entire world unfolded. The curvature was becoming more than he could hold inside his mind. Earth from this high altitude didn’t resemble any photograph. The images all flattened it and compressed it into something that felt manageable. But the magnitude from space was indescribable.

“Are you alright?” Naomi asked.

Daniel saw white weather curling over oceans, swathes of continents spread out in shades of rust and jade, and a seam of dawn moving like light across the surface. The earth was too intensely bright and almost far too beautiful for Daniel to fully comprehend.

“Yes,” he finally answered.

Although he wasn’t sure if that was true.

—

The journey to the moon was full of work. They focused on the systems confirmations, on the checklists and the call outs. They made their small corrections when they needed to. Naomi’s hands moved with precision over the controls, and Daniel watched her measured input as she piloted the capsule. Elias only spoke when needed. Despite the fact the edges of his sentences were clean, his voice was warm.

“Thrusters responding cleanly,” Naomi said.

“Copy,” Elias responded.

Daniel hovered near the panel, reading and re-reading numbers, waiting for change.

‘Cabin pressure stable. O2 nominal,’ Daniel said.

He tried to match the cadence of their voices, their authority and controlled calm. He tried to maintain focus. But it was hard when Earth was there, outside the window. A planetary embodiment of awe.

‘You get used to it,’ Naomi said.

‘You do?” he asked, and Naomi paused before she spoke again.

‘Not really, no,’ she finally said, and both Naomi and Elias gently laughed.

When Daniel next looked out the window, Earth was still out there but smaller now.

“I thought that travel would feel… faster,” Daniel said. “You know, I thought we’d really feel it.”

There was no drama in the distance. No sense of speed. Daniel had expected space to rush past the small windows. But it didn’t blur. Instead, space simply existed, and they moved within it slowly, like a thought forming.

Naomi made another small adjustment.

“You’re moving faster than you ever have,” she said.

“I know,’ he said, “But it doesn’t feel like we’re moving.”

Elias glanced at the trajectory display. Outside, the black remained unchanged. No blur. Just absence, holding.

“It’s not meant to,” Elias said.

Daniel reached out for the logbook, but he didn’t write a thing.

“The first time that I came to space,” said Naomi, “I was convinced that there was something wrong.

“That’s exactly how I feel,” said Daniel.

He chewed the soft flesh of his lip and thought again about the fence panel back home. Mara had insisted that she’d mend it, but he’d meant to fix it for her. Now the fence kept entering his thoughts.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Elias said, as he allowed himself the briefest glance towards the window.

“No,” Naomi echoed, ‘There is nothing wrong.’

But they’d left the surface of the earth, and everything was wholly wrong, although according to the numbers nothing was. It seemed that both these things were true.

—

Soon afterwards the moon appeared. It didn’t rise. It simply was. A growing presence as they travelled along their trajectory. Daniel couldn’t help but think of graveyards as he looked out at the scarred and quiet surface of the looming moon. He observed the tones of grey and ash and a colour that was close to white in the places where the sun struck. But it was the shadows that truly frightened him. They were absolute. So thick and dense it seemed that they were solid. Something tangible.

“It looks…” Naomi started saying but she didn’t finish speaking.

There was absolutely no movement, no blue or green or hint of life. Just the surface impacted by time, history written in the craters. And far beyond, the distant Earth. A small, impossibly bright sphere, suspended in the darkness, that even from this distance looked alive. The continents appeared to merge, and light spread like breath against a window. Storms formed and then dissolved again. Lightening pulsed over an ocean.

Daniel felt it in his stomach. He felt it in his chest. It spread in waves down to his fingertips.

“That’s everything,” he quietly said.

And he knew the others felt it too as they watched the planet shrink away. Their entire world reduced to just a point of light.

—

The capsule began orbiting the moon with a quiet inevitability. There was a surrendering to something that felt similar to gravity. A slipping into time and place. They worked, of course. Naomi kept the capsule’s nose pinned to the vector. Elias provided updates on their status, his voice a steady thread that seemed to tether them to Earth. Daniel confirmed trajectory readings, and he double-checked the data. But in the spaces in-between, Daniel found his own thoughts drifting. They returned repeatedly to the same place. To his broken garden fence.

It felt absurd given where he was now. But when he closed his eyes, he could see Mara stood beside it, her hands squeezing her hip bones and the gentle crease between her eyebrows that appeared when she was thinking.

“I’ll fix it,” he had said before he’d left, but she had laughed and said, “Of course you won’t.”

“I will,” he’d said, and he had really, really meant it.

But he’d never found the time to fix the fence panel. And now the fence had followed him to space.

On one orbit, they passed into deep shadow. The moon below them disappeared and what remained was absolute. Not night as Daniel knew it, but an absence that was so complete that it seemed to threaten life itself.

He leaned closer to the window.

“There’s nothing there,” he quietly said.

Naomi shook her head.

“There is,’ she said. ‘It’s just that you can’t see it.”

They stayed there as the darkness held. It was thick and dense, and Daniel became aware of his own breathing, as he wondered if they’d slipped from reach. If they were lost there in the darkness for eternity.

Then, suddenly the sun returned. A line of light broke out across the surface. It quickly spread. It reclaimed shapes. Craters emerged. Ravines appeared. As the view below them reassembled, Daniel finally let himself exhale.

—

The burn to leave the moon’s orbit felt gentle. There was almost no resistance as they pulled away, and Daniel wondered if the moon knew they belonged elsewhere.

The surface began receding and the shadows started softening as they finally headed back to Earth. Slowly at first, then more clearly, Earth’s colours started deepening and the light began to strengthen. Daniel watched it without looking away. He thought about the fence again. He thought about the garden. The uneven stretch of sun-burnt grass. The low hum of cicadas.

And he thought about his wife, Mara.

The thing that mattered most to him.

She was everything he’d left behind.

—

Re-entry came with fire. The capsule shook around them as the air outside began to burn, streaking past in flecks of orange, gold and violent white. The noise returned and filled the space. Daniel gripped his seat with tight, clenched fists until the sky shifted from black to blue. Then from blue to something lighter still and the clouds rushed up to meet them.

Then the impact came. Then stillness.

—

Later, when the world had finally steadied again, Daniel was standing in his garden.

The air was warm and moved lightly and he could smell the scent of sun-drenched grass. He could hear the thrumming of cicadas. The fence panel was still broken. It leaned just as it had before. The hinge was loose. The wood weathered.

For a moment he just looked at it. Then he stepped a little closer and placed his hand against the roughness of the grain.

He heard the door open behind him.

“Daniel?” he heard her say, and he turned to look at Mara.

She was standing barefoot in the grass. There was sunlight caught up in her hair and her eyes contained a thousand stars. Her hands were on her hip bones.

“I’m going to fix the fence,” he said.

“You probably won’t,’ she said and laughed.

And Mara walked towards her husband as the Earth continued turning and all of space stretched out beyond them, now irrelevant.

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If you enjoy Charlotte’s writing, it may interest you to know she has written two books published by published by Simon & Schuster, Afterwards (published 2023) and One Little Lie, out in July 2026 and available to pre-order now.