It had been weeks since contact was lost. The astronauts had already said
their goodbyes, I love yous and prayers by the time they started making music.
Stumpy banged on the module walls. An unending grave murmur rolled out of
Bubba’s throat. Moose, with a higher and more delicate voice, had been trailing
off the last of the songs he remembered for days, ceaselessly. The sounds
served to nothing but the soundtrack of a hypnotic trance they’d all lost
themselves in. None of them remembered which one started it, but the other
two started playing to drown out the maddening noise, and they all went mad
together. It’s been untold days of continuous and fluctuating dissonance.



       At a given point in not-time, a system alarm activated; A new melody was
added to their orchestra. The variation awakened the minds of the astronauts
lost in days of unsleep and prompted all three of them to focus on the same
point in not-space, where their sound waves met. For the first time, the voices
began to harmonise. A surge of vitality, slow to fade, raced through their
numbed and rusted bodies. Soon, Stumpy began following the tempo of the
alarm, a steady 70 beats per minute. The concordant melody caused a shift in
Moose’s voice, and soon after Bubba followed him, one after another strolling
up and down the hills of frequencies and bringing to life chords that were
entirely new, because they had been forgotten. They pioneered every key, every
scale and melody, and were within their right to claim discovery over them,
because the world they were on had never known sound. Then, a second alarm
started blaring, and Stumpy built a rhythm with black and numb drumsticks.



       As the last band member joined the symphony, the astronauts came back
to life. In that moment when the sun’s rays wormed their way through the
unclothed lunar sky and the module’s curtains, Moose rose from the ashes and
found himself right where he had died; at the point in time where he had lost
hope of ever being retrieved, with the tape recorder he was supposed to log
mission day 39 on in hand. With inestimable effort, he pressed the button and it
started recording, right as all the module’s other sirens joined in on the
performance. Warnings of impending doom were their chorus, and a show of
lights unfolded for their marvellous concert. Time was running again and
Moose didn’t waste the shortest moment. There were many declarations of love
left unsung. The depleting oxygen was threatening to choke out his singing
voice. Stumpy’s drumming surged ever louder and faster. Moose wailed
restless and rich harmonies and felt like he had everything in the universe to
put out into this little world that was shrinking; Their voices filled the air of the
module with splendour and carbon dioxide. He wasn’t using words; he couldn’t
fit enough of them in the time he knew they had left, and he wasn’t well-read
enough to find the most suitable ones in due time. He kept on chanting, letting
his bursting head dictate the notes. For all he knew, he never stopped.



       No one ever heard their greatest work. It never made it out of the
module. The air bare moon couldn’t carry it any further than the craft’s artificial
atmosphere. The tape inside the recorder contained six and half minutes of
music fading out into wheezes and 53 minutes of silence. It was a miracle they
lasted as long as they did. Moose and Bubba’s lungs could better be described
as pools of blood by the end of their performance. Stumpy’s drumsticks
wouldn’t keep a straight shape anymore. Forty-seven years later, when lunar
exploration was finally given another chance after the disaster, a team of
spacemen came to pay their respects to the fallen astronauts on behalf of all
the nations of Earth. They didn’t dare open the module, as to not disturb the
astronauts’ resting place.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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