Takeoff

ten.

“Hi.” 

I look up to the source of the voice. There stands a woman, sunny hair, umber skin, and eyes like the coffee swirling in my cup. Frills brush her neck, a bloody brooch resting at the hollow of her throat. The rest of her outfit echoes the frilly sentiment, white and plaid with brogues on shoes bearing intermittent patches of dirt and white petals. Her fingers tighten around her bag strap as she extends a hand. 

“I’m Amelia—you must be Wichita?”

Closing the book, I shake her hand. Yes, that would be me,” I say, setting the book face down beside my coffee. The cup is growing cold—I don’t even like coffee. Instead, I slide over a plate of strawberry cheesecake, two forks glinting on either side of blush-coloured desert, a single heart shaped strawberry sitting on top.

“Hopefully I didn’t make you wait too long?” Amelia laughs, taking a seat. She shakes her head, sunlight flying from her braids. There is a dip in the left side of her cheek, growing deeper as she eyes the cake like a bird does sparkling trinkets.

“No.” Putting on my best smile, I pass her a fork. “You’re just in time.”

nine.

It’s hard for humans to conceptualize the fourth dimension as anything but a straight line, a river flowing from a point we cannot see to a point we cannot identify. We try, sometimes, to fold time into a box within a box, the shape endlessly consuming itself as we do with the memories that so often pass by. A smile, a touch, the press of a forehead to mine where cold plastic now rests—a link of chains, one memory connects me to another until I’m pressed back into my seat thinking of how I got here.

The weight of the earth pushes me down, forcing me to tilt my head back. Aquamarine reflects across my eyes, light glinting off the visor. Fingers of warmth hold me close, a bracketed hand to keep the cold out as we climb. Everything is so fast, the images that flash by are but blurry steaks glowing with emotion.

eight.

“Wichita,” she says, gesturing me over. “Come see! It’s awake.”

A sigh accompanies the smile I can’t keep away as I press a hand to Amelia’s shoulder. “I’m here, love. What is it?”

Looking up, Amelia sends me a smile that rivals the sun. She’s radiant, the lines on her face indicative of her time spent on this world. Silver threads through golden locks, laying in a braid across the tattoo on her bared clavicle. The strap of her overalls falls aside forgotten, a spade peeking from the pocket at the centre with a sunflower painted on it. Squeezing my hand, she pulls me down to her garden of hopes and dreams. A laugh escapes, unbidden.

“The succulent is peeking out! I wasn’t sure if it would take considering the landscape, but it’s succeeded my expectations.” Amelia waves a dirty hand across the plants. Three of them—Amoura, Constantine, and Big Tom—all large and green with ripened leaves, dirt spilling around the bottom of the pot. But there is a fourth pot, Ira, the colour of a burning sunset dotted with white childlike spots. A near translucent tendril peeks from the fresh dirt. Earth fills my nose as I coo at our new plant child.

Wet lips press to my cheek, startling Big Tom’s leaves from my hand. “Amy!”

“Witch,” she teases, nosing my jaw like a cub in need of affection. “We did good, didn’t we?”

Waxy leaves between my fingers, the hair-like brush of Ira’s sprout—slow growths of life, new things that need tender hands and patient hearts. Everything I am not, but she is.

“We did.”

seven.

When you spend your whole life watching a horizon that never moves, you never think of anything else. Not of what happens when the ground opens up beneath your feet, nor when the sky rests just inches from your fingertips. Trapped in a cylinder of steel, worked over by minds that know only numbers, is one of many meanings of discomfort. Another is a blanket of darkness across the sky, or where you think the sky is. Oppressive like a smothering hug, walls far too close to touch with no discernible division where the metal was sheared together by human hands. Sometimes we’re too smart to see the danger—that point where the animal brain takes over to send you scrabbling at walls for purchase as ambition climbs ever higher.

A long breath and I blink to clear the fluid away. The strain makes pushes a hollow through my chest, abdomen heavy with the equipment vital to life. Luckily our fear as a civilization has made us paranoid, scared of the very slow lions that permeate everyday life. Still, there are those who stare into the abyss, the eyes of megafauna watching from corners yet unexplored.

six.

“I’m not sure about this—” The words are cut off as Amelia tugs me into a precarious spin. The ice is firm but my heart is not. A hummingbird in my chest, I grasp her forearms for balance, sending her a look.

Eyes following the scuffed toes of her skates, I’m able to get some semblance of balance. The rink around us is full of others in similar states, tripping to the frigid floor and skating in groups with arms interlinked like a life vest. “Amelia… I hate this,” I say, unable to keep the whine at bay. She merely laughs, sliding back as a swan through water. Atop her head is a hat she knitted herself, matching the one hiding my hair. A single fishtail swims at her back, stark against the bloody coat that keeps her warm. Her gloved fingers twine through mine, long and thick to my patchwork mittens.

“Relax Wichita, you’re getting the hang of it.” She whispers, tinged with laughter. “I won’t let you fall.”

“That’s what you said before I fell—three times!” I can’t help but huff. Pushing my body forward, I try to match her footwork as she skates in reverse. A quill across a page, we trace shapes in the ice, marking it with the words of my efforts.

I look up at smiling red lips, and that is my downfall. I’m not sure who falls first, but soon I find myself meeting gemstone eyes, crinkling at the corner from a pained chuckle. Apologies fall from my mouth. Our breaths come out as clouds, hiding the words I cannot say. The things too precious for even the air to hold.

It’s silly—Amelia can’t help but make the joke. But that’s when I know—I know who I belong to, the flowers amid my tangle of thorns. A searing hand over her mouth, she throws her head back and giggles, “It seems I’ve fallen for you again.”

five.

Breaking through the clouds is like diving into the depths. Through a layer of unmoving ice and snow, humans punch into the beyond as they do the watery world below. We try to bend it to our will, light the darkness, map the caverns of our world to fill the spaces in our hearts and mind. We are caught in between, dragged along fourth dimensional rivers as we go to extremes to stake a place in the ceaseless marching. We stumble, we trip, we fall—and hand in hand, humanity goes on.

My hands curl on my seat, fingers pressed to thermal fabric in search of what I know. The strain is nearly unbearable, and my eyes are forced to close. Like a marble in a tin can, I tremble. The cold takes me close, but part of my shivering comes from somewhere else. A dark fear, tendrils of longing with roots as far deep as unexplored trenches.

four.

“I have something for you, Witch!” She says in the tone of voice I know just screams trouble.

Beneath a knit hat resembling a cat, Amelia wears a smile just as crafty. She stands in the hall, with something behind her back. A grey strand of hair hangs in her eye, distinct from the yellow field tumbling down her back. Despite the autumn chill, her skirt reaches just above her knees above a pair of tights that look they had scissors taken to them—a fact I can imagine with startling clarity. “Can I come in?”

Softly breathing, I guide her inside. There was no other answer—I am a willing satellite in the orbit of a woman like the sun. She knows the way like the back of her hand, making a beeline to the couch. In her lap rests a box hastily wrapped in rosy paper bearing her signature scrawl.

“That for me?” I pick it from her eager hands and turn around. Hair falls into her eyes, and she pushes it back to hook her chin over my shoulder. A warm huff of breath prickles the skin there, the sensation new but familiar.

Once the string is pulled, the rest comes away easily. A blossom unfurling, the box falls apart to reveal a small plant with strange tendrils, green fingers twisting among each other.

“It’s a Capitata Peach!” Amelia cheers, forgetting to regulate her volume. I pat her cheek and she quiets, but energy thrums from her form as she kneels before me, a worshipper.

Raising the standard green pot, I eye the plant. There is a ladybug perched on a leaf. “A… peach plant?”

“No, it’ll turn peach in the future,” she says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “What’re you naming it? You have to give it a name, it’s the law.”

If she says it is, it must be. In the space formed by the curve of her nose and the dip in my shoulder rests a certain trust. Nurtured by months and tended to by effort. Like the effort it takes to grow a plant—this silly plant I now have to care for. But I know I will—there was never anything else. “So the name?” Amelia pushes.

“… Amoura.”

three.

We are pulled to the earth—by gravity, by human nature, or some other force. There is a part of us that long to delve into the natural, immerse ourselves in the waters of a world growing smaller by the day. And every day as we are pulled to the earth, so too are other celestial bodies to us. Feet to the dirt and hands to the stars, reaching for things beyond the little blue dot, an eye in the cosmic expanse. To think humanity the centre of the universe—it’s the way it’s always been. We’ve tried—we’re there—and at least we can be sure what awaits when we return.

The floor presses up into me, a sound like water rushing through my ears. Explosions, a thousand times a minute, are occurring just below. As I am pushed away from all I know, the stars envelop me. Darkness fills my visor only for a moment before—the sun. The sun, a smile, burning light I can touch if only I reach out. Tears blur the sight, but emotions fill in the rest.

two.

“So you’re going there?” Amelia’s voice is barely a whisper. A shower of meteors blurs across my vision, the image burned to the back of my eyes.

Glancing to the side, I’m met with earthen eyes, the stars reflected in them. The moon highlights her face, shadowing filling the valleys and contours. A braided crown of spun gold sits on her head, held in place by hidden pins. She pulls up her turtleneck and meets my eye. It’s chilly yet her hands are bare. There is dirt beneath the chipped nail polish.

“Hopefully,” I say, shrugging her heated gaze from my face. “Haven’t heard back from the company yet.” Pinpricks of warmth seem to follow me as I lean back, grass tickling my sides. Like a green shag rug, the field stretches in every direction, and we are but splotches of colour. In the sky above, the silent show continues. The stars that fall are ones we cannot touch, but still, my gaze tries to follow each white streak in the heavens.

“Space is so far away, don’t you think?” Amelia falls back beside me, hand clasped over her stomach. “I like it here where I can smell the dirt, drown in green rivers of moss, brush the dust from waxy leaves.”

I wonder what they call homesickness of the earth—whatever it is, she embodies it in every facet, covered in vital greenery and the stains of life. “There are gardens in space—for air.”

“But here, air is free.” She turns her head, grass kissing her cheek. The cold is barely an inconvenience among the dirt and weeds. “And here is where I am.”

A digit tugs at my pinkie, slender and calloused. A stranger in the night, tension flees my form. Our fingers interlock, a single connection stronger than gravity. Meteors continue to fall, white rain on a cosmic backdrop I can’t comprehend.

“Here is where we are.”

one.

Eons and eras, centuries and years, humanity has tried to put meaning into bodies so far away they’re dying as we see them. Impossible shapes and sacred patterns. It’s what we are wont to do. Time and time again we are caught endlessly staring at the stars, tracing the paths we dream to take somewhere along the river. A smile the devil would long for, a laugh like water rushing down the slope of a leaf. When time runs out, we’ll always have the memories, consumed by minds caught by the unstoppable currents of that dimension.

Eyes wide I watch the world fall away until there is nothing for darkness under my feet. Like kisses across a dark field of skin, the stars fill my vision as I trace Amelia’s name in the stars. Though we are not together, you are here with me. I hoped to find you out there—out in the endless where there are dreams and love and promises.