The Night Before an Interstellar Journey
Jennifer Linnaea
In the garden the moss is soft beneath my feet. Tomorrow I am leaving this world. That makes it sound like I’m dying.
I will tend the ship’s tiny ecosystem.
Snails and corals; drifts of green against black; when it fails I will dig in my arms, and make it new again.
I stroke the moss, remembering the child who pretended there a vast forest stretching away as far as the eye could see. I allow myself this thought: what I create will seed more tales than any wild tangle of trees and monsters.
The sky will no longer be blue.
I smell crumbled leaves; the wind has blown here every day since before anyone was born to breathe it. Each drop of dew trembles.
I don’t know why I ever decided to go away from the things I love. Maybe my heart has a void, that echoes the one above.
Jennifer Linnaea is or has been a research scientist, bicycle superhero, landlord, and librarian, not necessarily in that order. She lives in a big old house in Eugene, Oregon, where she studies Aikido and plots new literary happenings. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.