Flotsam
No survivors. A boat sunk in the middle of the ocean still makes a sound. Of submarines lost during World War II, many were never found. Their exact locations unknown, the mapping imprecise, the currents of the ocean bearing away the traces. Some were found decades later, young children of men who had died were now in their seventies and eighties. Their lives lived with the unknowing. What was it to know, to have found, after all that time?
Under the waves, way down at the bottom of everything, life rebuilds. Pieces of wood and metal and bone become sanctuary. In years, no one will recognize the shapes of something lost.
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Found
A ship sunk hundreds of years before. A bracelet with a broken clasp, slipped from the wrist of a girl running through a field. Love letters never sent. A piece of something meant for space. A necklace half-buried by the dusts of Mars.
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Debris
When a ship breaks up in space, the pieces stay forever. Always circling, waiting to damage something else. When it breaks up in the process of launching, jettisoning from Earth to outer space, pieces fall. Not everything breaks up in the atmosphere.
When a ship breaks up before it has broken free from the atmosphere, the pieces fall back to Earth. A piece of the Ariadne landed as far away from the original launch site as Wisconsin. No one could truly explain the distance.
Most pieces fell into the ocean. No one was harmed by falling debris.
When Skylab was deorbited in 1979, pieces that didn’t burn up in the atmosphere landed, for the most part, in the Indian Ocean. The rest ended up in rural Australia. When members of the Skylab investigation team arrived to look for pieces and make sense of what might have gone wrong, they were met with a four-hundred dollar fine for littering.
Everyone aboard the Ariadne was lost.
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Missing
Lost means gone, but missing has the potential of being found. Missing In Action, missing posters spread across a city. Still, most people know that missing will eventually mean lost.
When the crew of the Mars mission was lost, there were a few moments during loss of signal, before anyone in Mission Control knew, where it could have just been that the signal had blinkered. It was different than the Ariadne, then any mission before. There were no visuals, no instant sign of destruction.
There’s a space inside the word “missing,” something you could stay inside of.
The mission has been lost.
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Refuse
A mother can refuse to hear the news that her child has been killed in war, closing the door in the face of those who have come to tell her. But the knowledge is still there, will always be there.
What counts as refuse is a wider array than garbage, but still some of it can be refused. A life can be found in what has been thrown away.
In outer space, garbage is collected, kept, stored. We have learned that what is cast away returns.
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Lost
Accidents: we stub a toe, break a cup, call a loved one by someone else’s name. These everyday accidents are rarely fatal. In war and in space, the culmination of mistakes that can lead to an accident often are deadly. There is so much more at stake.
Years after she lost her husband on the Ariadne, his widow called their son by his name. In the moment after it happened, they both were startled out of the present and thrown back into the moment, all those years before, when they were watching the launch on TV and still thought everything would be okay.
Sorry, she said. Her son nodded. The years returned to them as an emptiness.
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Remains
Remains serve a dual function as a word: something has been lost and something has been left. Similar words are wreckage, ruins, remnants. Each does not fully contain the scope of what has been lost. For bodies, though, the word of choice is always remains.
A mother asks, can I bury him?
The man talking to her stumbles over his words, trying to avoid saying anything hurtful: not the body, not remains.
A son lost in war is sent home, but he is still missing.
What remains is a memory. Lines on the doorframe showing his height as he grew, photos on the wall, letters he sent to his sister.
A mother asks, what can I bury?
Her son on Mars, under dust. Her son never to be returned.
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Returned
It is his friend who fishes the necklace out of the ruins. Recognizes it after seeing a glint in the light. When he returns it to Earth, returns it to the mother, she doesn’t cry. Later, she carefully runs her fingernail into the crevices of the necklace, dislodges dust from another planet.
Rubbing the dirt between her fingers, it could be the earth. An observer would think it was nothing miraculous.
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Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Patterns of Orbit, the forthcoming Every Galaxy Is a Circle, and more. She is a founding co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph.