Notebooks, Conchas, y Un Café con Leche

Those are the items that make up your world the day the girl with the side buzz and brown bomber jacket says to you, in the back of a crowded cafetería, “Explícame pues—¿Qué sabes acerca del concepto de la dilatación del tiempo?”

The year is 2084, and this is the spot you always come to—just a walk from UNAM’s Instituto de Astronomía but far enough so none of your peers ever bother to trek the long exhale of asphalt to reach you—where you can tuck yourself away between the brick walls and slide away from the world, slip into your studies, forget that you’re a person at all. But this girl reached her voice over your papers and your pens and said she liked your tote. It was the one your abuela crocheted for you, with patches of ringed planets, and Laika, and the constellations you’d memorized from the nights watching them arch across your papá’s ranch. Because your abuela knew you always had your neck crooked back. Were always watching stars.

You told this girl that you were writing a dissertation on the effects of light-speed travel on the human body, how time is relative and spacetime is the fabric of the ever-expanding universe, that makes it so the closer you chase light speed, the farther you outrun Earth time. But no one ever cared to ask about your work before. And now you’re all too aware of the petrol wafts still clinging to your skin, your tongue fumbling over equations, and Einstein, and velocidad relativiva, so you shut up—say, “No quiero aburrirte.”

And she laughs—teases your stuttering—then says you have a pretty voice, “Y quiero oírte hablar.”

A shot, and a chaser. And you’re intoxicated.

So you attempt to explain time dilation, and this takes all afternoon, and halfway through you order another coffee but it’s not for you, and by closing time two mugs sit empty on that wooden table. This is how you learn to mark time with Adriana Jiménez. With items, and the stories they carry:

A friend’s dress you borrowed, two backpacks, a dinner check she covers—

You learn she’s a student too, here from the US to study the ruins of Tenochtitlán still buried beneath your feet. When she tells you this, her interest in relics and their stories—“a resuscitation of the dead,” she says, “for the ancestors I felt so far from all my life”—her eyes beam and you realize this is the first time you’ve ever truly witnessed starlight before.

One cab, four shoes left at the door of her apartment—

Because she invited you for a movie and you couldn’t help but wonder how the leather of her jacket will sigh if she uncrosses those arms to reach them around you. Cradle you. Keep you safe. You only finish the cold open before that jacket’s on the floor and your lips have found hers.

Neck, collarbone, hip—

Because she’s only staying for the summer, and you want her. And she wants you. Friends will ask how the movie was, and you’ll tell them, “Bien,” but truth is, all you’ll remember is its technicolor aurora against the topography of Adriana’s skin.

One airplane ticket, a years’ worth of out-of-country phone bills, a doctorate in astronomy—

You’d both agreed it wouldn’t be serious, both liars—mentirosas traviesas. Your mamá says she thought you’d grow out of this, your queerness un desacato a la familia, and that you need to end it now or pay back the money she gave to put that Dr. before your name. But that night, between your sobs, you plan your escape towards safety; it’s a sliver of a path, it’s Adriana-shaped, and quickly you realize how willing you are to cut away the parts of yourself that won’t fit through.

A university job contract, a half-empty suitcase, your passport stamped by a country just half a continent away—

You trade the smoggy, star-strangled sky of Mexico City for a misty one on a redwood coast, and even though the sea is horrific in its immensity, you use beach trips that taste of sand grains and citrus ChapStick to smother homesickness. Tell yourself, Your past is just excess pain for the story you are. Tell yourself, This is what you wanted. This was what you wanted.

Then one day as you’re fanning campfire flames, Adriana’s voice taps you from behind. “Oye, mírarme, amorsita.” You turn—laugh because you don’t know how long she’s been there balanced on one knee, grinning up at you.

Two rings, a city hall paper, a new apartment’s windowsills you fill with succulents over months. Then a letter: the offer of a lifetime—

It’s a simple job, a sling-shot voyage to the Oort cloud—the belt that is the membrane edge of our solar system—and back. The Agencia Espacial Mexicana man who calls about this says it’s because they read your dissertation, and that it’s only a six-month voyage thanks to the newly developed Trans-Warp Engine that crinkles light years into yards you can cross with single, heavy-heeled strides. He says, “Would you, Céu Galhardo, wish to chart the final frontier with us?”

A contract signed, the oil-stained cot you sleep on for months of training, a silver gleaming starship—

Adriana’s not there for takeoff. You fought when you told her what six months at near-light-speed travel meant: six months in heaven for you, two years for Adriana on dirt. “But I have to do it,” you told her after a week of silence. “We survived long distance before, we can again.”

The tears in her eyes when she smiles and says, “This time I’ll count the stars to find the extra one you’ll be.”

Rocket boosters howling. A radio cracking, “We have lift off!”

Your face in awe when fire rips away to show you what a Real Ocean is: the empty, ever-expanding vastness filled with so many stars—

You send messages back and forth, pixel heavy, audio lagging, these echoes of long-dead moments you’ll never get to touch.

A shuttle scorched from the heart-pounding plummet back to ground, and a heart-shaped rock you found among the quiet—

That night after the quiet drive home, you two swap stories between wine and fast food as you trace each other’s faces—lips—hands—desperate to remember warmth, what you’d craved during those months away. For the whole night, your hands never let go of skin.

A scrapbook of a palmful of years before the seizure. A hair trimmer you purchase to shave your scalp too because you won’t have her start chemo alone. The stack of bills that mark eight months before they stop coming. The casket. And a photograph to display beside it—

She’d snapped it the last time you two visited your private cove. In it, you two are taking refuge from the sun beneath your wide-brimmed hat, skin to skin as you squeeze her, promise to never—even if her shoulders are slivers when once they were boulders—forget her shape. In that photograph you never let her go.

Tin cup of coffee, a rusty mirror, the grey-haired reflection that marks the years since that photograph—

You stand in between the white walls of your quarters, the hum of the UNACSS Argo Navis reverberating from toes to sternum. Sleeplessness stings raw around your eyelids and you don’t know if you’ve ever recognized this face before. How long have you been standing here? Stuck halfway to Proxima Centauri, 4.2465 light years from Earth and everything you’ve ever loved? The walkie on your nightstand chirps: Captains to the bridge. You sniffle. Swallow the last of your coffee ration that tastes like bolts and salt then fit on your brown bomber jacket, your boots, and step out into the cold, echoing corridors of your starship.

 

The Starbeast

You found the creature two weeks ago along the Frontier, the edge, that void of deep space where nothing should have been, no sound, no life and yet—the scanners picked it up: A single blip in the dark.

You’d only been sailing a few months towards Proxima Centauri. Your mission? Find out if the latest constellation codex dredged out from the bones of Tenochtitlán is in fact a map—An invitation from some shapeless Creators showing the way towards the Origin of All Things—At least that’s how the A.E.G.I.S. shareholders put it, who could afford to purchase myths into realities.

Protocol made you drop out of near-light speed to investigate, and everyone crammed into the observation deck to see it, what was first just a speck stark white against the black sea that only grew larger, more immense as the Argo Navis approached. Even from behind all those heads, you were able to make out its shape, long and fusiform, its ends stretching out beyond the window for what you estimated was miles—and miles and miles more; you saw mountains of fins fanning along its sides, its top, its bottom, and wondered if a creature like that even had a top or bottom; you noticed also the gash in its side. A crater of bones, charred and ragged flesh where plumes of blue fluorescence whirled out to blotch the stars. Your crew shuddered at the sight of it—that gored monstrosity—and christened him the Starbeast.

But you noticed his rubbery skin. How constellations of iridescence shimmered within the fins. Whale, you decided. It’s a space whale.

“Galactocetus orionis,” Tomás the biologist identified the species during the briefing. You recognized the name, remembered the tales other space jockeys would swap during training, of harmless, slow, and stupid pests littering the Frontier that couldn’t help but drift in the headlights of cargo freighters barreling through space at .7865 times the speed of light before becoming meteor showers. This one was no different. Its wound told as much.

“They absorb light through those,” Tomás stabbed a chewed pencil at the fins on the 3D scan of the creature. Shrunken down, you thought the fins looked like maple leaves. Or coral. Or God’s own open hands, palms up. “They catch light particles like our ships’ own solar sails do. But whereas we have to adjust with the direction of solar winds, Galactocetus’s anatomy allows it to manipulate those particles by absorbing them then—eh-heh—discharging them opposite the direction they wish to go. That’s how they ambulate through the vacuum of—”

“It swims,” you interrupted.

All eyes found you, small, standing there in the back of the room. You suddenly wanted to seep into the folds of your jacket, grab hold of Adriana’s scent still baked into its stitching but no. She’s just past, you told yourself. And you learned long ago Past was something you could not carry into Now. Not when everything had weight, and every pound was already accounted for out here.

Tomás laughed. “Oh no, I wouldn’t—well…Yes, I suppose it does. Thing is, we’ve never found one intact enough to study before.”

He looked at you as he said it. Just you. Because Captain Bradshaw is incurious about real fucking aliens, and everyone knows he’ll let you have full say with matters like this. Because you’re the cartographer and co-captain to this expedition. Because the most comprehensive research on the codex map belonged to someone whose scribbled ramblings charted the deterioration of their body, whose hand you knew better than your own tired reflection.

“Look, all I’m asking is to quickly collect some samples and then we’re gone,” Tomás added. “No lost time, I promise.”

Lost time because that was the cost of existing out here, when every hour, minute, second spent chasing light speed across spacetime were singularities compared to the stretches of time passed back home: weddings, funerals, family dinners, and graduation ceremonies, Saturday night mistakes and quiet Sunday mornings where you could sip your café and listen to the birds and tell yourself there was nothing else, nothing else but this.

But then you considered Adriana’s hospital bills waiting a world away. How much A.E.G.I.S. would compensate for samples. You told Tomás, “You get thirty minutes.”

So you took the shuttle out to an armpit of the Starbeast, and as you waited in the comfort of the cockpit, unwilling to expose yourself to the cold, weightless grip of space, you watched the biologists become leashed maggots crawling along the whale fall. And as they sliced away slabs with their laser cutters, you noticed the iridescence shiver. The carcass shuddered. Then, way ahead of you, a slit of skin pulled away, and right as the Argo Navis’s alarm began to howl, a black, syrupy orb shifted back to drink you in its gaze. You were already shouting into the radio, “Everyone back now! It’s still fucking alive!”

Two weeks since that moment.

Two weeks since the Starbeast’s fins siphoned all the solar energy stored within the Argo Navis and left you stranded under the shadow of its mass, halfway from anywhere you wanted to be.

Two weeks of distress beacons. Of rationing supplies, cutting power to lower decks, doubling up in the cabins, attempting anything—everything—to generate enough force to push the Argo Navis out of the Starbeast’s gravitational grip. But to no fault but its own anatomy, the Starbeast would not let you go.

Two weeks of Here, and so, so much more of Away back home. You’re counting all that time you lost now, as you return to the bridge, ready for your next escape attempt.

Inside, you find Tomás tinkering with a helmet across the star-chart table, Florence and Quintin standing among the radars and analog dials with deputy flight marshal Andrew Morgan, hand fixed to his holster because he likes to remind the crew he’s one of the handful of you licensed to carry a firearm out here. Your co-captain Elliot Bradshaw, the real captain (not some company transplant like you) with experience carved into every smile and stress line of his face, his years-worn tattoo sleeves, neo-nautical classic, of course, sits hunched in his captain’s chair, with his captain’s hat, pinching his brow with one hand and counting rosary beads with his other. Even he’s exhausted, his black skin greyed out under the sterile, auxiliary lights. They all watch your approach, so you pull your lips into a smile. Wave at them all and the rest who’ve come to watch.

Florence waves back, Morgan glares. It was he who’d suggested using the torpedoes—those polished steel fingers ready to be pointed at whatever asteroids or private vessels venture too close to your ship—on the Starbeast. “Blow it the fuck up and be done with this,” he’d said. But you remembered the nights you’d lain awake as Adriana wrung herself to tears talking about all the cultures blasted into past tense during Cortés’s rape of Mexico, and you remembered that the Starbeast was a whale. You’d promised to find another way.

He hates you. They all do. You, whose fault this is—who spent this voyage either barking commands or hiding in your quarters where you could forget your body as the world passed outside. You turn to Bradshaw instead. “Morning, captain.”

“Co,” he grumbles. “Co-captain.”

And the words rake against you like razor teeth. But that was the deal, wasn’t it? Whereas Bradshaw was the esteemed captain of this vessel, you were the company hire. A usurper to his command whose only qualification was loving someone hard enough to squeeze when it was time to let them go.

“We just finished recalibrating for the neuro-synch.” Tomás bounces the Dream Reader in his hands. It’s one of those helmets you all must wear when in cryo-sleep, to monitor brain waves and record your dreams in vivid technicolor. Only this one’s been relayed to receptors bolted to the Starbeast’s hide, its chinstrap fitted just for you.

“We’re ready when you are,” Tomás says, and you just strap yourself into the pilot seat before him and remind yourself that this is your idea:

Use the Dreamer to neuro-synch with the Starbeast and generate a sensation uncomfortable enough to scare it off—let it find some elsewhere in the black to die so that the Argo Navis can start collecting starlight again. Because the Starbeast has been dying, and none of you know just how much longer it will cling to life.

—How long had you been sitting in the staleness of your apartment before the company called to say they could make you a captain? How badly you’d wanted to be anywhere but there, how many miles—worlds—lifetimes you were willing to throw between you and that grief—

As Tomás straps the helmet to your skull, Morgan spits. “Waste of fucking time,” and your captain squeezes your hand. “You sure you want to do this?”

You calculated all the time and people who’d miss them if anyone else volunteered for this: the possibility of the Dreamer whisking their mind into murk. But no one will miss you. Not your family you haven’t spoken to in years, not the friends you tore apart in the riptide of your grief. That’s why you nod to your captain, and as Tomás counts from the control panel, you search inside yourself for somewhere to take refuge.

“Three—two—one—and—”

—Notebooks—conchas—un café con leche—

You plummet into whiteness.

The whiteness swaddles you. Holds you. Drills into your skull until you crack, then pours in so much light. You’re flooded with it—moments witnessed by eyes at the end of a free-flowing body, a leviathan, the Starbeast, Him. With Him, you witness the geometry of the universe entire:

Constellations chasing each other like children across the shallows of time—galaxies egg-yoked and swirling—stars blooming collapsing blooming again, throwing matter into light and stone. He shows you rivers of gasses flowing between raging suns, and within them…so many whales; their celestial bodies swaying and bowing horseshoe-like in the tide. Between them, you watch the cloaca of the largest among Galactocetus push droplets of fluorescence up into the sea of black, and within them: pups fluttering within the blue.

Then the light howls—the Starbeast takes you elsewhere, shows you another ocean, a different world. The seas swell and cities bloom and soon you’re watching the road, your ’89 hatchback rattling over sun-cracked asphalt.

This is the day you brought Adriana to meet your family—the last time you tried to speak to them. You’d been terrified, afraid that Adriana would see the gashes of where you’d torn yourself loose in your escape into the shape of her life. On the drive back after the mess of it, she said with sternness, “You’re trying to test how much strain we can take before we break. We won’t though. You need to just trust me. Trust me. That’s the only way we make it into tomorrow.”

Now no one’s talking, and your jaw’s locked with shame and disdain. The same as when, years later when you’ll return from the Oort cloud and expect more than the reception you get: the simple hug and kiss, followed by Adriana’s recap of moments experienced without you. It’ll be easier to feed that disdain than to feel your shame in having expected her to wait to live her life.

Another flash. The light brings you to a white room, IV tubes draped, a vital monitor beeping. This is the last day in that room, a week before the funeral, when they say you’ll take her home because there’s nothing left to be done, and Adriana’s voice is raw as she condemns you for all the afternoons you spent hiding at home instead of coming here.

This is the last argument at the end of a novel’s worth of arguments. An unfair dissertation on all the ways you’re cruel—selfish—distant—cold. That you could chart constellations by memory, but humans are so much harder to navigate.

The cornered animal that is your past self bites back, “God forbid I have a moment to myself.”

Adriana laughs. “Yourself? You know, I spent years wondering if I had only been a means to an end for Your. Self.”

No—Not here, you try to tell the light. Anywhere but here. But you’re helpless to watch as your historic self vivisects her back with all the words you can. And it hurts.

And it’s all brightness.

Brightening still.

It sears your eyes, but you cannot blink, cannot scream as that moment is microscoped and more words are birthed, more galaxies collapsed. Their collective fires devour your face and swallow you whole until all you see is your captain ripping that blaze off your head and tossing the Dreamer across the bridge. It clanks against the metal as Bradshaw shakes you back into your skin.

“Céu! Are you okay?! What did you see?!”

His voice is far away, but you manage to say, “Oh my god—it’s full of stars.”

Your quarters, that stillness again—

You’re sitting on your cot, trying hard to melt into the ship’s purr and forget all you saw while the Starbeast still floats outside your window. A knock at your door. You’re about to tell them to go away when the unmistakable cadence of Adriana’s voice creeps under the metal:

¡Andale, vamonos!

You’re up—heart pounding—hand hovering over the door latch before you throw it open and step out to stand face-to-chest with a shadow. A monster. An iridescent creature with arms, legs, head, and a pair of eyes beaming lighthouse-like into you.

 

Conquests and Marauders

That was how Adriana put it, talking about Cortés during one of those early visits where plane tickets bookended weeks spent in the same time zone, same place.

Bed sheets, Keurig rumbling, TV flickering softly—

Your head’s on her chest, counting heartbeats. You used to prefer isolation, where you could parse out your thoughts alone, but here you can spend hours listening to your people’s shared history you never cared to hold before. This is before the Disdain; a moment you’ll return to during those last months with her, in search of the last time you felt the love that was once as familiar as sunlight on your skin. If you’d ever touch it again. Here, you think how lucky you are that someone like her can love something like you.

“We checked everywhere,” Morgan tells your captain as you sit between them on the bridge, Morgan’s accusations of your insanity gnashing at your trembling wrists. “No sign of the creature she described.”

You’re trying not to listen. Instead, you search for the creature on the aluminum alloy walls, behind the grotesque and hulking control consoles. There should have been security footage of it, could’ve been, had you not cut the power to those too. But you’re certain of what you saw—It was big. It was a man. Tall enough to fill the corridor, with maple-leaf spines and skin like molten metal, zig-zags of iridescence tracing muscle. No mouth, just eyes.

You reiterate that as soon as it—He—grabbed you by the shoulders, you’d punched the alarm and next you knew, your feet were heavy on solid ground, and the creature was gone. Just shadow and shimmers where he’d stood.

“See—she’s losing it!” Morgan shouts. “I don’t see why we need to entertain this shit. We have the explosives ready; just give me the clearance.”

Bradshaw’s strangling his rosary. “Captain Jiménez is still my co-captain and I won’t agree to anything without her consent—”

Morgan punches the window. “Horse shit!” Aims his words right at you. “You don’t get to hide in your cabin while we waste away—I’ve spoken with the Lower Deckers, and none of them give a shit about that thing or whatever god you hope to find at the end of your map, so as far as I can tell, there’s just two choices here, Céu, either you kill it, or we do. Just listen to me—I’m trying to warn you.”

You’ve spent so many years with sweaty men invading your space, getting in close so you see their pores, smell their coffee as they chide your accent, your country, making sure you know it was their grace that put you where you stand, and not your mind. You’ve survived them all before; this one will not scare you now.

“No one’s going to die,” you say. “We just need a little more time, but if all else fails, we go into cryo and wait for a salvage party once we’re past due.”

“That could be years!”

“DECADES MAYBE! But right now, as far as I’m concerned, you’re stepping out of line and if you don’t return to your station, I’ll have you brigged for insubordination, officer. Is that clear?”

Nothing. He leaves with Florence and Quintin waiting for him in the hall, and it’s not until their boot-falls fade that you allow yourself to breathe. Then it’s just you and your captain, sitting between the chirping navigation systems.

“He’s right you know,” your captain says. “Sure, we can brig him—it would be funny, even—but how would that look to the rest of them? I have half a mind to divert all power to the shuttle and launch a small team to find help. You’d captain it, I’d stay. Once you find rescue though, and you will, I think it’s best you hitch a ride home. Just some advice you can take or leave. But I’ve seen this before; this might not be the place for you.”

You shake your head. “No-no-no-no—it’s not cabin fever or—or any other fucking kind of psychosis. You have to believe I saw something. I—I think it’s trying to communicate; I think the link did something; I just—need more time, Captain. Please.” You see it in his eyes, his earnestness, and then, the knife in your stomach, whose dull pain you’ve grown accustomed to since learning to exist alone again, well, Bradshaw’s gaze twists it, and you’re gutted all over again.

You wait until you’re deep in the guts of the Argo Navis where no one will find you, to pin yourself between wires and pipes to stop from shattering entirely. You’re telling yourself to let it go, that this too will become Past—

Past.

Past.

Past.

But there’s hotness in your cheeks, and a fist in your throat, and then her voice finds you again, surrounded by so many tons of metal:

Céu Galhardo Jiménez.

Céu Galhardo Jiménez.

You gulp your sobs. Scan the corridors for—there! You catch it inhabiting the corner of your sight: a metallic foot slipping away down the hall. You chase it, whirl around a corner, arms out and panting—

Step onto the crisp, terracotta tiles of your mamá’s interior patio, Earth’s sun straining above. You have to squint to peer through all that brightness, that Mexican heat you once could bathe in now sizzling your skin. You’re blinking, not understanding, but there are Mamá’s monsteras, potted in the corners with her nopales, her laelias, and her statue of La Virgen too. How many times did she crack your knuckles raw and bloody with her rough wood ladle before that statue? To beat the sin out of you?

“¿Ahora que?” Mamá says as she rushes past you, basket of folded sheets between her arms. “Otra vez mirando el cielo, pensando en tus pendejadas—Vete a ayudar tu padre, niña. ¡Órale!”

Then she’s gone. There’s only wind, desert yawning outside.

You don’t want to be here—can’t be—you creep through your house, searching for the exit before the walls settle in and trap you for good this time, but the halls keep resetting, the doors always a stride away until finally you leap—grab the knob and swing it open and throw yourself into quiet:

Adriana’s whisper-cluttered hospital room. A cork board, a desk of Get-Well-Soon cards, whole stack of developed 35 mm on top, heavy with items of the last few months—You’re watching her pin the photographs to her board when she turns to you. Eyes halting your heart.

“I don’t know why you took all of those,” you finally say. “We had phones and hurricanes worth of cloud storage stuffed full of HD pictures. Could see all our fuckin pores. Why bother with something so grainy, so crude? I had to sort through each one after you died. I sat in a mess of them across the living room and I couldn’t breathe. I think they’re horrible.”

What she says isn’t any different than what she had already said, elsewhen in some other time, some other space. “Because I’m dying, Céu, and how else will we keep a record of this—of me—before I’m gone? Phones die and files are wiped out of existence once a server crashes. These are something you will actually own. Only you can choose what happens to them. Don’t tell me you’ll just pack them away like everything else.”

Fists clenched. Jaw locked. Heart slamming slamming slamming.

“Céu? Tell me I’m the exception. Céu—”

You can’t do this. You’re backing away; you’re passing under the threshold and stepping over time and miles and space to get as far from Past as possible; you step right back into the empty corridor of the Argo Navis. Where you’d turned in search of the creature. There’s nothing here. Just space: a window, the airlock within. Sealed shut.

Hands trembling and sweat-slick you feel your body, the walls, making sure you’re really here, that this is Now. Then the voice curls back out from the dark:

Céu Galhardo Jiménez.

“Where are you?” you speak to the silence.

Afuera.

It’s coming from the airlock.

Búscame. estoy esperándote.

You dial your access code, the doors slide apart, you step inside, then the light behind you shifts. You turn—throw your hands up as Morgan slams you against the airlock hull. Whiteness eats your sight but you scramble, kick away your attacker’s heavy chest and hands grabbing your wrists, your hair, and through it all you glance at Florence in the hall outside shouting, “Morgan what the fuck are you doing?! Just cuff her!”

“You all saw that! Talking to walls—the cunt’s got cabin fever, she’s a danger to all of us—” Florence tries to rip him off you, but his fist finds her throat, and when she stumbles back choking, he shuts the airlock so it’s just him, just you, in this box as he draws the pistol from his hip.

You don’t let him.

You hurl all your mass at him and crash in a scramble of limbs—elbows—knees—fingernails—teeth—until that pistol is suddenly heavy in your grip, and you’ve unlatched the safety, and Morgan’s hands wrap around your throat. Vision blotching. World ringing. The taste of iron between your teeth. For years you thought you weren’t alive, weren’t dead, that you were rotting in some unlife waiting for a hand to pull you out—you realize now how badly you want to live.

And with your boot-heel pinning Morgan to the wall, he coughs, “wait,” but it’s too late. You squeeze the trigger.

You scream—pulpy wetness spattered across your face—and scream. A crack, and then break. Even when you throw the gun away, and others have gathered to try and override the hatch, you can’t stop the sobbing. The heaving. You curl into yourself tight beside Morgan’s corpse and shut your eyes, pretend no one’s there, that you’re nothing at all.

 

Swimming

“What was that?”

Hospital beeps, sharp whispers, the smell of disinfectant—

You sit beside her hospital bed on a stiff, foam recliner, its faux leather upholstery tugs your skin all wrong. You’ve spent more nights than you ever thought you would on chairs like that, in rooms like this. Always imagined you’d sleep somewhere weightless and humming with circuitry, the great sea of space engulfing you. This is the last time sleeping in a hospital, because they said she only has days now, when once she had years. You’re sick with regret for the days you took the intersection home, and not here. You’re holding these last hours in the valley of your palm, wondering if there ever would have been enough.

You repeat your question, but Adriana won’t face you. She’s looking out the window, has been since the argument. “Two,” she says, softly. “We could’ve had two more years together. Two whole years if you hadn’t gone.”

“What?” You can’t even process those words—you won’t. You let them smack against you like flies on windshields, asteroids on echoing hulls. You resort to your base instincts; the words are out before you can feel them between your teeth, “I’m sorry.”

She’s still staring out the window. “Before they send me home, I wanna go somewhere.” Then she looks at you with the love you’ve always known, and whatever worry you didn’t even notice was festering in you is expelled with a smile. “The beach—you and me. ¡Andale, vamonos!”

You wait for hours in the med bay—your prison cell—fading in and out, waking, then sinking back into pain once more and finding Adriana there, alive, excited, telling you another one of her stories with a confidence that you wish you had. You don’t understand why you’re here and she’s not.

A knock on the door.

Céu Galhardo Jiménez.

The gears shift, but it’s your captain who steps inside. “We’ve decided to kill it. Afterwards, we’re moving on, finishing the mission.” Your right ear sands down the edge of his words, but your left hears just fine. Despite the painkillers your pulse still pounds in your skull, and your right eye is angry, swollen. Even shifting upright creates a throbbing that shoots deep into every joint. You wonder if We includes You.

“You can’t,” you wheeze. Is that really what’s left of your voice now? You’re thinking of Hernán Cortés, and those damned to lifetimes of digging up Past. “We’re in His home.”

Your captain counts his rosary. One. Two. Three. Four. “We took a vote; I’ll have no mutinies on my ship.” You wish his words could hurt; they just knock against your hollow self. Resolved to your failure, you point to the beads.

“Why care about finding our creators when they’re not your god?”

“Are they yours?”

“Mamá was a vicious zealot. Like many gay daughters to Mexican mothers, I dropped all that at the first chance of escape…I don’t how I ended up here because of it.”

Your captain nods, rattles his rosary. “My grandma gave me these. Things is, I’m not even Catholic—I’m an alcoholic. Sober three years now, and more to go to prove to my family I’ve built myself anew. The beads give me something to count, keep me grounded. But Tomás has loans to pay, and this ship’s the first place that has ever given Florence three meals in a day. We all got here by different reasons, I just…hope you’ll find meaning in yours.” He laughs—air through his nose. “I suppose I’m a man of faith after all.”

Then, before he locks the door behind him, you say, “Elliot.” He waits. “I didn’t mean to kill Morgan.”

“I know.”

He leaves you to the mess you are, and once it’s just your breathing and the Argo Navis’s purring, the voice curls back, iridescence twinkling under the lights:

Céu Galhardo Jiménez.

“¿Qué quieres conmigo?” you ask the Starbeast, wondering why He speaks in Spanish.

Por que es tu lengua, y por que quiero enseñarte algo. ¿Puedo?

“Sí.”

The door yawns wide, then the silver, iridescent, unreal creature He is steps in to squat down to look you eye to lighthouse eye with His hand extended. Waiting. You hesitate, then take it, and again you’re plunged into the universe.

—collapsing stars, comatic gas, starting anew again—

But this time you can take it; you’ve felt this sorrow before.

He takes you to your familiar moon, where a Galactocetus pup hula-hoops around its parent before it loses balance and is pulled by gravity onto the shores of your Earth. Months are seconds here, and you watch from the atmosphere as its parent had, as the pup struggles to catch air beneath it for months. But months are seconds here, and eventually, European ships arrive to corral it in its crater cove. They plunge harpoons into it, the men in metal suits, and you want to scream, STOP! Don’t hurt it! But it’s too late. It always has been. Too late.

The Starbeast is watching you from across your planet’s curve.

“Why are you showing me this?”

With a blink He reaches into your skull and places the reason why: The adults of their culture carry with them the sum-total of their history, feeding it all to their offspring at the end of their lives, to carry with them and pass it on once more. Their story is a chain stretching from when their kind first learned to leave their weight behind to swim amongst stars, but the Starbeast has no pup. Not anymore. Because He—not he, not she—They had made the mistake to test if Their pup could withstand the pull of Earth’s gravity, then, in Their guilt, threw themself into the path of an asteroid hurtling. Howling. Raging.

They’ve been dying for a long time since. Have waited eons ever since to find someone to pass their story to, meanwhile more and more of their kind are killed by mundane starship traffic. You want to ask Them where They came from, if there is a god or if some other messy, chaotic species formed yours, but all you choke up is, “Why me?”

They say when you looked into Their mind, They looked also into yours.

Y miro que traes mucho dolor contigo, y peso como el mío.

You tell the Starbeast, “I don’t want to be here. Take me somewhere nice.”

The Starbeast obliges: You wake on your surfboard. The water is still, the waves calm. Adriana is backstroke swimming next to you, her chin to the sky, mouth open and smiling as if to breathe in all that sky. “How do you feel?” you ask her now, just as you had back then.

“Like I’m weightless.” Then she looks at you. “I feel so safe with you, you know.”

The universe grants you this one last chance: You tell her, “I do. And same. Because I love you.”

And I always will.

Then you’re back. Alone in the med bay. But the doors are open, waiting.

Your captain’s pounding on the airlock, as you fit your gloves on inside, screw on your bubble helmet. “Céu! Get back inside right now! That’s an order!” You ignore him, remind yourself that it doesn’t matter whether he’ll send you back or not, that so long as you’re out there, they won’t kill the Starbeast. You’ll still have time for this—your final shot.

You dial your access code. The caution lights dye you red, and space sucks out sound, and when the airlock gasps open you stand before the vastness in your pressure suit, black-eyed but tall, washed by all that starlight on your skin.

The Starbeast waits on the other side of space. You’re holding the moment They returned to you—you with Adriana on that beach. Before she swam, the waves had beat against you when you carried her as far as your toes could brush seafloor. You didn’t go further, too afraid to give yourself to tide. But you did get to watch her backstroke in the blue, taking long drags of all that open sky. You feel that moment’s mass in your hands and realize that it still exists, is still happening. Always happening—along with the rest—elsewhere in the never-ending universe.

You realize you want to keep holding that moment, will carry it into all your presents and all your futures. So you squeeze your moment tight, take a deep breath…

And dive into that vastness.

Momentum carries you across the gulf, beyond the Argo Navis’s solar sails and right up to the Starbeast, to wade before Their colossal eye. You’re a child on your papá’s ranch again, neck crooked back to take all that beauty in. Your voice echoes in your helmet, “¿Me escuchas?”

Claro.

When They die, the Starbeast will stop absorbing all the light particles, and the ship will power up again. It will take a day or two, but you’ll be off, to home or a new world you don’t yet know; it doesn’t matter, what matters is the story They’ll tell, the one you’ll make space for beside where you keep yours. But before you do, you ask Them if They’re nervous to die.

They tell you, Sí; you clear your throat.

And here, in this quiet, vacant corner of the universe, you share with Them a story of notebooks, and conchas, y un café con leche.

© 2025 M. M. Olivas