Down by the Riverside

A Writer's cramp prompt: (24 hours/1000 words or less)
Somewhere in your story or poem, include the line Down by the riverside...
Be sure to bold it for tomorrow's judge!

Down by the Riverside

Down by the riverside lies the old dead spaceship.

We kids go there often, climb up inside and pretend the control panel still blinks red and blues. There's no steering wheel so you can't drive it anywhere, but Dad says spaceships never drive. They zoom.

Our parents don't like us to enter. They say things like, "There might be scops hiding
under the seats, but insects don't really like to sleep inside metal. And there's nothing for them to eat in a spaceship – no leaves, no grass, no juicy flower petals.

Mom says, "It might not be safe. Ships are full of stardust and meteor fragments."

But she's only kidding. Stardust and meteor fragments are all around us. They're in the dirt, the air, the water. Dad told me once that people are actually made from stardust and meteor fragments. So there.

Down by the riverside lies a dead spaceship where all of us go when we want to sit and dream. In the worn seats of long ago dead pilots, we kids can soar through the stars, visit strange planets, drift in space. I know because I spend most my time there.

Of course, I'm not just dreaming. I'm practicing.

Dad says we're never going up again. Never, never, never.

We flew twenty-two hundred years ago, flew all the way from a faraway world. At least that's what my history teacher told us, which explains the rust on a ship that was never supposed to rust.

The ship went down, landed where it was supposed to. No one cared that it landed badly, crushed in its belly. Our ancestors had no intention of ever leaving this planet. They arrived exactly where they'd planned to arrive.

But I didn't.

I was born here, but I shouldn't have been. My blood speaks differently than everyone else's. It tells me I need to soar upwards into Kemor's indigo sky. Maybe the dust fragments of one of those long ago pilots seeped into my skin to swim inside my veins. I bet that's why I itch to launch myself skyward.

And that's why if you want to find me, here's where you'll have to look. I'm sitting in the pilot's chair, my hands on an instrument panel that no longer hums or flashes. But it's where I belong, down by the riverside in the old dead spaceship.

~~~~~~~ 395 words ~~~~~~~~