"Far from the Galactic Hub"

Years ago I would sell short-shorts to various markets  What they refer to these days as "flash fiction". There was a market then...I haven't even looked to see if there is anymore.

Here is one that failed to find a home back in those old days. It's just been sitting in the proverbial trunk gathering dust. A little dark science-fiction tale.

"FAR FROM THE GALACTIC HUB"
by
James Robert Smith

     He'd been forced from the herd long ago. And so he'd been drifting the outer reaches for many cycles, far from the Hub. He was alone. 
      
     And then. 
     
     He heard her. He listened to her plaintive call, the unmistakable sigh of first yearning. Initially, he thought that he was mistaken, that he had been alone for so long that he was imagining things. But the sigh came again, that quick burst and the faint prickling of her desire tickled across his receptors so that he turned toward her, spinning his mass effortlessly in the void so that he could seek her out.

     With a slow pulse he thrust himself toward that place where she waited; and he wondered how she could have come so far from the Hub. This was not a normal thing in the life of a female, but his lust and desire for companionship overruled that curious fact.

     For many cycles he wondered if he were not deluding himself. But as he continued to pulse, to increase the velocity of his mass, he felt time and again her call, each more intense than the one before. Truly, this female yearned for him as fiercely as he for her. He tacked away from the Hub, farther than he ever had, and he pushed past lonely systems, aiming for a certain yellow point of light that grew as he surged toward it. She was calling.

     In a while, after traveling through this desert void, but feeling her calls, her sighs that grew sometimes to panting moans, he saw her, small and perfect against the mass of this backwater star around which she was anchored: so tiny and perfect and blue.

     He corrected his path and pulsed again, sending his great mass toward her. How would she receive him? Would she accept his advances?

*

     In a desperate effort, the men of Earth launched an armada of nuclear missiles at the Texas-sized mass that seemed to be coming toward Earth. They could not destroy it, they feared, but perhaps it could be deflected away. In the skies, ten thousand megatons detonated against its gray mass as it broke the plane of the orbit of Mars. 

 *

     Ah, he needn't have worried. He heard her call, felt the soothing glow of her lust as he came within a unit of her. She wanted him, her thrusting foreplay was exciting. Such a teasing, delicate kiss! Excellent. He would reciprocate.

     He opened his gills and loosed his passion. The ladies always enjoyed a big, sloppy one.