To my side, there’s a crater. I figure out how to turn my wheels. Maybe I will go see it. This new place is big and amazing and I want to look at all of the things. I head in the direction of the crater.

  I think that now I understand what the crew meant about Home. It’s not just one place. It’s many places. I read on Wikipedia that there are lots of stars and that some stars have planets and if Earth is a planet and it is Home than maybe other planets can be Home too.

  In front of me, the crater stretches out. I want Sarah to come with me to see it but she is walking the other way. I wonder when she is coming back because I am making so many reports to show her.

  I start transmitting data, even though Sarah is getting farther and farther away, because I want to be efficient.

  Fairy-Tale Ending

  When the moon was full, Immer lowered her hair to the Earth, a silver net with snarls bound tight as a captain’s knot. Kneeling down, she plucked the strands of her hair like a harpist.

  In the tension before dawn, Immer raised her hair, scooping birds and bugs away from the Earth. Immersed in her net, they dreamt. She ate the birds, swallowing them whole since she couldn’t bear the sound of small bones crunching. The bugs she cooked in a stew. Next came the bacteria and viruses, fungi and protozoa, which she brushed out of her hair as if they were burrs. With care, she sorted the smaller life forms.

  Once done, she scattered the microorganisms above the Earth like rain, except for the most deadly and beautiful. Those, she sprinkled along the surface of the moon.

  She was about to curl her hair into a bed when she felt a gentle tug. Something else was stuck in her locks.

  Over the years, Immer had caught many things in her hair–slumbering bears and the bees who follow them; sticks, stones, and bones; bird nests (she was no friend to birds, although she loved their songs); smoke from wildfires, the smell lingering on her curls; yarn for a sweater, wood for a table, and other unmade things; the song of a cello (she still hears it, even though she’s combed out the melody hundreds of times); the light that comes over the mountains; half-chewed leaves; water.

  Now she parted her hair to find a book submerged like an ocean chest under wispy waves, its gold-edged pages blooming with illustrations. Tales for children, but with darkness underneath. Immer read stories of girls who were barred from wolf-hungry woods, girls trapped in towers, girls running. Always running.

  Where are the other stories? Immer thought, flipping through the pages with a prehensile lock. The stories of women who had no fear of the woods, who ran alongside wolves and swam in clear rivers. Older stories, and truer, of women who drank in dragon’s breath and spat out fire.

  The next night, as her hair brushed against the Earth, something tugged hard. Again and again, that fierce pull. Sharpness bloomed in her scalp. Immer drew up her hair, hoping for another book.

  Instead, a man in a fine vest clung to her curls.

  Never before had a visitor ascended. The moon was no place for fragile bodies, with its barrenness and isolation, its subtle dust and solemn beauty.

  Immer studied this human, who had come so unexpectedly. Loneliness crept over her like waves against the shore, a little at a time, until she was drenched. She wanted very much to speak to him. Perhaps she could point to the star of her birth and tell of how, when she came of age, her grandparents had wrapped her in their hair and catapulted her to this moon to hunt.

  Immer curled her hair around the man so he could breathe and waited to see what he would do.

  He stumbled forward and drank in her form, his mouth curving into a soft roundness. She did not like the way he looked at her, the sharpness in his eyes.

  “You are beautiful,” he said. The first words from his mouth.

  Her hair rushed back from him, streaming behind her, until only one lock remained curled around his head. This was not what she wanted to hear. This story, again. Her tongue was thick around human speech. “Go.”

  “But–” He faltered. Pointed down to the Earth. “I have climbed so far.”

  “Go,” she said, again.

  This was not the fairytale settled in his bones. He was handsome, the lines of his face sharp, the shape of his shoulders firm.

  “No,” she said to the unasked question, the form of this word so similar to the last. A warning.

  He stepped toward her, his boots making harsh prints in the dust. The buttons on his vest sparkled like wicked stars.

  The ending depends on the story you know.

  In one version, she weaves a strand of hair into his eyes, releasing carefully sorted prokaryotes that immobilize him. Unlike the birds, he is too big to swallow whole.

  In another version, he cuts off the lock of hair surrounding him, intending to keep it. Deprived of his oxygen source, he dies. She eats this one, too.

  In another, he departs, descending her rope of hair. Perhaps her strange shaping of the word “no” is enough, or the glint in her eyes, or her hunger.

  That night, she spread her hair over the moon entire, testing its crevasses. There were places she had not been, still. Her hair was growing longer.

  Soon, her hair will grow long enough to reach past the sun. Long enough to slingshot her body over the universe, grabbing planets like pitons on a great climb upward. She will travel home and tell of a strange planet, one with birds and cellos, wedding rings, the terrible scent of smoke. She will tell of a book with gold-sharp pages and a hunger that woke within her like a flurry of beetle wings, alive and fragile and furious, until it came to settle, like the moon’s darkened dust, finally sated.

  Seeds Travel

  Plotting a route.

  Hajar piloted the mech over vast mountains, through meadows lush with grasses that were almost like those of Earth, except for their orange tips. She travelled through dense forests and snowscapes heavy with wind.

  The mech was like an extension of her body, never tiring, wrapping around her like a seed pod protecting its cargo.

  Hajar reviewed the data from the soil samples gathered by the mech’s feet. A rich composition of minerals in this region, but not enough nitrogen for farming.

  In her pocket rested a blue stone.

  * * * * *

  When Hajar was six, back on Earth, she brought her father a seed. “What’s this?” she asked.

  He scooped her onto the kitchen counter and kissed her nose. “That’s a boxelder maple seed. Look at how it’s held within this thin layer, like a paper coat.”

  “How did it get here?”

  Her father told her that seeds travel by wind and water, in the hard shells of nuts and blankets of fruit, carried on the coats of animals or mashed within their digestive tracts, pulled underground by insects, buried by squirrels, scattered by the dual forces of pressure and gravity.

  Blackberry plants stretch their creeping vines, plunging spines into the earth. Coconuts embark on sea journeys, carrying the weight of meat and milk, to germinate on the sands of far beaches. Dandelion seeds dance in the air, and the boxelder maple encases its seeds in thin wings, to glide gently down.

  * * * * *

  Hajar triggered the wings on the mech and leapt from a cliff, gliding in large loops until she touched down. The hands of the mech tested the air for breathability and temperature, and searched for spores.

  Forward went the mech. Hajar read messages from the others. Nathaniel was heading north from a desert in the western hemisphere, while Denisa had found a promising sector near the equator. Arwa had done a fascinating preliminary survey of insects in a grassland biome. No one had heard from Suraya, aside from a terse message that she had touched down and was exploring, but she tended to go quiet on bad days.

  They all carried their own secret griefs, ready to bloom. Nathaniel refused to listen to Debussy, except for days when he would listen to nothing else, and the melody of ‘Clair De Lune’ floated across the ship. Arwa had a singular teacup, light green and decorated with fish, which she hid away in her quarters. Every member of the crew had left someone behind. They carried their grief in different ways: in photographs and letters, in knitted scarves and handwritten recipes, in ordinary objects such as teacups and brooms, chipped pots and blue stones.

  The mech marched onward under an alien sunset. When it grew too dark to see, Hajar halted the machine. She took the blue stone out of her pocket and turned it over. Before she left Earth, her father had folded the stone into her hands, his faded green hat tipped back, his hands smelling of cinnamon from baking. The stone had come from his garden, prised up from the mud. “Find a new place for it,” he’d said, planting those words in the space meant for goodbyes. This was what she brought from Earth, what she carried.

  Today, the stone felt rough against her fingers. She thought of her father, imagined the sound of the blender churning his breakfast, the worn leather of his hiking boots, his collection of rocks scattered over geology books on the kitchen counter.

  Eventually, she slept, the stone clutched in her hand.

  * * * * *

  For her thesis, Hajar studied seed-dispersal strategies of Oenothera deltoides, the bird-cage plant of Californian deserts.

  The plant travels like this: as dunes shift, the roots are exposed. Shade melts away, leaving the plant under the light of an intolerable sun. The plant dies, curling its roots over itself: a bird cage, a wicker ball. Wind pulls the plant kilometres from its home. When the plant finds shelter from wind, seeds spill out from the lattice.

  New plants rise, phoenix-like, from the husk.

  * * * * *

  The mech emerged in a clearing blanketed with grass. Three-petalled flowers bent in the wind.

  The soil readings were good. A river rushed by to the east, the water potable.

  Hajar sent a message to the others. A habitable zone to add to the list. She imagined all of them out in the meadow, tilling the soil, constructing houses from the durable bio-plastic they’d brought.

  Hajar emerged from the mech. For the first time, she felt the planet’s air on her face. The wind carried the smell of sun-simmered grass and wet soil.

  Next to her, a tree thick with seeds wrapped in flexible coating, like a boxelder maple.

  Once, her father had told her how seeds travel—to arid deserts and rich soil, through woodland and tundra, across oceans and rivers. By centimetres or kilometres, they go.

  Not all of them survive.

  Seeds travel, tumbling, falling, swept along until they cannot travel farther.

  Where they land is home. They put down roots, they grow.

  She wished her father was there. Seeds, she would tell him, are designed to travel, to seek out habitable spaces, leaving behind their progenitors, pushing forward into the wide future.

  Hajar slipped the blue stone from her pocket. This place felt right, already full of life. How many seeds were even now under the soil, waiting to grow?

  She clutched the stone close, then buried it in the soft earth.

  2020

  Memories of a Rose Garden

  “I’m going to write a rose garden,” I told Matthew, so I found hills as blank as paper and wrote each individual petal, a softness of grey and yellow and green. I specified thorns curled outward, the rough feel of the stone paths, the beetles who would brush their wings against us feather soft.

  The words unglued from the paper, wiggling up industriously one letter at a time, and as they became part of the world, settling down into the earth and finding their shape there, Matthew reached out to touch the pen held lightly between my fingers.

  It has been so long since I wrote the rose garden. I look back on myself at sixteen, through those layers of years, and it is like peering through muddy water. How can I remember how I truly was?

  I learned, at that age, that writing has power, so I am writing down my story to see if I can catch the truth of it.

  A rose garden can be a wild place if you write it the right way. I wrote brambles, disorder, paths that twisted nowhere and everywhere, the sharp beaks of birds.

  The evening roses cradled us. Matthew asked me to write little things into the world—clouds in the shape of frowning mouths, yellow buttons, packets of mint tea, which we boiled in the patch of sunlight written bright by the pond choked with algae, sunlight which glowed even in the dark, even in winter.

  Once, he asked me to write his name into the bark of trees, into the grass, into the sky, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to write him into the world more than he already was. It was a wrongness he asked of me, but I didn’t have the courage to tell him so.

  I’d found the pen at the back of Persimmon Books, the used bookstore down Fifth Street where I worked when I was in high school. I was reshelving a textbook on plant biology when the pen fell off the shelf, the cap a little sharper, maybe, than a regular pen, and the blue plastic shiny and scarred, but looking normal aside from that.

  When I tried to write a poem about dandelions, white fluff materialized in my hands.

  I made up rules for how I would use the pen. The pen had come to me without my asking, at a time when I needed it, and so it seemed like I should use it to put gifts into the world. I wrote daisies into the cracks of concrete. I wrote rain and yellow leaves, and a certain softness that comes when the sun is rising over the mountains and the sky stretches out. I liked to write beetles with iridescent wings, watching them turn from words into something real.

  I think what I wanted more than anything was to write a place for myself in the world, a place where I could fit, but I didn’t know how to do it, so instead I wrote puddles and snails and once a rose garden that was mine.

  “Let me try it,” said Matthew. We were sitting in the rose garden on chairs woven from dead leaves. His face was never more beautiful than when he wanted something, filled with an intensity that could have shadowed the sun.

  “It’s mine,” I said, the anger in my voice startling me. But the pen wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anyone’s.

  Beetles brushed past his face. He swatted at them, nearly hitting one with the back of his hand. He had been so angry when I wouldn’t write the beetles out of the garden, as if it was so easy to take something out of the world once it was in. “I would write something no one would ever forget. I would write myself immortality.”

  “The pen isn’t for that.” I clutched the pen close to my body, under the sleeve of my ratty red sweater.

  When I was sixteen, I loved him. That can be hard to remember. My memories of him are like obsidian lodged under the layers of my past, jagged pieces that won’t dissolve. The good memories are the hardest. There was the tender way he blew on my soup when we ate at Chrysanthemums (I couldn’t stand hot soup), or the graceful arch of his eyebrows, which was most apparent when he was reading, or the time he placed his hand over my eyes, light as beetle wings, when we hiked up the mountain path and came to a bluff, and I was suddenly, intensely afraid of heights. He didn’t mind the things about me other people minded—my aloofness, my old clothes, my tendency to forget that I had said something and say it again.

  I didn’t know then that it was possible to love someone, and for them to love you, and to still be capable of causing so much harm to each other.

  I knew something was wrong when no beetles came to greet me at the entrance to the rose garden. I searched for them under petals and in the sky. No soft wings beat in the air.

  When I was sixteen, I used the pen to put gifts into the world.

  In my twenties, I would have used it to try to change the world; sweeping changes, impassioned and rash and thoughtless.

  In my thirties, I would have destroyed the pen, for power is a dangerous thing.

  In my forties, I would have thought very hard about how to put goodness into the world, and done it. I would have examined the consequences, rejoicing at good outcomes, finding my way through my guilt at bad ones.

  Now that I am in my fifties, if I found such a pen again, I think I would use it to put gifts into the world.

  I found Matthew pacing by the dead leaf chairs. His face held righteousness and shame. When I think back on this memory, I am struck by how young he looked.

  “Why couldn’t you let me have a place of my own?” I said, my voice loud and hard. “Because you didn’t make it? Because it was mine and not yours?”

  He lunged for the pen, and in my astonishment I let it slip from my fingers.

  He had no paper, so he wrote against his skin, and the words sprang up. He gave himself invincibility, immortality, wealth. The words were too heavy to come into the world. They sank against him, drilling down into his arms.

  “Stop,” I said. “You can’t exist this way.”

  The words strangled in his throat, coasting over his body. He had asked for too much. He had asked for things that could not be.

  I grabbed the pen and coaxed the words back in, one letter at a time. As I pulled the ink from him, he crumpled forward, his breathing harsh, his eyes fluttering closed.

  With the unwritten words reabsorbed, I felt the power contained within the pen. I could have written him immortal. I could have written it for myself.

  “Where are the beetles?” I said.

  “I trapped them by the pond.”

  I found the beetles in cages made from brittle sticks and thorns.

  Freedom, I wrote, striking the pen against the air. It was a hard word to make come alive, for what sort of shape should such a word have in the world? But I wrote it, and the cages dissolved.

  In their new life, they were not my soft beetles anymore, but something changed. Wildness came to them, and joy. They pelted Matthew, who cowered behind his hands, and then they flew away.

  Ink ran out of the pen in rivers. Ink drenched the garden, filling the gaps in the stone pathways.

  Matthew sank with his arms full of new skin, impressions of beetle wings indented in his face. The ink ran around him but would not touch him.

 

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