The Vessel

Today's prompts are a little trickier to work with than last week's though perhaps not in the way you would think. The theme is "sand," and the subject is "the vessel." These evoke the image of a ship at sea, or a ship beached in a sandy cove. But that's too easy. My challenge with this one is to create a snippet with more surprise and pop than the image that comes to everyone's mind (assuming none of my readers here have aphantasia, which is statistically unlikely).
If you come up with something completely different than I do, I would love to hear about it!
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The rumble of the engine shook the whole ship, vibrating through every nut, bolt, and panel. At times, things came loose and rattled horrendously until the Engineer could sprint to the site and tighten everything down again. Luckily for everyone, that only happened with the inside panels, and never with the bulkhead. If it ever did move to the outer layers, they would all be frozen space debris.

"This haul is the one that will get us the funds to buy a new ship." That's what the Captain promised. There were some doubts, but no one really had the energy to argue anymore. It was a constant fight to keep the old rustbucket from falling apart every time they passed a minor asteroid or moon.


"Who's paying us to ship this stuff, anyway?" grumbled the Chief Morale Officer (who was also our Janitor and Cook). He was frowning at the floor as he spoke, which did nothing to boost anyone's morale, especially his own. It had been meant to stay in the cargo bay, but it seemed to spread more and more, the longer it was onboard. The gritty stuff was in the halls, in the galley, in the restroom, even in our sleeping quarters. The Captain nearly threw a fit when it made its way into the control room (we stopped calling it the "bridge" about the same time the airlock became the "cargo bay."

The "cargo bay" which was full of crates and crates of sand. More than a metric ton of the stuff. Sure, it sounded fancy to say your sand was "imported" and "hand sifted," but the reality of it was a lot less fancy and a lot more... invasive.

"If I never see this crap again, I'll die happy." The Engineer muttered.

The Captain grunted agreement."Look at the bright side, boys. We won't have to clean it up. After this, we're getting a new ship - a real ship."

This did cheer us up. The Captain became our new Moral Officer.