The rocketThere was a small town in the middle of somewhere or nowhere. It didn't really have a name and there were few people to call it anything even if it had one. It sat on the edge of a pine forest and near the shore of a cold, deep lake and, at night, the sky bled red and purple as if someone had doused it with radioactive watercolors. The town itself was small and dusty and almost entirely unremarkable. Except for the rocket.The rocket had waited there for nearly 50 years. Not to personify it too much, it didn't really wait. It loomed, it stood immobile, it cast a long dark shadow th