Red Rocket

Garth Miró

          If you had a good working cock, you were still worth a damn. If not, well buddy, you were getting left. You were going to rot on the heap Earth had become in 2025.
          Panic first started when the tubes backed up with shit. People tried using cups and oil cans and New York Yankees baseball caps, but it just wasn’t the same. Even the dumbest then realized they were fucked.
          Disease came swiftly. It crawled up out of the shit piles, gray, friendly, and everyone’s softened modern immune systems welcomed it in. By the end, only one guy was left in Japan. Two families split California down the middle, each taking a half. Spain was just a pile of old TVs and dirty socks. Anyone, anyone at all who was still alive, formed a world government to focus on finding a solution. But the more they talked, the more they knew what had to be done. They were going to have to leave.
          To get to Mars, a new form of power was needed. The rocket was big.
          The world government looked and looked, but no one had any idea how to get “Big Red” into space. It was twice the size of the Empire State Building. After exhausting their list, they gritted their teeth and picked up the phone. With reluctance, a previously shunned scientist named Ernie Stillmeyer was called. He was a miserable drunk and smelled horrible, but he had ideas. Things others couldn’t think up. Things normal scientists thought were beneath the field.
          “What you got for us, Earn?” the U.S. representative asked the brilliant unshaven hack.
          He looked up from his beer and smiled a bean-colored smile. His plan was for humanity to fuck its way out.
          At first, people rightfully lifted their brows. But after seeing the device work in person, they unanimously agreed it was the only way.
          That day in the secret underground lab, somewhere in Nevada, Ernie and the prostitute slowly got naked. They hooked themselves up to the device—which looked a lot like a toaster—and started going at it.
          Wires attached to their nipple clamps carried sexual energy to a large light-bulb indicator sitting on a metal desk. As the two gyrated, the women in the audience noted Ernie was quite well endowed. With their thrusting and grunting, the indicator light on the desk started to flicker. Then it stayed glowing. A bile-yellow burn. It burst! Could it be? Could they actually power Big Red through sex? Gasping for air, glistening with sweat, Ernie Stillmeyer leaned back and lit a cigarette. He told them it was time to get to work.
          Government officials were sent out to all remaining people of the world. They went to houses with measuring tape and measured each cock carefully. They had to be big. Over nine inches was ideal.
          When they were done, a thousand men and a thousand women boarded Big Red. The rest looked up at the rocket—free government beer in hand (a parting gift)—as it exploded into the deep-blue sky.
          Deep-blue, then black.
          This initial launch was powered by normal fuel, but once they were in space the revolutionary intercourse machine would need to get them the rest of the way. They had a long way to go. It would be fifteen years until they reached Mars.
          Ernie dropped his pants and addressed the audience from the balcony in the rocket’s main pod. As he explained their task, assistants came out and clamped the machine to his nipples. He lifted one of the assistant’s dresses and began his work. The people cheered. They followed suit, the men dropping their trousers and the women daintily sliding off their underwear. Within moments, the air was thick. Indicator lights along the walls lit up brighter than the stars, and off through space they shot.
          For the first years, normal sexual behavior satisfied the machine. The interior of the ship was flooded in bile-yellow light. Like a lizard’s cage. It worked best when taking in the sexual energy of a highly aroused coupling, when people were at the peak of horniness. But after a while, after doggy-style felt mechanical, threesomes were like peeling an orange, and BDSM merely roused a yawn, the ship started to sputter. People tried to spice it up, sure, but in the end humans get bored easily. All the lube and straps and butt plugs shaped like the bald, smooth head of Dr. Phil couldn’t save them.
          It was years of slogging through orgy after orgy, just to keep the minimal amount of light on. When Big Red finally made it to Mars, it was twenty years over the projected timeline. Wilted, tired people stumbled out of the ship and onto land in their baggy space suits. They set up camps as quickly as possible and grew vegetables and built small towns. But even with all that new clean shitless land, and the chance to thrive and start again, people only ever got older. No one was ever born, because no one ever fucked. They had done so much and were now repulsed by even the thought. Days and nights passed, and the herd dwindled. And when the last couple was left, they decided to stomach through it. They couldn’t go out like this, after everything. They tried their best to have a baby and save humanity—but nothing. They were both dried up. The hollow shell of Big Red loomed above, its shadow causing them to shiver in each other’s arms.

Garth Miró is a writer from Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Litro, Shark Reef, and KingsCountyPolitics.com.