Epektasis

06:38.
Ambient air: thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.
Below specification.
Within waiver.

Steel contracts by microns.
Elastomer stiffens, loses elasticity,
forgets return.

This is recorded.
This is archived.
This becomes authorisation.

A teleconference ends without goodbye.
Voices replaced by line noise.
Someone enters flight rationale
and the phrase begins behaving
like explanation rather than warning.

On the pad,
handrails hold frost.
Liquid oxygen vents, white and animal,
breathing toward ignition.

No one writes flammable.
Everyone writes cold.

The joint is assembled in stacked language:
tang, clevis, field joint.
Two O-rings asked to remember
how circular pressure resists fire.

Compression measured in millimetres.
Resilience in probability.
Failure deferred.

Engineers write: erosion observed.
Another adds: cold increases blow-by risk.
The verb is softened.
Risk becomes conditional.
Conditional becomes acceptable.
Acceptable becomes scheduled.

T-minus proceeds in integers.
The clocks consent.

Ignition.

Flame organises into thrust.
The vehicle rises slowly,
as if reconsidering.

The plume writes a brief signature
across the sky, then erases it.

Applause.
A sudden quiet among children.

Seventy-three seconds.

Telemetry spikes.
Chamber pressure drops.
A flare appears along the right booster
where no vocabulary exists yet.

Explosion is inaccurate.
What occurs is structural unmaking
under aerodynamic load.

The tank fails open.
Hydrogen meets oxygen
without negotiation.

Light expands faster than explanation.

In Mission Control
no one stands immediately.
Hands remain trained on procedure.
Someone says: vehicle anomaly.
Someone does not say what everyone knows.

Debris arcs into the Atlantic.
White smoke draws incomplete parentheses
around the blue.

A classroom television continues broadcasting snow.
A teacher reaches for the remote,
stops,
leaves the moment unfinished
because history has not yet named it.

Later, divers inventory fragments:
tiles with numbers still legible,
wiring fused into reef forms,
a helmet with the visor intact,
still shaped like a face.

The ocean receives without annotation.

Months later the commission will write:
organisational failure,
normalisation of deviance,
communication breakdown.

The words behave well on paper.
They do not smoke.
They do not fall.

But that morning contained only temperature
and the labour of translation:
warning into delay,
delay into tolerance,
tolerance into launch.

A ring of rubber asked to perform certainty.
It performed approximation.

The pad remains.
The flag repeats its rehearsed motion.
Wind tests microphones
for voices trained not to answer.

Forty years later
we call this a lesson.
Often we mean distance.

Meanwhile rockets rise again—
new sponsors, sharper cameras,
faster countdowns.

Cold still enters material.
Schedules still press hesitation.
Language still edits danger
until it fits inside permission.

Stand close enough and the story alters.

Not tragedy.
Sequence.

Temperature plus decision.
The ordinary mathematics
of not stopping.

Nothing here has finished happening.

-

Written on the 40th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle disaster.