Abukoff House Books

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, now, as of about a half hour ago, was a cockroach crawling across the remains of a burnt out world. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out.

I came upon this burnt out husk of a planet, just as the flames were fighting for the last gasp of oxygen. Something had ripped the atmosphere from the surface. And I have to say that I hope it was an attack from without rather than destruction from within. Because I’d been there before it was destroyed, and it was beautiful. About eighty percent water. Oxygen/Nitrogen atmosphere. At just the right axial tilt and distance from the sun to make it a paradise. It was indeed a paradise, largely uninhabited. It was, until discovered by those ever-expanding and ever-curious humans.

And what of the humans? The first time they found alien life, it was a flower (a blood-orchid, from what I’ve read), of all things, on a world in their own neighborhood, only a handful of light years away. And their reaction? They plucked it from the alien soil, quickly and efficiently killing it. Mankind’s best and brightest killed the first alien life they found. How do I know this, you might ask? They bragged about it. The heroes. The scourge of alien flowers.

So if I shed no tears for the end of a human encroachment into the clean deep vastness of space, well, they’ve made their bed.

Where does the cockroach come in? I dropped a mining probe down look around at what was left of the burnt world. And the only sign of life- indeed, the only sign that anything had ever lived there, was a cockroach crawling over a rock. Don’t get me wrong, I love people. I’ve met many good humans. But at the destructive end of the human experiment on this small planet, life has found a way to keep going. Simple stubborn life moves through the ashes. Hope among the ruins.