Constellation of the Lonely
Channel 6 filmed her playing the Erhu upside down in the airlock.
Later they showed her eating noodles with a fork. The noodles were made into another GIF and were seen dancing Tarantella with some rigatoni.
For literature, I wanted to write about love and the redness of a rose. But she instructs me, “That’s a predictable metaphor, go find a Cassia. It’s made of flowers that spread out like Cassiopeia.”
When I google, I learn this constellation is made of 5 stars spread out in the shape of a W, the first letter of my nickname. Mama calls me “Wing It” because I do things last minute. I tell her it’s because I’m more heart than head. She replies, “That’s no way to be a scientist.”
I curse the December sky whenever I see the neighbouring family tobogganing. They’re terrifyingly smiley and snow makes me lonely.
Stardust Blessing
The night before Mama’s second space mission, she gave me a surprise. “Something from the heavens.”
I excitedly took the bottle which I’d assumed had come from the ISS.
“What we all come from,” she said looking up at the glittering stars.
I was expecting stardust to be sparkly, not this blackened soot. But I guess that’s to be expected from anything suffering burn-out. I see the attached label and read.
“Montana?”
“Yes it’s from meteorites collected by a Montana Laboratory.”
After Mama left, I played around with my make-up kit and wrote a new tag for the bottle—“Star dust from outer space”.
I refused when Mrs. Kowalski suggested we place the bottle with the school laboratory collection which displayed various fossils, one formaldehyde rattlesnake and a bald eagle feather. At recess, everyone lined up for a stardust blessing, and so I secretly knighted them with Mallofusa metallic eye-shadow.
The Electric Is-ness of Life
Mama’s been gone for a hundred days too long. Last month on TV5, she was filmed installing batteries outside the space station amidst a sheer black sky. Magnifique! the Quebec reporter exclaimed.
Papa left in the middle of the broadcast while Nana was making rice dumplings. He floated into the house of his lover while Mama floated into the ethereal thrum of space.
When Mrs. Kollwitz asked me to explain space for our science presentation, I brought a box of emptiness. I explained we’re more space than electrons and asked may I teach some meditation?
Why don’t you tell us about astronaut life? She replied like all the other teachers.
My room is a forest mausoleum. I collect centipedes and press the wings of dead dragonflies. These go with my collection of skeletons of shrew moles and sparrows. Each gossamer wing or hawk feather is a page to the book of being. Mama emails why don’t you study the living? Write a journal on the pines of our pine trees or the hum of the hummingbird, things that breed and breathe life. I tell her I can’t be weighed down by the gravity of doing; she replies that’s no way to be a scientist.
As Mama studies her pear tree in microgravity, I breathe in the molecule of shrew mole and burrow the sweet softness of earth. At night, my nerves vein into the quills of hawk wings, lifting me past the sheerness of clouds. Unburdened by telescopes or microscopes, I inhabit the electric is-ness of life.
“Wash rice before cooking.”
“Be still less, produce more.”
Always I reply, “Yes, Mama,” as I feel the earth and sky with my hands.
Michele Wong was a winner in CityTV’s Vancouver’s Story Initiatives. She’s had honorable mentions in the Lorian Hemmingway & Writer’s Digest Short Story Contests, was a Tobias Wolff Award finalist, was long-listed in the Bath Flash Fiction & Fish Short Story & Fish Flash Contests. Her writing has been or will be published in the Bath Flash-fiction anthology, ScribbleLit, 101.Org & Blue Mountain Review.