Issue 24 September 2015 Flash Fiction Online September 2015

Remember that cheesy Tom Jones song from the 70s? “Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow…” Yeah. I’ve tried to forget it, too. Yet here I am, in the September of my life (maybe early August, late July if I’m lucky). How did that happen? Unlike Ol’ sock-in-his-trousers-Tom, my September feels far from slow and mellow.

 I’ve spent the better part of two days sorting through my filing cabinet, trying to condense two cabinets into one. Wish me luck. But in the process, I’ve been sorting through piles and piles of old photos and cards and letters and kids’ homework projects and all the accumulated treasures and detritus of I won’t tell you how many years.

 Time tends to do that. It gets away from you, passes by too quickly. At times you look back at the happy times, the great memories, the grand adventures with a sense of keen satisfaction. But other times you think of those same times, memories, and adventures and feel pangs of regret—for mistakes you’ve made or things you didn’t do that you wish you had. 

I’ve always told my kids, ‘No regrets.’ If you do it and you’re going to wish you hadn’t, don’t do it. If you’re going not to do it and then going to wish you had, then do it. 

Our first story this month runs right up that street. “Ships and Stars and Childhood Things” by Gwendolyn Kiste. A lovely science fiction story of time and love and life passing by.

Also this month, we’re pleased to offer “Pidgin” by Katrina S. Forest. Another science fiction offering in which time passing is a factor. 300 years of time, to be precise. That’s a lot of time. Things change in that amount of time. Some interesting changes in this story.

And, more on the future dystopian side of things, “The Wedding Gig” by John League. Another tale of time passing—in this case the remembrances of an aging musician as she copes with the post-plague world. A lovely tale of self-realization and acceptance. 

Finally this month, John Guzlowski is back with a republished story, “1968: A True Confession.” Again, time passes, age comes to us all. I love John’s treatment of the sweet relish of life and contemplating the past, present, and future.

Also be sure to check out our own Jason Ridler‘s article, “FXXK WRITING! ADVICE ON WRITING ADVICE AND OTHER REDUNDANCIES! PLUS! COSMIC TOP SECRET LIST OF WRITING ADVICE!” As our publisher, Anna Yeatts describes it: “Geared toward more seasoned writers, it’s good chewy stuff based on Jason’s years in the business.” Good chewy stuff. I like that.

Enjoy! And may your heart and mind be forever planted in June!

“It’s hot,” the saxophone player says with a shrug. “Right?”

The bass player nods. He showed up in a Metallica t-shirt.

The saxophone player wears short sleeves under a jacket with the lining cut out. He told me so. I’m wearing what we always wore to wedding gigs: a tuxedo jacket with velvet lapels over a long sleeve white shirt with a pleated front. Even though I’m a girl.

Marvin comes back to the bandstand with four perspiring bottles of water.

“In case you get hot,” he says.

Marvin and I are the only ones left from the original band, but he shed his tuxedo jacket the moment he got here.

Sure, it’s hot. But it’s not Fever hot like it was last year.

We play ‘C Jam Blues’ quietly to warm up the crowd, but we play it in the key of F, not C like it says in the name, because of the saxophone kid. Just out of school, he’s not much younger than me, at least in years. He’s pale and has no Fever scars, and he plays like someone will steal any notes he doesn’t use during this song. The bass player is blissfully workmanlike, steady. I’m still out of shape, so I play reserved and small like I prefer it that way.

Playing small, I don’t get noticed as much. I always got looks, a girl playing trumpet in a jazz combo, even before Fever. They wanted to watch what I could do, and I would show them, command their attention with a huge sound over long phrases. Nowadays, they watch the dark scars on the backs of my hands disappear into my sleeves and clap with forced enthusiasm for the poor girl with the tiny sound who lived through Fever.

When we finish, the saxophone kid sucks on his mouthpiece and winks at me.

“Cut that out right now,” I say. I don’t even want him to be here, so leering at me is out.

We get a request for ‘St. Thomas,’ but saxophone kid doesn’t know it. He knows who Sonny Rollins is, the saxophone player who wrote it, but that’s all. Just a name, nothing more.

I miss the old band. We were tight. Together. Always surprising each other. So when Brandon got Fever, Joe and I got it—and Marvin kept clear like he was making a point. Brandon and Joe died days apart. If they’d lived another three weeks, they could have had the retroviral drug that saved the rest of us. They’d be scarred like me, but they’d be alive.

Two women with corsages as big as their faces come over. One tells us, “The bride will be here any moment.” Then they linger behind their corsages in front of the bandstand. The other says, “You know, I actually liked her dress.”

“I know. It’s like nothing happened, like bridal shops just brought out Fever dresses because it was just the in thing this year.”

Fever dresses? I can imagine. Thick and heavy, with gloves. And a heavy veil, of course, to hide a bride’s scars. I hope she’s miserable under all that in this heat.

My own scars run up my arms, but not like an addict’s angry blood vessels. They follow no discernible anatomical course as they wind over my body like dark vines—like Fever, which spread in no discernible pattern. One day you were fine, the next day your brain was boiling in your head. If you survived, you were marked, always starting with your hands, then arms, shoulders. The longer Fever had you, the more you were changed. My scars climb past my shoulders, wrap across my chest between my breasts, snake around my ribs on the left side and reach for the small of my back.

A murmur passes through the crowd, and folks jockey for a view of the bride. Now that I know no one is looking at me, I want to leave.

Before I can move, the saxophone kid says, “Here comes the bride.”

I want to hit him.

Then I see her, and she doesn’t look like any bride I’ve ever seen. Her scars are worse than mine. Hands, arms, shoulders, chest, neck, face and up into her hair—and probably everywhere her dress covers, too. How she survived Fever that long is its own miracle. But while her dress covers her scars, it doesn’t conceal them. It’s white, and it’s covered in lace—but dark lace in Fever scars’ green-black color.

It’s hard to know where Fever scars stop and lace starts. Dark lines flow up her arms and spill down the bodice, into the skirt where they spread out like roots. Her hair is down, and her scars climb her face and onto her scalp, where they disappear into wavy brown hair streaked with dark green-black.
Fever has made her exquisite. She has their attention, wants it like any bride.

I can’t play. The saxophone kid does a decent solo “Stardust” over Marvin and the bass player with the Metallica t-shirt, while I sit in a folding chair beside the bass amp and watch the bride smile at her husband.

When the first dance is done, a corsage lady comes back and asks the saxophone kid to play something happy while they get pictures of the cake being cut. I take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves, then I dig in my gig bag, find my fake book and turn to the page with ‘St. Thomas.’ I put it on the stand for the saxophone kid.

“ ‘St. Thomas,’ ” I say. “In C.”

He nods, looking from me to the music and back. I have his attention, and for the first time today, I don’t want to hit him.

Part 1: The Siege of Khe Sanh

Vietnam wasn’t much in my life that spring.

Marching in the anti-war demonstrations, I wore a Vietcong hat made out of construction paper, but I wasn’t thinking about war.

My thoughts were all on love, the pure hippie girl yearning for me and the dreams we wove in the letters we were sure would bring us together finally in California after college.

I wanted to touch her, feel the weight and shape of her breasts as she rolled her gray sweater above her head and said, “Don’t be so shy, Johnny.   Don’t you love them?”

And I did.  I loved them more than our dreams of California beaches and waking in a house among green and red flowers with the scent of sunlit breezes stirring the curtains softly, softly but not enough to wake her from her dreams, just enough to wake me so I could follow the curve of her chin and imagine the taste of her hair in my mouth. Vanilla, sweet apricots, and something salty, maybe my sweat when we made love.

Those dreams kept me writing to her, but they weren’t enough. So while the soldiers in Vietnam pressed their backs against the sandbag shacks of Khe Sanh, I told my parents that college was driving me crazy, and I dropped out and hitched 23 hours to College Park, Maryland.

But none of it worked out the way I imagined.

She was still in school, writing a paper on Crime and Punishment.  She knew I loved that book and asked me what I thought Raskolnikov’s final sin was.  Was it pride that drove him to drive his axe into the old woman’s head, or was it the love he felt for his sister and mother?  I couldn’t think straight and made up stuff about Jesus and the Greeks and how hubris is a good man’s failing.

And sometimes at night we’d walk the lazy, springtime paths of the campus, stop at a bench in the shadows and neck and pet, or if we were lucky and her roommate was out, we’d sneak into her dorm room and press against each other, my hands on the breasts beneath her gray sweater, her palms rolling soft circles on my chest.

But mostly, she spent her time in the library, and I sat in an all-night diner dreaming and spinning a silver dollar on the counter.

Part II:  Dreaming

Later that summer, we were in my parents’ house, the rooms quiet with sunlight streaming through the windows and spinning the rooms to gold, and she said she didn’t love me.
She said she had hitched from Maryland to tell me she was seeing me for the last time, that my love wasn’t enough to keep her dreaming of California with me.  She said she was moving to Frisco alone, and this was the end of us.

I went to my parents’ bedroom and pulled a revolver from a drawer, and I didn’t even know if the revolver was loaded or if I was just joking, and I grabbed her arm so tight she couldn’t pull away, and I pointed the revolver at her face and said I’d shoot her and then I’d shoot myself because she didn’t love me.

She looked at my hand grabbing her arm so tight, and then she looked at the revolver and said, “If you’re going to do it, do it—because I don’t love you and don’t care if I go to California alone or die here with you.”

And I said I’d do it.  I’d take the revolver and pull the trigger.  I couldn’t live without us dreaming about California and cold beaches and red wine, all those dreams that filled our love with all the glory and beauty, all the time and sunlight, we’d ever need.

And she said, “Just do it.  Just press the revolver there and do it.”

And I knew I couldn’t—not there in my mom’s kitchen with the sunlight so pure almost like the sunlight on the cold beaches in California, and I let the revolver drop to the floor and told her I couldn’t do it.

And she said it again, “I don’t love you.”

I couldn’t look at her.  I turned away and asked, “What we do not?”

And she shook her arm loose from my hand.

Part III. Here/Now, 2015

What can you do after something like that?

We went out for coffee and talked, but there was nothing to say.

She moved to Frisco, and I finished my degree and started another.  And all the while, I was writing her letters that didn’t say anything because they couldn’t, and she’d ignore them, and sometimes during spring break, I’d hitchhike to California.

I’d just stop by to see her.  I wanted to see if she had changed, if the dream we shared had somehow pieced itself back together.

But it never did, and I met someone in grad school, and we got married and got jobs and bought a home and loved each other like I never dreamed, and we were happy.

And sometimes I still think about the pure hippie girl and the weight and shape of her breasts as she rolled her gray sweater over her head, and I remember the taste of her hair in my mouth. Vanilla, sweet apricots, and something salty, maybe my sweat after we made love.

But it’s different.

I’m sixty-six now, and soon I’ll be sixty-seven, and what I’ve learned about life’s changes is that we change the way the great glaciers change.  Slowly.

One year we melt a little. The next we freeze a little.  A wind comes from some place and shines up our northern walls. The next year the wind is a little stronger or weaker. We don’t change the way people in books change. Today’s hero, tomorrow’s fool.

Our future—a patient grandmother with a toddler in hand—comes slowly.

Previously published in Scream Online, 2002. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

WARNING-NEWBS!

If you are a new, novice, or beginning writer, THIS ARTICLE IS NOT FOR YOU! None of this really matters at your level of development. Come back in a decade, broken and sore, and then give it a whirl.

I recently saw a Facebook post quoting Chuck Wendig’s advice from 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER. The book is part of an instructional series, all written in the Wendigean fashion, complete with healthy dollops of profanity, tough-guy finger-waggin’, and rock-solid certainties broken by occasional caveats, all jammed through his blunt sense of humor and delivered in easy-to-follow lists.

I should be a champion of such things. But I ain’t. And it’s not Wendig’s fault. He’s just doing as a modern midlist-writer is wont to do: having fun, helping others, and making money from his trade. Fill your boots, as the army says. Fill your boots.

But if you’ve been around the block for a decade (or more) you start to get weary of writing advice. It’s never meant for YOU, the never-was-veteran inching across the meridian of your mortality. Because you know these rules, strictures, and suggestions. You’ve heard them for the past seven decades! Boring old variations of Heinlein’s Rules and their ilk have filled pages and pages of books and books, and now they are here in lists of lists on lists!

Insights available from such material deteriorate rapidly with experience. Soon, writing advice seems lazy, repetitive, even trite. Especially in list form. Lists remind me of tournaments plots in martial arts flicks: instant structure with built in hooks to drive you to the very last round. I should know, I used them for not one, but two novels! But good god, it gets inane after you’ve seen Bloodsport, Bloodpunch, and Bloodfart. Perhaps those who profess to be wizards of words could raise the ante by making a killer paragraph instead of a bullet-pointed-hook in the form of a declarative sentence. It also might be the historian side of my brain: have you actually found something new to say? Or are you just repeating what you’ve heard a thousand times from others who came before? Someone really needs to do a historiography of writing advice, but I have enough thankless tasks to do before I’m worm poop.

I digress.

My grunts are proof that such advice lists are not for me. They are for legions of newbs and those who like to be refreshed with the same advice over and over. I’m not a plucky, young writer, fresh from a workshop experience and first pro sale, ready to pay my dues and tell stories at conventions, five years hence, of how I sold my first SF novel for a lowball advance to a small imprint of a massive conglomerate, or how I mastered SEO advertising to funnel fans into buying bundles of my Kindle books from a massive monopoly. Both of which I hope to do, someday.

So, what audience am I? Published author of fifteen years who crashed and burned due to tragedy and grief outside of but related to the writing life. So I, and others like me, are not the demographic for vintage advice in fresh costumes. We’ve done ass-to-chair. We know characters need strong goals. We know about cliff hangers, showing vs. telling, and biases against first-person POV. Rinse, wash, regurgitate. And while all of the old truisms are . . . true, hearing them louder, or quieter, or zippier doesn’t add to the well of knowledge we’ve already gained.

So today I pay it forward. I offer a counter punch, against the time-worn value of goals, and their relation to a writer’s ID.

In The Antidote, a great book for driven people who dislike the cult of optimist self-help advice, author Oliver Burkeman reviews the dark side of goal setting. While goal-setting in moderation can have tremendous influence on external achievement, it also comes with a price tag that is often ignored or dismissed. Goal-driven companies, from ENRON to crooked autoshops, also stick to their goals: they make quotas that earn cash. Everything else (including ethical and legal conduct, not treating people like tools) gets tossed out the window. Who cares if you lie, cheat, and steal? You got the big payday. You got the big contract. You got the audience you wanted. That’s the goal. Everything else is secondary. In short, goals can breed shit conduct like sock puppet reviews. At the far end, they can produce misery.

In high intensity careers, and high intensity people, goals can also fuse with identity. You convince yourself that failure isn’t about something that didn’t work . . . it’s about a failure of yourself as a human being in total. Thus, you refuse to see warnings signs and trouble ahead, even when you go past perseverance into terrible conduct and risky behavior. You refuse to see the storm and still climb the mountain, otherwise you’ll be a failed person! Death would be better! Just be relentless and it will happen! Ignore warning signs! Ignore common sense! Your goal is you!

Such fusing breeds profound and deep sorrow. That’s why there are corpses on Everest and writers who have meltdowns when their “job” is their whole identity. Think about how awful it is if your identity gets rejected a hundred times a year, and their identity sucks at paying rent, and their identity loses an agent, and their identity is fired . . . you see how this goes. Sadly, badly, and madly.

For years I loved having a “writer identity.” It gave my life shape and form, and a tough goal to relentlessly follow. It also allowed me to ignore things like mounting unhappiness, growing dislike of most genre fiction, and birthed the asinine idea of making a living from fiction in the wake of the Great Recession. Being a writer meant I could ignore great swaths of my own suffering: after all, artists suffer and are special snowflakes and the job is so hard that all I have to do is worship the gods of publishing with relentless toil and eventually I will get my payday and those I hurt will be repaid.

SAD.

And when the payday never happened . . . I was a failed person.

SADDER.

Fusing my identity to being a writer also convinced me that being alone was what I wanted. You could always justify being alone: you were writing. Eventually I didn’t want to be alone . . ., but I couldn’t admit that. So I wrote more and endured the loneliness as if I wanted it. I lied to myself. So, writing wasn’t really an “escape” anymore. It was a retreat. I love writing, and part of me is a solitary dude, but realizing I was hiding in a solitary art was terrifying.

SADDEST.

Few books warn that this kind of thinking can become so seductive and subliminal, a silent motor for a crippled existence. Writers often make a cult of loneliness and suffering, instead of taking a step back and asking why is so much of writer culture busted and broken and unhealthy. To bolster our suffering, we brag. The rejections. The bad decisions. The agent that screwed us. The contract we didn’t read that then screwed us. The sacrifices we’ve had to make with friends, family, whatevz. Poor us. And I’ve done them all, big time. I’d hoped they were instructive from the POV of persistence, but there’s also a rotten side of that coin. Of course writing is hard. But making a virtue of suffering is fucking stupid, and is a part of the writing culture I’ve abandoned after being an offender for years. That’s why I love Jane Yolen’s writing book, Take Joy. It’s the antithesis to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a good book but thick with the cult of suffering dogma. Yolen, whose career most would envy, makes it clear: the act of writing should be an occasion for happiness. Reminds me, too, when someone asked Margaret Atwood if a writer needed to suffer to make great art. Her paraphrased response? “Suffering’s going to happen whether you like it or not, so don’t go looking for it.” Huzzah!

Few advice columns remind you that suffering as a writer, or, hell, being a writer doesn’t make you better than anyone. And it may make you worse. Sure, literature is a valuable part of a modern and progress civilization, one with a rich history and countless values (not least of which is generating empathy for humankind outside of your own skull). And the community can be great. But all of these elements of being a writer make you no worse or better than anyone else with another job or art. Spend time with people outside your imaginary worlds, and you’ll see the mammoth of awesome from many walks of life. It will put a dent in the “we are chosen” mythology that festers in some writing circles and smells like some kind of privilege turned into personal destiny (perhaps it helps to make the cult of suffering seem more noble). I fear far too many writers think of themselves as Tolkien Elves, a sad, beautiful nobility that’s actually, categorically, and empirically “better” than everyone, especially the ham and eggers who work at the Prancing Pony.

Writing is labor, an art, and can be a job. Being a writer means you write. Being a professional writer means you get paid a professional wage. Heck, it doesn’t even mean you write well. Indeed, the more advice I see from lists or supposed Master Classes on writing seem to have less to do with understanding the power of words to create stories than with finding readers! SELL! AUDIENCE! METRICS!

When I ask colleagues if they try and improve their craft, vast swaths think I’m being an elitist shithook, or, worse, that writing well is an issue of taste. It isn’t. What you like is an issue of taste. I love Burger King, especially for breakfast, but I know the difference between it and a killer steak from a chef who has a great command of flavor. I love wrestling, and I know it can’t accomplish as much or as well as Ibsen when it comes to the human heart at war with itself. Should you need another analogy: kids writing their name in ketchup on the tables at Denny’s are not producing the literary equivalent of A Farewell To Arms, even if you hate Hemingway and love ketchup name poetry.

But again, I digress.

Selling stuff and having an audience are good things. Getting paid is a good thing. But these goals don’t speak to me. They put an abstract idea (an audience I don’t have) and some kind of fiscal success again (which is illusory at this stage) before making the art I want to make. If the odds in publishing remain rotten, why not shoot for writing what you love first, and see who rolls with you on your terms? If you fail at getting an audience, you still succeeded in writing something you loved. The one fan letter I’ve received means more to me than the potential payday of writing in the template of a bestselling thrillers. It’s because I didn’t think about “audience” that that the fan letter exists. Two points!

Steve Tem, one of my mentors and an absolutely wonderful writer, once noted that his career of hundreds of sales of books, stories, and more could be seen as a failure since there was no commercial success. But it was the career he wanted, writing stories that meant something to him first. Amen. And yes, he writes better than James Patterson, even if he’ll never have his audience. If Patterson and his cadre of co-authors can pull off an equivalent to THE DEADFALL HOTEL or THE MAN ON THE CEILING (written with his wife, the late Melanie Tem, also a fantastic writer), I’d like to see him try. Again, if you like Patterson’s work, awesome. That’s a taste call (see Burger King above!). Saying his work accomplishes the same thing as the Tems, Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates is reductionist to the point of absurdity. You know, stupid.
These days, my writing life is largely outside the novel and short story world, and I dedicate a lot of time to other arts. Yet, in the off chance I’m wrong, and there are ten-and-twenty-year veterans that are meh about the same old kung-fu-tournament-lists of Heinlein and Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard with new masks, here’s an attempt to cover a lesser visited part of the advice map. For your pleasure, it’s in the form of a list!
WRITING ADVICE MOST WRITING ADVICE LISTS WON’T TELL YOU!

1. Kill Your Porn Dreams:

Admit to yourself that what you really want is legions of fans, billions of ebook sales, and gaggles of groupies who worship you more than Neil Gaiman, and then toss those dreams in the burn can. Later, when they creep back in, shove them back in the burn can. Every time. And they’ll return and return, but they won’t happen. You can’t make them happen any more than Hitler could use his “Triumph of the Will” spell to turn the Battle of Stalingrad into a German victory. Worse, some studies have shown daydreaming about a goal stimulates the same release of pleasure chemicals as actually DOING what you’re dreaming of, so you sap your strength from actually going out and making stuff. So, kill your porn dreams! Understood? Cool. Now, pornless, do you still want to write? If yes, carry on!

2. Writing Well is Harder than Marketing, but Better for Your Heart:

Kameron Hurley wrote a great post about generating an audience via improving as a writer. Most of the backlash I read about this approach was from people who wished to have an audience first, and then write well. How weird is that? You start with zero audience . . . so whose audience do you want? Hurley’s? As I get closer to the grave, the less I care about audiences and more on telling only stories I dig and doing it well. Me first, the world later. That doesn’t mean it won’t be fun and good. It will be! It may even find a wide audience (I am a commercial writer, after all). But it’s better for your heart to make art you love than art that pleases everyone (which, as Ricky Nelson knew, was a fool’s errand), and the better you get at it, the more those stories will be great. You won’t just repeat yourself. Which is what mediocre fiction does.

3. Quitting is Awesome:

Every Johnny Tough Guy Writer will bark incessant dogma about how writers never quit, they endure, persistence is their watchword. All true. Until it’s not. Sometimes relentless writing, for those who don’t have a problem putting ass-to-chair, is a recipe for burnout, or the blurring of goals and identity. If you think quitting writing is actually a failure of you as a person, then you need to stop writing, right fucking now, and realize you are a person and not Clio’s vending machine. Go do something else. Find joy in other things and people. Writing will be there when you get back, and, don’t worry, the publishing industry has no idea you exist, so they won’t miss you. Find people who would. Spend time with them. Stories are great, but, frankly, people are better. Especially you.

Brandilene watched the rockets arrive.

The first day of summer and the seasonal staff descended on the sterile cube that dangled in space. Captains and crews followed, towing fine fabrics and tacky trinkets to be weighed and measured and cataloged before being sent on their way, an elaborate assembly line conducted in a gleeful din.

The arrival like a cacophonous boardwalk was the most exciting thing to witness all year. And Brandilene should know. She and her parents were the only ones that never left. Full-time caretakers for a soulless place in a soulless void.

Outside, a homogenized line of vessels filed past. She counted each one. Through the window at the dock, a handsome face in a trading ship smiled at her.
Blushing, Brandilene scurried away to her hiding place in the wall. Because it was no more than a tiny cabinet, her parents never cleaned there, which made it the only place that felt like hers. With a rusted bobby pin, she etched a message into the steel: Brandilene was here.

That evening, the man appeared again, declaring goods to a pretty uniformed lady who asked him questions and giggled even before he answered.

“Age?” Another giggle.

“Thirty,” he said.

Same as Brandilene’s parents. Light years away for a five-year-old.

He leaned forward. “Have you ever seen the Outer Realm?”

“No,” the lady said, “I’ve only been to Earth.”

Brandilene envied them both. Born inside an empty eggshell, she’d never left the barren hallways, never dipped her toes in dirt. What was it like to breathe fresh air, to find someplace to call your own?

He must know. All summer, she peeked around corners as the far-flung stranger bartered his ship’s treasures.

August came, and one by one, the visitors departed.

At the dock, he turned back and grinned. “Will you watch me leave like you watched me arrive?”

It was the first time in three months he’d spoken to her.

Eyes downcast, Brandilene shrugged and kicked the floor. When she looked up again, he was gone.

The final ship every year shuttled the summer help back home. Brandilene stood at the window as the last sparks of life trickled from the station. Then she and her family were alone.

That winter, while her parents taught her to repair monitors and mop floors, Brandilene snuck glances at the sky and wondered where he was. When her chores were finished, and there was nothing else to do, she hid in the wall and dreamed. She imagined all the sights he beheld, all the lives he lived, all the ways his world was better than the vacant rest stop where ennui was her only playmate.

The summers bled together, new faces replacing the old. They all looked the same, and none looked like him.

As she waited, her legs stretched out, slowly at first and then in tiny bursts that happened overnight. When he returned, she nearly matched his height.

She was fifteen now. He was still thirty, incubated inside that steel womb, an immortal in her eyes.

Disembarking, he smiled at her. Smiled once. That was all. For the rest of summer, he passed her as if she was air outside his ship, scuttling along the vents.

Ten years for a smile. It was enough to buoy her through another decade.

She grew no more, but her face took on new dimensions. Thinner and older but glowing with keen wonderment. She no longer fit inside her hiding place, but she sometimes peeked her head into the cubbyhole just to check that her name was still there, covered in dust and otherwise forgotten.

Her parents groomed her to assume their place as caretaker. She would soon inherit a lifetime of scrubbing corners and inspecting monitors and waiting, always waiting. At least she was good at that.

When his ship boomeranged back, she was twenty-five. He never stopped being thirty. Thirty. A maddening number.

She lingered at the dock, eager he might notice how she’d changed.

And he did notice. All day and all night, he noticed. Brandilene had never slept inside a captain’s suite. It wasn’t what she expected, the cramped room with tissue paper walls hardly big enough to fit two.

“Do you remember me?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said, but she knew he was lying. How could he remember a face that was so different each time he saw it?

In August, he departed, and Brandilene wished she could still hide in the wall. But she realized for the first time she couldn’t be like him. Always en route to another exotic locale, he wasn’t immortal. In his long sleep in a cool, white tube, he was forever hiding, trapped inside steel, a prisoner with clear windows instead of barred ones. Even when he got a taste of worlds beyond, he never remained somewhere long enough to savor the dirt beneath his boots. He had no home, and neither did she. Their lives were different and the same.

She was thirty-five when he returned next. Since they last parted, she had become the elder. Inside his suite, he held her close, but she just stared at the gray-tiled ceiling, thinking how strange it was to wear a dream you long ago outgrew.

“Come with me,” he said in August. “You could join the crew.”

Brandilene smiled. She could go with him and cheat aging. Even cheat the universe in a way. But she’d never sink her toes in the mud and belong there. She wouldn’t be immortal. She wouldn’t live at all.

She waved goodbye as he vanished into the sky.

On the last shuttle, Brandilene got a seat of her own. Before she left, she checked her message on the wall. It would be there long after she was not.

When the ship landed, Brandilene slipped off her shoes and walked across the earth. It felt warm beneath her feet.

It felt like home.

We first met in a school gym at 6 pm; the budget wasn’t what it used to be. I found Asher seated at a folding table with all the posture of a corpse. He glanced up, affirming he wasn’t one, but I’d never seen a grown man look so lost. Guess visiting Earth after his people hadn’t seen it in 300 years could do that. Not that he came vacationing. He was, by our best guesses, an explorer — as shocked to find us as we were to find him.

The gym floor was glitchy and shifted from polished wood to Astroturf when I approached. I slid into the chair opposite Asher and placed my hand beneath his. His palm felt dry, his fingertips rough as an old-fashioned typist’s.

“Hello,” I signed.

Understanding did not miraculously flood Asher’s face. As if I’d expected it would. All he’d tried to do in newsfeeds was poke reporters’ foreheads. I’d told Boss that wasn’t tactile signing, wasn’t any language I knew, but got called in as Ms. Obscure Language Expert anyways. Now I was in charge of Asher whether I liked it or not.

I ground my feet into the Astroturf. So what if he didn’t know tactile signing? He could learn it. It was better than teaching him English or Chinese when he hadn’t uttered a sound since his arrival.

I repositioned his hand, feeling my class ring scrape the table. “Show me,” I signed. “Show me what you want to say.”

His eyebrows furrowed, and he tilted his head. But I pressed my finger into my open palm and repeated the sign. Next, I removed his hands, twisted my ring off onto the table, and spread my hands out towards it. Show. My lips pursed. Demonstrate. Come on, now.

To my shock, his face relaxed. Then he reached forward, bringing two fingers towards my face.

“What?” I signed. As in, “What the hell are you doing?”

He cocked his head and repeated my sign from before. “Demonstrating.”

Demonstrating, huh? Well, he’d tried to do whatever-this-was to everyone else. No reason I’d be exempt. I exhaled slowly and nodded my acceptance. He leaned in, so close I could smell sweat and pressed his fingers against my forehead.

I flushed. Embarrassment? I didn’t feel embarrassed, though I probably looked ridiculous. Then the flush was gone. Asher’s eyebrows furrowed, and my cheeks warmed again.

Was he causing this? At the thought, my fingertips cooled. My arms, too. But the heat from my cheeks spread across my chest. It felt like entering a warm house on a winter’s night. Welcomed. I felt welcomed.

I gasped, pulled back, and my skin returned to normal.

Was that… a greeting? In his language?

If it was, I had to answer. I repeated “hello” in standard ASL, and Asher mimicked it.

We’d greeted each other. First communication. The language nerd in me had the ultimate high. Sure, genetic engineering could do lots of wacky stuff. And sure, far-off colonies probably did much different wacky stuff than Earth. But those colonies hadn’t lost communications with Earth within weeks of settling. Those colonies told us all the wacky stuff they’d been doing the past three centuries. Those colonies didn’t have anything like this.

Asher reached towards me again, and I leaned in. My body changed faster now; my lower legs burned. “Fire”? No, the burning wasn’t severe, and it came from inside my muscles, not outside. Then I recognized it as the burn of lactic acid after a workout. So this was Asher’s phrase for “running”? Or maybe “going”?

I stood to demonstrate my understanding. When I jogged around the table, the Astroturf shifted to concrete halfway through, and I almost fell on my face. Asher’s grin could’ve spanned galaxies.

“Run,” I signed. He repeated it and eagerly stretched out his hand again.

I sat and closed my eyes, barely thinking straight. A language. A whole new language. Asher’s rough fingertips touched my forehead. This time, my heart sped up, and my mouth watered. My best comparison was a child facing mounds of chocolate. No impulse control, only desire. “Want.” This means “want.”

Well, that was easy. I opened my eyes and demonstrated my understanding by snatching my class ring and stroking it like a miser. Asher smirked at that. Confident I’d interpreted correctly, I showed him the sign — a curved finger eagerly pointing.

Asher copied it, then beckoned me closer. I leaned forward, eyes already closed. But instead of a new sensation, I felt the same two from before. My legs burned while my mouth watered.

Is this a sentence? “Want run”? My nerdy euphoria ebbed as I debated. He wanted to run? Didn’t make sense. But for all I knew, I’d only gotten a blurry image compared to his fellow colonists. Maybe he didn’t mean “run”, but “go” after all? In that case, he would’ve been saying, “Want go.” I looked around the gym with its scratched walls, its glitchy floor, its lack of even one window to the huge, exciting world.

“Sure, we can go,” I signed. “We can go anywhere you like.”