A Good Death
The assignment was to use the following elements in a story. We didn't have to use all of them, but I did anyway.
theme: a good death
objects: spaceship, shoe, watch, mirror, antique iron
dialogue: "Lose the hat." "Where d'you come from?" "Don't you hate it when that happens?"
version 1
The Lost Cause was primed and ready to fly. I gave myself one last check in the mirror. "Lose the hat," it said, and I did. Not as rakish, to be sure, but a good deal more respectable. The mirror's AI wasn't as cutting-edge as I was used to, but that's what you get when you travel. Hotel tech wasn't up to the level that you could get on, say, your standard wristwatch. I had left mine at home.
I didn't want to be late, so I kicked the door open ("Where d'you come from? Were you born in a barn?" the mirror remarked in tired, halting idiom as I failed to turn the lights out) and made it out to the flight deck. I realized belatedly that I still hadn't closed the deal on that antique iron on ebay, but I figured it shouldn't matter much to me, right? Hell, I didn't even need my shoes. I kicked them off. The honor guard failed to look at me strangely, although I know they wanted to. Formality, it gets me every time. I wonder what the commentator would say. There goes Jerry Warner down to his waiting ship, Glory Bound, to save the human race. How noble he is, how taciturn. Look at that, he's kicking his shoes off to honor the gravitas of the situation. He won't need them where he's going.
Such reminisces are pointless. Here I am, about to save humanity for the nth time. Except this time I won't be coming back. Don't you hate it when that happens?
version 2
Jon looked at his refrigerator in disgust. Upon it, in gleaming ceramic green, clung a spaceship. Not a real spaceship, thank God, but the magnet was bad enough. He wished Janet were the sort of freak who would reminisce very frankly about the aliens she saw twenty years ago during an acid trip. Instead, she was subtle, coming back from her stupid sci-fi conventions in some ridiculous getup, tin foil and sunglasses. "Where the hell d'you come from, Jupiter? Lose the hat," Jon had yelled once. She'd responded, insanely, "Sorry I'm late. Got stuck at Phobos in a traffic jam. Don't you hate it when that happens?" And then grinned. She held an antique iron, probably an impulse buy from a garage sale, but at that moment he hated the very idea of antiques. Just another backwards brand of futurism. He resented the past, couldn't stand the future. If only he could live in the present. But everywhere he looked there was something to remind him. A wristwatch in the shape of a Star Trek communicator badge. A shoe once worn by Harrison Ford (Blade Runner, not Star Wars). Philip K. Dick's goddamn mirror, of all things. To top it off, she read nothing but science fiction, wouldn't even look at his latest work. Called it "depressing." But the New York Times had called it "a starkly imaginative treatise that weaves into one tapestry the disparate strands of teen pregnancy, wanton gang violence, and the scourge of AIDS in war-torn totalitarian regimes… both moving and profoundly prophetic." Spaceships and morlocks, pah. She could live in her fantasy worlds, but he'd stick to solid, comforting reality. He penned the first sentence of his new novel, A Good Death. Not satisfied, he scribbled it out and tried again… and again… and again.