The Last Notebook of Leonardo by B.B. Wurge

find eleven or twelve in one store, and
sometimes just one. Luckily they weren’t expensive. At the end of each day we’d come home with the back seat of the car clattering with old clocks. Then in the evening we would pry open the front of each clock and scrape the glowing green stuff into a cup, and Dad would pour the cup into the fuel tank, which was a steel gas tank from a tractor. After about three days Dad said that we had enough. He stuck a twig into the fuel tank to see how full it was, and when he was satisfied he screwed the cover back on. He said that a little bit of nuclear fuel would get us a long way, and since we were only going to the moon and hopefully back again, we didn’t need a full tank. We were ready to launch.
    It was the last day of December, and Noma suggested that we wait until midnight. Our launch would be our New Year’s celebration. We would be like a firecracker shooting up into the air. I hoped we wouldn’t explode.

Toward the moon.

    14
    We climbed through the hatch into the interior. It was surprisingly comfortable. Dad had put an old car seat in the wagon, and up front, for the driver, a reclining chair with a footrest. It was a big wagon, so we had a lot of room, even with Dad in there with us. We had a Styrofoam ice chest packed with cold chicken and egg salad. Under the seat we had a few sacks of potatoes for Dad, and we had some gallon jugs of water for all of us. We had a lot of other stuff in a trunk strapped on the roof, such as Dad’s two boxes of papers and a stack of books and some extra clothes, but we couldn’t get to the trunk without going outside the ship, which didn’t seem likely in space. Maybe it would be possible once we reached the moon. According to Dad, space was very cold, but he had insulated the spaceship with the arctic survival quilt, and so we should be okay. Leonardo
had suggested goose feathers, but probably our way was better.
    We sat down and buckled ourselves in. Dad closed the hatch, and all the nighttime sounds of creaking trees and hooting night birds stopped suddenly. We were sealed in. I looked out the window at Noma’s tiny slate-roofed house in the moonlight. Snow was falling softly through the still air, piling up on the roof and the front steps. The night looked peaceful.
    Dad sat in the driver’s seat surrounded by about thirty levers and handles and knobs. I hoped he knew which was which. “Here goes,” he said, and yanked down on a leather strap. I gritted my teeth and waited for the blast to shoot us up in the air, but nothing happened.
    â€œUm, Dad,” I said, “are you sure there’s enough fuel?”
    â€œOf course there is,” he said. “It’s working beautifully.”
    I looked out the window and realized that we had already left the ground. Leonardo’s design didn’t involve rocket engines blasting us off the Earth. It was more sophisticated. We rose up gently above Noma’s house, through the falling snow, and soon reached the cloud cover. It looked like a giant gray amoeba looming over us, glowing from the moon behind it. We plunged into it and when we came out on top,
we were in the clearest, brightest, starriest night I had ever seen.
    â€œThere’s the moon,” Dad said, pointing out the front window. “Somebody hold the map and make sure I’m driving the right way.” He handed back a drawing of the moon with an X at our destination. All the moon’s craters and pocks and streaks were neatly drawn on the map.
    Dad took hold of the controls with his hands and feet and drove straight at the moon. It was a beautiful smooth ride, not like a bumpy car ride over a country road, and certainly nothing like the jerking, stop-and-go movement of a New York taxi. The Earth sped away behind us and the moon loomed bigger and bigger.
    â€œI do wish I had brought a pack of cards,” Noma said.
    We said nothing for a long time after that.