Confessions of a Third-Culture Kid
Alyssa Nshimirimana ~ Creative Nonfiction
Being a psychology major often consists of discovering the many ways humans are terrible at thinking. Cognition 101: “We are cognitive misers,” I neatly jot down. We’re fond of mental shortcuts. Assumptions make perfect sense until, shockingly, they morph into heartless jacks-in-the-box and spring mocking absurdity into your face. You’re left distraught and burning with embarrassment.
I remember forming one such false belief. I am standing four feet short, my big, avid eyes silently following the agitated adults of my childhood. I conclude these giants know everything worth understanding. They can point to Burundi on a map and turn raw rice soft and savory. Rumor says they can even hear God. I am every four-year-old. I want to fly already and see the world from their vantage point. My guts insist that, for some reason, these nurturing titans withhold the master key to the chain of never-ending “whys” that shackle my burgeoning wings.
Nothing ever was, is, or will be more self-evident. The adults of my childhood know who they are. They know where they fit, to whom they belong, and what purpose they serve. Exhibit 1: a banal scene playing on a Friday evening, that of my father extracting packaged goods out of reusable grocery bags. His moves, utterly efficient, and demonstrates sheer confidence. From this, the much younger version of me infers that her Papa has cracked the code to the meaning of life.
He provides for his family and does so with undeniable ease. He takes out a plastic bottle of Schweppes Tonic, a fizzy beverage I once mentioned enjoying, and hands me the drink. No one else in our household of six appreciates its bittersweet tang – though they’ll eventually acquire the taste. Watching me take a contented sip, Dad smirks bemusedly.
I can see the gears in his head. He is up to something. His mind runs through half of the dictionary, a habit he built as a child, during this special period in life when most humans are as free as they’ll ever be. Back then, the African institutions in charge of his education asked him to choose either words or numbers, paragraphs or mathematical demonstrations, literary classics or scientific textbooks. He was drawn to La Fontaine’s fables more than he ever was to Descartes’ findings. To this day, Dad can still perfectly recite the poems he memorized all those decades ago. In an alternate reality, one in which poets never go hungry, my orthopedic surgeon of a father spins fiction to feed his loved ones.
The gears end their rotation. This bilingual lyricist I call ‘Dad’, away from fame’s spotlight, crafts a nickname for me: “the Alien.” And, immediately, wherever my soul abides, a cosmic shift occurs. I startle and choke on my newest moniker. I have never resonated more intensely with anything as I do that day with the concept of alienation, the idea that you fit apart from the group and that your differences from your peers far outweigh your similarities. Without intending to, Dad forces my gaze upon murky emotions, vague feelings that constantly hover.
A crisis begins, but my parents fail to notice. How could the omniscient adults of my childhood stay oblivious? The truth mutates into one discomforting oxymoron. Maybe nothing will ever be self-evident again.Yet my rookie of a mind is charged with solving the mystery. I’m in violent need of light. In darkness, I fume.
Years later, the Alien sits a few feet taller and many pounds heavier, legalized in Texas. She is conscientiously taking notes in a foreign language when time rudely freezes. What usually courses from one second to the next indulges in stillness. The miracle lasts just long enough for me to process one crude oversimplification: that of the differences between collectivistic societies and individualistic ones. In the former, interdependence prevails. In the latter, independence reigns. I exist in-between, forever alien everywhere.
This revelation sets all fumes ablaze. Fire consumes nebulous conjectures. The universe bares proven truths.
I am fated to always question. Should I crucify egocentrism for the sake of my lineage’s redemption? Or should my hero’s journey define me alone? Should I parent siblings I never birthed, or foster friendships elevated by blood? Should I bear many children or tango with my freedom? Should I tailor the fabric of my faith or put on a local church’s uniform? Each inquiry bites sharply into my identity.
So, I take every deep breath I must. Belly breathing thickens the skin and makes you less likely to bruise when reality strikes. Experience taught me so. I have become a trained belly breather out of necessity – after too many assumptions crumbled and the ground opened from under my feet.
I was the girl writing down flashcards on catatonia and anhedonia. I would try to empathize, to get a mental feel for the shoes worn by those who don’t move or feel pleasure, also known as the stigmatized. I assumed I would never join their pitiful club. I couldn’t predict I’d need to learn to use checklists, mindfulness, and words of affirmation to subdue pain. I couldn’t foresee I’d have to practice forgiving and forgetting. I never fathomed how taxing absolving a lifetime’s worth of hurt would prove. I didn’t expect I would succeed.
I reminisce, and because the luckiest of patients in the 21st century do recover, I stare at the silver lining. To survive means uncovering your antifragility. Life challenges and stressors are not merely opportunities to develop resilience. They are the necessary evils to acquire tremendously helpful strengths. If a toddler is never exposed to peanuts by his coddling parents, he faces a greater risk of developing an allergy to the otherwise harmless nut. Just like your immune system must interact with potential threats during your earliest years to develop an appropriate response to what your organism cannot indefinitely avoid, you’re better off having suffered through challenges during your twenties. You understand after you’ve won. Eventually, unavoidable yet unpredictable hardships come your way, but they meet you prepared, equipped to fend them off, and looking forward to the sweet taste of victory.
Hence, my newfound fondness for the stench of decaying assumptions. I invite the universe to chew, gnaw, and chomp to its heart’s content. This Alien’s plane of existence, where worldviews meet and blend, hides a disarming declination of beauty. I alone bask in its glory.
The Middle
Rose Weisburg ~ Poetry
We met when we were in middle
school, back when words like “my best friend”
meant the entire world to me.
And so, that was what you were called,
when, in truth, you were my first love,
which I know now is not the same.
​
You see, if it had been the same,
I’d not get stuck in the middle
of you and all the boys you’d love.
Boys who meant much more than a friend,
the ones whom every week you’d call
a lot more than you would call me.
​
It’s not that you didn’t love me,
just that our love wasn’t the same.
‘Love’ just wasn’t what people called
this thing, something in the middle
of ‘idolized person’ and ‘friend.’
Nevertheless, it felt like love,
​
Especially when you said I love
you before you’d hang up on me,
swearing you’d always stay my friend.
Especially when we’d share the same
seat, squeezed tightly in the middle
of the car (“The Ford,” it was called).
​
But those feelings are now recalled
because you chose to fall in love
with boys, showing off your middle
in tops once bought to match with me.
because you chose to date the same
guy for two years, your first boyfriend.
​
Though he wasn’t a great boyfriend,
“Your first love” is what he was called.
Do we define that phrase the same?
And if so, were you not in love
with your best friend, with us, with me?
Or were we just in the middle
​
of transitioning into love
that was bigger than you and me?
If so, then I miss the middle.
I Am
David Duong ~ Poetry
As I walk,
I begin to observe the nature around me. How
the cold breeze gently pats my shoulder, the
sound of my feet interacting with the soil. I
notice my breathing.
Air fills up my lungs,
I am alive.
As alive as every flower and tree I walked past.
We are similar.
I am constantly changing,
physically and mentally transforming.
I am different yet the same,
constantly in motion.
Driftwood, lost in space and time,
flowing with the current.
Powerful and unforgiving,
whirlpool after whirlpool.
I am the ground that I walk,
the flowers and trees that I see,
the driftwood, but also the relentless sea.
I am dust.
A billion years of creation exist within me.
I am the unchanging past.
I am present,
and the uncertain future.
One day I will return,
but I have never left.
Just like a flower,
I, too, will wither away.
I explore the mindstream,
stepping from world to world,
just to be awaken
to find that I am.
Conscious Unconscious
Alyssa Nshimirimana ~ Short Story
“I see so plainly that there are no definitive signs by which to distinguish being awake from being asleep” – Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.
​
​
​
The sound of waves crashing ashore brings Iris Morvan to consciousness.
Water unfolds and splays outwardly, like the checkered blankets of her childhood picnics, before shying away to reunite with the horizon’s shimmering translucence. The next wave arrives promptly, followed by another. The ocean seems set on engulfing the beach whole, one inch at a time.
The glinting of the water's surface prickles Iris’s eyes. Yet, gazing at the rolling of the seas soothes her. With every woosh, she sways, feeling like a giant baby.
When she was five, she used to watch her mother gently rock her youngest sister, trying to lull the crankiest of infants to sleep. Iris would press a plushy against each ear. A puppy on the left. A bunny on the right. She’d never switch their positions. And she would put all her childish might in her tiny arms, shutting her eyelids tightly as she does now, decades later, to get a better look at the memory. She’s briefly saddened that the images elude her, but the warmth on her face comforts her. She’s a marshmallow left unsupervised on a bright summer day.
This weather’s perfect for a nap.
Iris digs her naked toes deeper into the dry, cool sand. She takes in the many sounds of her immediate surroundings. The wind whispers in her ears. Youthful squeals of excitement and grown-ups shouting orders create joyful disharmony. She catches the flirtatious rant of someone nearby and feels a silent disdain towards the object of his praises. In the background, Newport Beach traffic whirls faintly.
Her favorite noise remains the drumming beat of the waves as they lap on shore.
There’s a word for that.
Iris knows for a fact that there’s a word for that specific sound---she would know. She’s every trivia night’s grandma champion. The term is on the tip of her tongue.
What was it again? Sur… suration? Surdation? Surudation?
A sudden pattering startles her. She finds herself wide-eyed, staring at the most magnificent goldendoodle. For a second, she’s mute. The goldendoodle thoughtfully stares back.
Now, aren’t you a darling!
The puppy wags a playful tail once, then twice, as if taunting Iris to step forward and give chase. Its shiny black pupils never leave her, even when it raises a furry ear, before it unexpectedly sprints away. Iris watches it leap and bounce in circles around a young man whose lanky, unassured figure reminds her of Raymond---her greatest pride.
Others, to cope with midlife crises, buy extravagant cars or cheat on their partner. Some, like her Raymond, do both. But her son also adopted Brains, a retired K9, and devotes his time on pampering the proud German shepherd. For having given birth to such an amazing human being…
I must be God’s favorite person.
Iris smiles. She becomes happiness personified.
I should come to the beach more often.
And she would. If not for the seagulls. Their screeching always rattles her, so she rarely ever…
A shiver runs down Iris’s spine. She has yet to hear a single one of the piercing cries that haunt shores worldwide. Her right hand hastily rises to shield her eyes as she scans the sky. Patiently. Painstakingly.
Not a single feathered being.
Doubt’s cold fingers creep on her, snaking up her back, chilling her nape, winding around her throat… they’re aiming for her heart. Iris clasps her left hand against her chest. The cotton of her shirt rustles unpleasantly.
Is this…reality?
Iris Morvan has endured many awfully vivid dreams – ones where, ‘til the very end, she’s convinced real events occurred. It began after a visit from Daisy, her granddaughter. The girl, bless her heart, is somewhat of a naïve creature. She spends her days discussing fairies with other teenagers. Iris wouldn’t mind as much if these conversations happened outdoors rather than in Daisy’s messy bedroom, through the dirty screen of her mistreated laptop. Maybe then the girl would know a thing or two about the real world.
At least, her granddaughter is a kind soul. Twice a week, she Ubers to Iris’s tiny apartment for a chat, always bringing bits of sausage for Whiskers, her grumpy orange Persian cat.
Two months ago, Daisy told Iris about lucid dreaming. Iris herself didn’t pay much attention, given how entertained she was by the sight of her grandbaby gulping half a pie meant for twelve people. Iris planned on bringing everyone at her weekly book club meeting a meringue slice the next day, but she no longer cared. She just gained fascinating insight.
Daisy eats pie exactly like Raymond does. Although she physically looks nothing like her dad--- her parents needed a male donor to conceive her---she follows the exact same ritual.
First, using both hands, they hold the slice at eye level. They study the garnish for a second or two before knocking back their heads and downing the entire thing in one go.
On the day she made this discovery, Iris was so moved that she only caught glimpses of Daisy’s enthused spiel.
I’m almost there, Nana. I feel like after practicing once or twice more, I’ll be able to perfectly control my dreams.
Iris had grinned at the tall tales of flying above mountains and spying on an annoying classmate while tucking one of Daisy’s blond locks behind her ear.
Nana. What would you do if you could lucid dream?
Iris had happily humored her one and only grandchild.
I would bring your Pops back. Not his sick self but how he was when Raymond was born.
Yes, if she had any control over her dreams, Iris would conjure her beloved husband. She was tired of remembering his diminished form, tired of the pain glued to his face during his last months, and tired of his specter sneaking up on her daily. She pined for the boisterous man who had rushed to the maternity ward in his greasy blues and had cried harder than the newborn in his arms.
Is now my chance?
What are the odds that she is currently dreaming? Iris feels faint with hope. Her late husband is about to materialize before her very eyes. She would’ve put on makeup, had she not stopped buying lipstick after he left, so she must meet him bare faced. But now isn’t the time for regrets. A shadowy silhouette stretches before her.
Iris nervously follows the dark outline all the way to gray sneakers. She promptly raises her eyes and meets those of a young stranger. The goldendoodle from earlier sits still by his side.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” The stranger frowns down at her expectantly.
Hoping he won’t notice the tears welling up, Iris asks: “Who’s this good boy?”
The man glances at his side and Iris reads adoration in the way the crow feet crease the corner of his eyes.
“That’s Sahara,” he replies. “The best girl ever.”
Iris lets Sahara sniff her spotted and wrinkly fingers.
“Are you sure you’re alright? You looked quite pale a moment ago. And you were holding your chest, so…”
“Oh, that’s just old age,” Iris cuts with a wry laugh.
A fat seagull chooses this exact moment to land between them. The bird sets one eye on Iris and the other on the canine on the opposite side. The universe stills for a second. Then chaos ensues.
Sahara pounces on the bird, which shrieks bloody murder. The pet’s owner responds immediately, spewing a long series of orders intersected with a colorful curse every time a command goes ignored. Eventually, he settles on tackling Sahara. Sand rains on Iris’s skirt, who bursts out laughing at the impromptu wrestling show. The seagull is already high in the air.
“Sit! Sahara! Sit! ****! Sit down, Sahara! Sit down!”
After the umpteenth declination of the order, Sahara obliges, wagging an unapologetic tail. She looks prouder than ever, while the disheveled young man crouching next to her hides his flushed face behind large hands.
Iris can’t stop laughing. She couldn’t be dreaming. She would never come up with this kind of scenario.
How can lucid dreaming be any fun if there are no surprises? How would you get a good laugh?
“Have you ever heard of lucid dreams?” she asks, her voice still vibrating with delight.
The man lowers his hands to reveal a quizzical look.
“My granddaughter told me about it,” Iris pursues. “How do you know you’re not dreaming?”
She observes his thoughtful expression.
“That’s a very good question,” he concedes.
How seriously he considers her inquiry tickles Iris. She takes in his high cheekbones, full lips, almond eyes, and buzzcut. If not for her granddaughter’s relentless nagging, she’d ask him where he really comes from.
“Maybe it has to do with expectations?” he wonders out loud. “Take unicorns for example. If they were real, people would have capitalized on it already. Fancy restaurants would serve rare unicorn steak, for sure. But because unicorns aren’t real, what we would expect to see if they were real also doesn’t happen. Does that make sense? I think that’s why fiction should remain fiction. It gives us the thrill we don’t actually want to deal with, you know? Like, dragons, for example, they sure sound like they’re a sight to behold, but then the world would also be so terrifying.”
He glances at Sahara, who began chasing her tail a minute ago, and smirks.
“I mean, I love my girl, but she’d be gobbled up real quick.”
Iris chuckles alongside her latest acquaintance. He seemed shy at first but as expected, young people these days love these sorts of conversations. She tries to remember whether that was true of her generation, but she gives in right away. Iris has fully relaxed by now. She never was creative enough to imagine such an interesting character.
Who names their puppy after a desert, anyway?
Just as sense comes back to the world, the ground disappears from under her feet. The last sound Iris hears is that of the young man calling for her.
Silent Suffering
Sam Everett ~ Poetry
when the tale’s over and the words are said,
we feel a gnawing, clawing dread
at the silence heavy in the air
always watching, always there,
that we fill with stories in its stead.
words we’ve written, words we’ve read:
words are what the silence bled
when its presence we could no longer bear.
and it is never heard.
that emptiness we all tread
surrounds our lives and greets the dead,
but greet it willing, we’d never dare.
we quell the quiet with words of prayer.
let me breathe! it’s always pled.
and it is never heard.
Cosmic Shards
Alyssa Nshimirimana ~ Poetry
Sporadically, I collect
twenty-minute short
fragments from a world
that lies nestled
in between two doors:
A world that holds
all of the sky
and all of the earth.
A prosaic mosaic
of blues and browns
and spring’s bold,
endearing emerald.
A world that breathes out
the muted sound of traffic–
a world where feet thump
a secret heartbeat.
It reaches the tiny
trembling bones in your ears,
and it makes you grin and grin
at fleeting feathery spirits;
it makes you eye and smile
at rodents’ twirling tails;
it sucks out all the murk
and bubbling bitterness.
A world populated by
plump, pedant clouds,
where every old thing
stays new under the sun.
From every exploration,
I return wilder:
a creature of the wind,
the stealthiest of thieves–
pockets filled to the brim
with two thousand pieces
of brilliant mundanities.
Binary Stars
Emily Masters ~ Short Story
We are the crew of the Phoenix 3. And we are never going to see land.
​
One of the first phrases I ever remember getting sick of was “pinnacle of human achievement.”
And on paper, I guess, that’s exactly what the Phoenix 3 would look like. With a population in the thousands and infrastructure capable of supporting several times more, the Phoenix 3 is not quite a space station and not quite a city. We are bound for Vesta, the nearest habitable planet to Earth. It orbits a star in Alpha Centauri. And the actual relevant part is that Earth and Vesta are four hundred and thirty-seven years apart.
Apparently, the Phoenix Project was hotly debated on Earth even after the math to make it happen was proven feasible. “The descendants of the first generation wouldn’t be able to consent,” that sort of thing.
And yeah, it would have been nice to be asked if I wanted my whole life spent in the greatest city ever built, with the small addendum of never in my life having the chance to see an ocean. But two hundred and nine years into a four-hundred-year voyage is a little late to start second-guessing.
The Phoenix 3 travels by flinging itself from one solar system’s orbit to another, riding the momentum and using the solar power it had absorbed until it hit the next solar system on the flight path. Each day takes us to parts of the galaxy that nothing but unmanned probes have even seen, let alone been launched past at speeds that would make a bullet question its purpose in life.
Living in a spacebound city being hurled at skin-peeling speeds from star to star is, to be honest, a hell of a lot more boring than it sounds. I and about ten thousand other unlucky bastards had the misfortune of being born halfway through a voyage designed to take about five consecutive human lifetimes.
Isolation is what gets you. That, and having no control over your fate. Humans are social animals, and humans really, really like to explore. So they gave us an archive of as much enrichment in our enclosure as they could, and they urged leaders to keep the talk of madness to a minimum. It wasn’t forbidden, but they didn’t want any self-fulfilling prophecies or anything. So the people who built our spacecraft focused on stuffing it with distractions.
The Phoenix 3 was built to provide us with everything we could ever want.
Within reason, of course.
Any movie or television show ever made, any book or poem or journal article ever written, comprehensive 3D walkthroughs of every museum in the entire world: they’re all at our fingertips. We’re living in the greatest time capsule ever created. A monument to the humanity that came before.
It wasn’t solely with the motivation of preserving human knowledge. No, scientists back on Earth apparently ran a whole lot of tests before they sent our great, great grandparents up here a couple centuries back. Over and over, one variable proved the most difficult to control for: madness.
Everyone knew someone who knew someone who’d been affected by being up here, but it wasn’t something I’d ever been able to visualize. Both Alpha Centauri and the concept of madness felt equally distant from me: extremely relevant in concept, but nothing I would ever encounter in my natural lifetime. Nothing to worry about, just to be passively wary of.
It was the year I turned twelve that the lead astronomers announced we would be passing through a binary star system in two years’ time. That might seem like way too long of a build-up, and I definitely thought it was an eternity at the time. But now I get the reasoning in announcing it so early. Two years, after all, wasn’t so terribly long. I mean, compared to the centuries that separated us from anywhere else worth being. And we had little else to look forward to. The leaders bought us two years of anticipation rather than the standard monotony of “everything is at your fingertips right now, except for the things you can never, ever have.”
Every couple decades, the leaders tried to put a new positive spin on it. “Citizens of the galaxy,” someone had tried to brand it when my parents were teenagers. Everyone else had collectively agreed that was dumb as hell, so now you mostly only see that phrase on old murals in some of the quirkier levels of the ship, where rock samples pass as the main form of entertainment.
All of the people who live there are freaks. Which is why “Rock Sample Level 2” was my favorite place on the ship. No windows to let in the vast blackness and untouchable pinpricks of starlight. Just humanity, raw and creative and only slightly off-putting. Over a dozen floors of the Phoenix 3 had murals—again, we had nothing but time—but Rock Sample Level 2 was unique in that it didn’t have any surfaces that weren’t covered in paintings.
Some were hastily-sprayed words, names, and dates. Others were over a century old. My favorite was the oldest on the ship: a view of a mountain in front of a sunset. Painted by someone who had seen both in person. The colors faded, of course—being painted on a two-hundred-year-old wall under lights and climate control will do that—but the shapes, the bands of gradient from light to dark, the shadow of the mountain always grabbed me.
I liked to imagine mountains. According to my books, a mountain was larger than the Phoenix 3, completely solid and teeming with life and made entirely of rocks like the tiny rock samples in little, sterile display cases on Rock Sample Level 2.
Each evening, I reluctantly left the rock samples to go retrieve my sister from Level 31 for dinner.
I always braced myself, walked fast, and took care not to look too hard at the wall. I’d learned years ago that if I didn’t remind her, she probably wouldn’t eat for a few days.
“Why do you like it up here?” I asked, pulling Terra away from the wall of windows. Level 31 wasn’t the only floor of the Phoenix 3 with windows, but it was the only one entirely glassed in, so that you felt a brush of a hand away from floating off into the existential emptiness.
“I just like looking, I guess.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. The sky, maybe.”
Terra said things like that a lot. She was older and smarter, though, so she got a pass to say things that sounded like weirdly translated poetry.
I looked over Terra’s shoulder at the window and shuddered. It was endless in a way that made me feel weightlessness crawling up from the base of my spine. I tugged on her arm a little more insistently, and she relented and came with me to dinner.
It was only when I looked out at the existential nothingness of space that I kind of comprehended how Earth scientists thought we could go mad out here.
I didn’t care about the binary stars, since looking at them meant looking out a window, something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible.
But for Terra, the idea grabbed her and didn’t let go from the moment the occurrence was announced. She kept a countdown on our wall, and I tried to be excited for her as the day of seeing the stars inched closer and dread built in my gut. Two years can pass quickly when you aren’t looking forward to where they’re heading.
“The binary stars are today,” Terra said on the day in question.
On impulse, I stood up. “I’ll go with you.”
Terra blinked twice, and then she smiled. Her smiles always had something far-away in them, but this one felt closer than usual—miles rather than lightyears. We were so alone out here, a few thousand of us as the only humans for millions of miles. I didn’t want my sister to be farther away than that.
We weren’t the only ones on Level 31, but we’d come near the beginning of the phenomenon being visible.
Our ship was close enough to the system that the binary stars dwarfed the scattering of starlight that filled the endless blackness of space.
There was something haunting about them. One had a reddish cast, and the other was blisteringly white. One the ghost of the other, haunting and haunted all at once. Locked in a dance on a timescale not even the crew of the Phoenix 3 could comprehend.
I will never see a mountain, I thought. Or smell the sea. Or taste one of the types of fruit that scientists who died centuries before I was born decided not to include on this ship.
But no one on Earth will ever see what I’m seeing right now.
“That’s it?” Terra said. “The binary stars… That’s all there is?”
I tore my eyes from the stars and stared at her. Was she underwhelmed?
Terra’s face was stoic and unreadable and still fixed on the window, so I looked back at the twin stars.
After what could have been only a few minutes or well over an hour, Terra left. It was the first time in my memory that I’d stayed to look out the Level 31 window longer than my sister. The leaders had put up some sort of UV filter on the window, so we didn’t need to worry about damaging our eyes. I hadn’t expected that to be a concern for me. But even when my back started to hurt from how long I’d been standing there with my head tilted up, I couldn’t look away from those stars.
…
Terra wasn’t at dinner that night. And she didn’t respond to calls. Our parents were concerned, but Terra was an adult, and it hadn’t been that long, so there wasn’t much we could do but wait.
A call from Terra jolted me out of sleep.
“Will you meet me at the airlock that’s a pain in the ass to get to?” Terra asked. Her voice sounded strange.
I blinked away my grogginess, or tried to, anyway. “Where the science waste goes? On Level 12?”
Terra made a sound that I thought then was a laugh. Now, I wonder.
“Yeah,” she said. “Level 12.”
I don’t know what it was about her tone. But as soon as she ended the call, I tugged boots on over my pajama pants and started running.
When I got to Level 12, it was—predictably—empty except for Terra. On a ship with more rooms than people, it was very easy to find an empty room. Especially during sleeping hours.
Terra sat on the ground beside the airlock, leaning on the wall. When I got close, she looked up and blinked a few times, slow and languid, like I’d disturbed her nap.
“What’s going on? Are you okay?” The words rushed out of me, and unease knotted up my insides.
“I figured it out,” Terra said. “I think I hate them.”
That wasn’t what I’d expected her to say. “Who?”
It was like she hadn’t heard me. “I hate them for what they did to us. The people who took the sky from us could look up at the sky when they decided to put us here.”
After a pause, she continued, “I need you to do something for me. I already took care of the hard part.”
Terra gestured loosely, holding out a small plastic sample bottle for me to take. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I bent to take it from her. The bottle was empty, and I meant to remark on it, but my hands spasmed as soon as I read the label. The bottle slipped from my fingers and bounced hollowly. I didn’t see where it rolled to.
“This- Why do you have this? Terra, thallium is really toxic.”
“I know. I took it all.”
My insides lurched. “What? Then- Then we need to get you to the hospital level-”
“No.”
“Terra!”
“I don’t want it. I don’t want any of this. And no one ever asked. So I’m not asking either. I’m just asking you. Will you help me… be somewhere else?”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
Terra looked from me to the airlock behind her, moving like her neck was barely strong enough to support her head. I wondered if she could even see me, with how glassy her eyes were.
“I want to be part of the sky. I want it to stop.”
I wanted to argue. Terra’s lips were turning blue, her knuckles clenched white with the effort of not showing any pain from how much poison she’d ingested. But she had her jaw set, prepared to argue right back. Terra never argued.
“Please,” Terra said. The word took her way too much effort, and sweat had beaded along her forehead before she got through it. “I don’t… want to argue.”
Terra never argued, I thought again. Was that because she’d never cared about anything enough to argue with me about it?
Forcing my throat to form the words, I said, “I’ll help.”
Terra’s eyes didn’t clear, and her mouth didn’t smile, but I saw the relief wash over her even as her forehead beaded with sweat.
“Thank… you. Will you… wait with me? Until it’s time?”
Of course I would wait. It wasn’t a choice.
Feeling like I was on the wrong side of a window from the rest of the world, I closed the distance and sat beside her. The cold metal wall pressed against my shoulder blades. Ignoring the discomfort, I pulled Terra against my side, her head on the curve between my neck and my shoulder. I watched her chest rise and fall, lungs expanding and contracting with a rhythm that grew less and less steady.
The airlock was designed so carefully. It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t even accept a parcel that had any life signs. But Terra had taken enough thallium to take care of that.
I held her, running my fingers over her hair until she stopped moving.
Between the distant ringing of pipes and the hum of the life support, the hallways of the Phoenix 3 were never silent. But for a moment, all I could hear was my own breathing. Not Terra’s. For the first time, not Terra’s.
The breath caught in my throat, choking me. I closed my eyes, still rhythmically tracing her hairline even though I knew there was no one left to feel it.
Something should feel different now, I thought. But her hair was as soft as always, her clothes rough and oversized just how she liked them. Even her skin hadn’t had a chance to cool. Something should feel different.
But Terra had asked me for one thing, and I was going to do it. I got to my feet, pressed the access button of the airlock and dragged her the last few feet into the tiny room.
It was wrong, probably. Everything was supposed to be recycled on the ship, even people’s remains. But no one had given us a choice to be here, to live like this, to carve out a life inside a time capsule and pretend we still felt all the way human.
I could help Terra make this choice. She wanted to be part of the sky. Whatever the sky was to us.
No life signs detected, the airlock scanner said. Commence release and disposal?
I pressed the “yes” button, and the airlock opened.
It didn’t make me feel different. I guess a part of me knew that Terra hadn’t been all the way here for years. Seeing those stars so far off had killed something in her, and it wasn’t until now that I realized it killed everything she had left.
So no, this didn’t feel like losing her. You can’t lose someone you’ve already lost.
I know now that I was in shock. What I still can’t figure out is how I made it from Level 12 to Level 31.
The binary stars were still there, circling each other. Untouchable, but linked invisibly by gravity. Held at arms’ length so they wouldn’t destroy each other.
Together, but separate. If something happened to one, maybe the other could keep burning.
Maybe.
I was still looking out at the pair of stars when a pair of security staff pulled me aside and asked me about unscheduled activity on Level 12’s airlock. I don’t remember what I told them, but it must have been what they wanted to hear, because they left me to my window.
Later, I filled in most of the details for our parents, for my friends and neighbors, for the security staff who needed to put in paperwork and a ship doctor who added my report to a mental health log.
And much, much later, when grief and reality hit me, I let myself cry for my sister and her sky.
​
…
​
We are the crew of the Phoenix 3. We are never going to see land. But we will see wonders no one on Earth could imagine, and we pave the way for future generations to see a new sky and build a new world. And thanks to people who died centuries before my birth, I will have to be alright with that.
Mostly, I’m content with my rock samples. My murals. My culture as a “citizen of the galaxy,” stupid as it feels to write.
But once every day-night cycle, I find myself drifting back to Level 31. Sometimes it’s crowded. Sometimes it’s dead empty except for me. That doesn’t matter to me. Either way, I go and look. I think about how someone on Earth might be looking up, wishing she could see different stars.
I’ve never seen the same starscape twice.
I know I won’t see Terra when I look out there; she died beside me on the floor of Level 12 and burned up the moment I opened the airlock. I don’t look for her because I know where she is. Instead, I try to see what she always looked for outside the expanse of glass on Level 31.
Hope. Hope for a brighter star, a justification for all that was taken from us when our ancestors chose to remove our choices. Hope that our descendants will one day see a sky, and that they will think our sacrifice was worth it.
I’ve looked out that window every day for seventy years.
Artificial Light
Jess Parker ~ Poetry
The divide is clear when you enter the room
from the right side. The flashes of white
and the too-sweet smell designed to entice,
to conceal and to constrict.
Your hand is swatted when you reach
toward the side cast in shadow. I see the way
your gaze lingers on the them from afar, flashes of
fingers intertwined and bodies leaning together
for support, but you can’t look for long;
the glare of the lights and the figures overhead
say: forbidden, suffocated, trampled down,
or even more deadly: ignored.
The ones that surround you
watch the others closely
though they pretend they do not.
Judging your footfalls,
comparing them to their own;
some look inviting but most
are waiting for you to stumble
and for them to correct.
Community bought and sold
by the dollar each Sunday,
yet they tell you to fear
the community bred in darkness instead.
It takes a while;
You take quiet steps towards the edge
and watch as the sinners, the rebels, the fallen
give each other more life in a look
than every hug and sermon attempts
to give you from the light.
And maybe there is something more
but you’re sure the something would rather
this whole place be flooded with warmth
than the fear icing your veins here.
You’re chosen. You belong.
You don’t have a choice.
When you step out of the light, let them say
you’re too far gone, then turn
and ask their kids to learn from you.
Let the warmth come not from the artificial lights
but the warmth you create through every step –
Once created to be,
you are creating by being.
Remembrance of where you came from
begins trading shame for firelight,
artificial fluorescents for a real smile.
Watching from the room,
it’s you who reminds me
it’s brave not to uproot
just to be placed in a smaller box.