In Stages

“Hey, Sunshine. I’m at the market on Lienova II. I see you put menstrual cups on the list. But, did you know that there are about two dozen different brands? Shapes? — I mean, Sara, this one looks like a tulip — do you care what color it is? You’re going to have to be more specific. Call me back and help me out. I feel like a creep hanging around this aisle. I love you.”

It’s what I have — this old voice message, a reel of holographic photos, a handmade-with-love box full of handwritten letters, and a folded flag trapped inside a triangular case. They’re all here on our bed with me. They don’t mind that I haven’t showered, or that I’ve irreparably wrinkled my black dress.

I’m cold. The hairs on my back are getting tired from standing at attention under the hum of the environmental conduit. I’d gotten as far as unzipping the dress for air before I’d laid down yesterday. No, not yesterday.

I don’t know how many days have passed exactly since they jettisoned him. I will guess two. I’m starting to feel truly weary from having not eaten since my mother commanded I try her hors d’oeuvres at the memorial service, else she would not return to Earth and I’d be punished with her unrelenting presence in our tiny quarters. Our tiny quarters. My tiny quarters.

Micah and I had been talking about buying a house in the colony on Lienova Prime once his contract was finally up and we could at last be settled in one place, finally civilians.

I thought about eating, maybe an hour ago, but I haven’t cooked for one in years. I’m a good cook. Micah always said so. But one plate would be terribly lonely on the table by itself. I don’t even want to think about how devastated the leftovers would feel, crammed in a container, shivering in the fridge, with only moldy berries of some sort for company.

I wouldn’t want to inflict what I’m feeling on anything else, especially things so undeserving. It wouldn’t be fair.

Nothing about this is fair.

“Hey, Sunshine…I love you.”

#

My dearest Sara,

Elisyan sucks. It’s hot. The twin suns are unbearably bright and yet, somehow those heinous orbs pale in comparison to you, my Sunshine. I am missing you so much. It’s killing me that I can’t be home with you…

I’ve determined that reread letters go well with PB&J. The letters alone make me cry, while the sandwich by itself feels like a fifteen-pound free weight in my stomach. But, mercifully, somehow, together they cancel each other out.

I’ve reread almost the entire box of letters, some of them aloud, some of them in my head using Micah’s voice. I know I teased him about insisting on handwriting when encrypted subspace voice messages are so much easier. But, here in this pool of paper, I am grateful for his old-fashioned ways. The sway of his handwriting sends me sailing into a dreamy ocean of memories.

There’s jelly globbed on my — his — sweatshirt and sticky smudges across the glass window of the flag’s little home. I’m okay with this, that jelly squishes out of sandwiches more readily than peanut butter, although I do feel the need to apologize to the flag.

I don’t even like peanut butter. Micah did. No. “Like” doesn’t even begin to satisfy what Micah felt for peanut butter. That’s why I’d bought it in bulk on my last trip to Earth. When he got back to the station, I was going to surprise him with enough of the stuff to stock an apocalypse bunker. I figured it would give me a better shot at convincing him to never leave again if there were peanut butter at home to be eaten.

He would be so disappointed if I let it go to waste. Which is why, as compromise, I think I will use it instead to construct a little house with toasted wheat bread for walls and peanut butter for mortar.

My dearest Sara,

Elisyan sucks…

#

“I promise, Sara, after this tour, that’s it. I’ll never leave you again,” he’d assured me right after this holophoto had been taken. This photo I had despised when I’d been tagged in it, I now wanted, enlarged, framed, illuminated.

We’d been fighting all week about the Astral Army. An upcoming deployment will do that to newlyweds.

It was romantic at first, the idea of marrying a space soldier. I had thought I could handle it. After all, when we had first started dating, he’d told me he would serve his four years, then get out and go to school. But that was before the war started.

When he’d told me he had been rethinking it, considering renewing, I’d blown up and had gone to a friend’s party without him.

He’d come after me. I was already three Grenalian Ales in and prepared to rip him a new one.

“You could die, Micah! Die! The probability rises every minute you stay,” I’d snarled.

We’d fought between clinched teeth from the keg in the kitchen all the way to the beer pong table, stopping only to satisfy a drunken photographer.

“Smile, you two!”

Cheese. Flash.

I’d downed my drink and had tried to escape before the bright light cleared from his eyes. But he’d grabbed my hand — quick, that one — and swore to me, he would come home, and stay home.

He’d escorted me back to our quarters. I’d covered him with I’m sorry kisses. We’d made love.

I save the holophoto — two forced smiles and a crushed plastic cup — as my communicator’s background.

The glow of the three-dimensional image reflects off the bedroom window. Beyond the glass, from a field of stars, I pick one and say that it must be where Micah’s landed to watch over this space station and me.

“I promise, Sara…I’ll never leave you again.”

#

“If you’re watching this, I’m so sorry, Sara. I didn’t — I wasn’t able to keep my promise to come back home to you…”

They had delivered it this morning. His footlocker, full of everything he’d had with him in his last months on Elisyan. Letters I’d sent him, a holophoto from our honeymoon at the resort on Renal’i, his clothes and a second pair of boots, and my pocket-sized holocamcorder. I’d forgotten all about it after tucking it into my backpack for my semester on Mars where I’d planned to document every detail.

Pulling it out of his rucksack, I lay it right-side up on his pillow, and curl up on our bed. It flickers on with a wave of my hand and projects the miniaturized scene into the air. I watch footage of a life on a distant lunar base — his friends kicking around a piliri ball, a tour of the barracks, lots of pink sand. The sound of his laugh from the other side of the camera melts into my skin and I can almost feel his phantom hands on me.

The last scene captures clumsy attempts to set the device up to face himself.

“Hello, Sunshine. If you’re watching this…”

It’s too much, seeing his face, three-dimensional, his lips synch up with his voice. I slam my hand over the device, squashing him back into it, and choke on the clumped ball of tears in the back of my mouth.

I can’t decide if I’m sad or angry. Sad or angry. Sad or — definitely angry.

Trying to blink away the blurry film of tears, I catch sight of the flag, the blue and green ball, our home world, emblazoned on a deep navy background.

All it is, is a loud reminder that my husband is dead. “Your husband is dead!” it mocks.

That isn’t very nice. They have all these rules about treating Earth flags with respect. But you aren’t being very respectful in return, while I’ve let you live on my bed for weeks.

No more.

I pick up the case that securely holds the scornful thing. It’s got to go, perhaps into a closet or drawer, or the trash chute to the station’s incinerator.

Against the wall is what my shaking hands decide. The glass shatters, the butterfly wing-thin paneling fails to brace itself against the case’s corner. A puff of gray powder billows out of the hole.

The flag looks sad there, broken and spilled across the floor. And, suddenly, between heaving breaths and pangs of agonizing sadness, I feel some sort of projected pity for the thing and rush to its aid. I pull the carcass out of the wrecked case and into my arms. It was the last thing to embrace my husband, draped across his casket, guarding him all the way home.

“Sorry,” I whisper to it.

I settle back onto our bed, lay my head on the flag, and wave my hand over the holocamcorder to resume playback.

He smiles at me, and I reach for his face.

“I know you’re feeling broken, Sunshine. But, I can’t allow that. I couldn’t call you Sunshine if it weren’t how I see you. Don’t let me being gone gray your skies for long, Sara…I love you.”

#

“Sunnier skies, Sara. That’s what we’ll find on Lienova Prime.”

His voice whispers in my heart.

I prepare to disembark.

I wrote our names on the corner bulkhead of our quarters, packed our things, and booked passage on a Ven’ek transport vessel — second stop, Lienova Prime.

The oppressive gray walls of the station release me.

Sunnier skies, here I come.