Page 5 of Eat My Moon Dust
?TINSLEY?
Two Years Later… Ish.
I rolled onto my stomach and held up my scope, looking out over my premium view of the jungle. Every tree was well below my perch atop Home Tower 02, where I could see miles and miles into the distance. Sometimes I could convince myself that I lived in a sort of twilight tropical paradise on Earth, where the jungle was magenta and purple, the grass a dark aubergine bordering on black, and the sky turquoise instead of blue. But then I’d come up here and see Big Blue, the monstrous water planet haunting the northern hemisphere where it stayed tidally locked with our little moon, see the curve of the horizon–so much tighter than Earth’s–and I’d come crashing back to reality.
My bakery was gone, my dad was gone, my friends were gone. I even missed that one customer that filched an entire bowl of candy canes a few days before I was abducted. And while I couldn’t bring any of those things here, maybe I could bring a little cheer to Renata, the human colony we’d established on Yaspur.
“Come to mama,” I murmured, looking through the toy scope I’d bought off the holomarket. I blew one of my short curls from my forehead and searched out the mountains perpetually caught in Big Blue’s shadow, so far in the distance that they were just a ghostly shadow through the thick atmosphere.
I found the range, crossed my fingers, and slowly swiped across their peaks.
White.
I gasped with excitement as soon as I saw the snow caps.
“Yes!” I hooped and hollered, scrambling up onto my butt for a better view. I brought the scope back up to my face and took another look. Sure enough, far,farpast the jungle, snow blanketed the mountaintops. I breathed in deep as if I could smell the ice.
We’d established Renata more than an orbit ago, and while the shilpakaari had shared a few of their traditions that passed the seasons, therewereno seasons in a jungle. Maybe hot, hotter, wet, wetter… Nothing like Kingston, Ontario, where the winter weighed down the pines in glittering flakes and called you to a cup of hot chocolate. Wherethe spring burst with young green and thunderstorms that filled the air with the smell of fresh-cut flowers and grass.
I couldalmostsmell it again.
That’s not to say that things in Renata were going poorly, that we were all loafing on our couches, pining for Earth. Many people had a good thing going on Yaspur. My former roommate, Omi, had her own hair shop and had started a portfolio of mane styles for the shilpakaari. Bree, the human transpo mechanic, ran the public media feed for the colony, giving the rest of the union a taste of human life while simultaneously smiting trolls with maniacal New Yorker glee.
And who could forget Amelia and Ezraji? They were close to welcoming their twins, the first shilpakaari-human hybrids. The galaxy didn’t know it yet, but the whole colony was buzzing with excitement over the union’s very first hukaari children. When the news broke publicly, it would becrazy.
And people really were healing. We’d all been leaning on each other, bonded by our shared abductee experiences and the sheer alien wilderness surrounding us. Before, when the security patrols emerged from the jungle like ghosts, silent and sure-footed, we’d all hide and watch them warily from our windows. We’d whisper about their weapons and their unfamiliar features and how paranoid and insecure we’d felt in our so-called “protected status.”
There was absolutely no question that even among our alien “hosts,” our security team was intimidating. Vin, with his devilish red exoskeleton and crown of spires. Sizzle, a black hellhound with a Y-shaped Cheshire Cat grin. Ngozi and Kokebe, the uids with two pairs of eyes stacked like spiders and an uncanny preternatural awareness of each other’s movements…
Now though, when they emerged from their patrols, most humans waved hello. Their big, scary faces would break into human-like smiles and nods of greeting. The uids even brought flowers or fruits they knew we liked, and I’d seen them help construct stalls and clear roads after the rains. Although they had terrified us all at first, they didn’t anymore.
Now, many of us counted them as family.
Literally! Humans were shacking up with aliens left and right around here.
Which meant it was time to bring some celebration and pizazz to our sterile little paradise.
That’s right.
We needed a freakingparty.
That snow in the distance meant it was my time of year, even if it wasn’t in my backyard. It meant cozy blankets and fireplaces and twinkle lights. It meant a bakery ringing with holiday music, hung with beaded snowflakes, and Santa hats for my employees. It meant gingerbread house competitions, sugar cookie workshops for kids,oh god, mulled cider spiked with so much rum I’d be dancing on a—
I bit my lip and closed my eyes, centering myself as the sudden urge to cry hit me hard. While Sam’s wife had said that sometimes healing could take you far away, mynohkomipanhad taught me that productivity helped soothe a troubled soul.
I needed to let the things I’d lost go and brighten my skies by making new memories. Focus on healing others as a way to heal myself.
The only problem was that my usual method of healing wasn’t available to me. I thought of the mouth-watering aroma of brown sugar inThe Three Sistersthis time of year and a lump caught in my throat. Butter tarts, black forest cakes, pear fig galettes, hazelnut trifles, maple pies, pfeffernusse cookies, caramel bûche de Noël, sweet bannock... I swallowed hard, damning my circumstance.
Not that I couldn’t eat most of those things. I just couldn’tmakethem. There were no ovens, no pots or pans, no blenders or whisks. Just food bays.Freaking bing.Food’s ready. Food’s perfect.
Food’sboring.
So if I couldn’t bake anymore, what could I do? I could decorate, play music, get drunk, and watch the movie archive—something I’d been doing for an embarrassing amount of time at this point. And if it depressed me to leave my little unit and the Christmas cheer behind, maybe others felt in the holiday dumps too. We needed a break from the humdrum of colony life.
We neededholidaysagain.
I rolled up my comforter and scope, then headed back down the service ladder into the top floor of the tower. When I entered the lift and selected the ground floor, there was a little fizzle of excitement in my stomach. I kept my fingers crossed as I descended, tentatively hopeful that this could be my purpose here. I just had to get permission first, and I had to do it before the anxiety ate me up. Rip off the Band-Aid, jump in with both feet, be confident!
