photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter:
The way those who are at one point closest to us can pass out of our lives and into memory is a phenomenon that perhaps deserves more expert research. In “When We Were Astronauts,” David DeGusta foregrounds the mysticism of the personal against the era-defining scientific advancements of the moon landing, using a precisely-rendered long retrospective POV to take us to new and uncharted emotional territory.
Listen to DeGusta’s story, read by Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman:
When We Were Astronauts
We eloped the week after the moon landing, the Apollo men back on earth but still quarantined. As soon as we got the marriage certificate, we dashed away from the courthouse like a pair of startled deer. By the time we slowed, both of us giggling, the memory of what had spooked us was an inkblot, half a phone number, a sun-bleached billboard.
“Is this going to work?” I asked Ray as we waited at the bus stop.
“Baby,” he said, pointing up into the indifferent sky, “we just went to the moon.”
Lord, he had a smile that could just polish me off.
When we got to the motel, Ray asked the clerk for a honeymoon discount, but she just stubbed out her cigarette, then twisted it for good measure. She handed him a room key with a red diamond tag, the number 10 in elegant gold numerals. That much was fancy, nothing else, certainly not us nor what was between us.
The room smelled like lavender plants a dog had pissed on, but Ray’s outlaw looks could make anything feel like an adventure.
“We’ll come back here,” he said. “For our anniversary.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
We were feral with each other on the scratchy bedsheet, desperate for marriage to feel different. Was it the same for Armstrong, waving in parade after parade, wondering if going to the moon had changed him at all?
In the morning I gashed my finger on the soap holder, then drew a blood heart for us on the mirror. But that was something a girlfriend would do, not a wife, so I smeared it away with some toilet paper.
Ray wanted the red tag for a keepsake, but we couldn’t get it off the key ring. Soon enough we forgot the name of the motel, misplaced our marriage certificate and then our marriage, lost ourselves in the Valium haze of the ’70s. “All of them” can mean any number, including zero.
Yesterday I learned that Ray had died—an accident while riding motorcycles with his grandson. It was like hearing an actor had passed away, some heartthrob from old movies, not someone I had known, had married. Maybe if I had held on to a few souvenirs, my past would feel like something that actually happened to me. Did they let Armstrong keep anything from his space travels? I imagine him shuffling out into his backyard at night and staring up at the moon and telling himself, “I was there, I was there.”
David DeGusta is a writer and translator based in the East Bay. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2023, and he is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. His writing has appeared in Catapult, Boulevard, and the Masters Review, among other places. He can be found at www.davidwrites.net.
