Tide

High tide always scared the hell out of me. The stories I used to read as a kid, where the hero was in a cave and got trapped by the tide would leave me with my security eroded and my body alert for attack. The nights I read adventures like that I'd sleep with my head buried under the covers and the pillow, trying to stop water from seeping into my soul.

I don't know why I've never moved away from the sea. Considering my phobia, living in a place like Hallaton or Chelmorton might have made more sense. Little stone houses and patchwork fields cut with streams that have no tides. No highs and lows of salty danger invading my life twice each day.

But I've lived in Deal all of my days. On the beach. I can't count the number of days I've watched the waters come and go, in a never ending cycle linked to the moon. I've never learned what beasts lurk under that dark surface. I've never investigated a cave at low tide, or picnicked beside tidal pools teeming with interesting creatures. I've always given the tides a respectful distance.

And they have provided the same courtesy.

Last night on the news, another tidal surge was headed for Texas. People were packing their lives into their vehicles and heading for higher ground. I would join them. I would pack my photographs and my Japanese fighting fish and drive until I felt safe.

Safety has been a harsh mistress for me. She has lurked in my closets and read a book while I ventured toward my future. But will she always be my saviour? Or did I merely rack up points owed so that one day the sea can claim me?

Candle

Halva kept a candle on her desk. Not the romantic kind, or the tapered kind, but a big cube of orange wax with a bat on the side. She picked it up one Halloween, mesmerized by the bat. She loved bats. More than she loved herself.

But that wasn't hard. She pretty much hated herself.

Life had started out lousy for her, not only because her parents argued all the time, but also because she had no money and few friends. The skinny kid down the street--Lucy Kwidbunker--was her friend, but that wasn't saying much. Lucy was "touched" or "slow" which basically meant that Lucy didn't have any hope of ever being treated like a regular kid. But that was years ago. Now Halva was an adult, responsible for her own failures. Her life had turned out exactly as she had feared. And it showed no signs of improving any time soon.

Halva sat most nights, staring at a blank computer screen and dreaming of being a writer. She decided to never use her real name. She chose the name "Priscilla Pasterline" because it sounded pretty and romantic. Priscilla was the kind of woman who had tapered candles that emanated scents of lavender and cinnamon. Priscilla had several boyfriends, all of whom adored her. She was smart, funny, athletic, but most of all she loved herself only enough to be happy. Not too much; that wouldn't do. Only enough that it boosted her self-esteem.

This particular Tuesday, Halva lit the tea light inside her bat candle. Long ago, she'd used up all of the fuel within the original candle, but she couldn't part with her lucky dollar store treasure.

The black outline of the bat flickered in the flame light. Bats had to be the best mammals alive, except for humans of course. They were night creatures. They didn't see, they only heard. And by hearing they could see more than humans. They were fast and smart, light and strong, and the most amazing creatures to fly without wings or feathers. Too bad Halloween had taken them on as mascots. They deserved better: Christmas or Easter or some nobler holiday.

Paper

The guy came to the door, asking me to order a subscription to the paper. I hadn't done the news-thing in awhile, and the deal was uber-cheap so I signed up. Figured my six year old could practice reading on the headlines.

The next thing I knew, the papers started coming. First it was one a day. Then two. I thought two was a bit odd, but maybe the paperboy was shortchanging his route, or trying to make extra bucks?

Then one day I got four. That's right, four. How is it that a single Mom in a 2 bedroom bungalow needs four papers every day? What was the delivery guy thinking? I checked my bank account, to make sure I wasn't being charged for all of this multiplicity. I wasn't.

Took me a week--and by that time I was getting six papers a day--but I found the guy's number and phoned him. He didn't answer, so I left a message on his machine. No big surprise that he didn't return the call.

I left him six messages, a kind of "code" so that he'd know which irate customer I was. He never phoned me back.

My house didn't have room for all of the paper. The recycle truck only picks up every other week. My kids started to build forts out of all of the stacks. When the two-year-old climbed to the top of one pile, fell off, and broke her collar bone, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I'm not one to get up at three o'clock in the morning to catch a paperboy in the act of delivering, but a five hour trip to a hospital with a toddler can change a mom's perspective. So I sat with a big cup of coffee and waited.

The steam from the cup drifted through the morning haze. The street light flickered in front of Bill's house across the way. Moths drifted in and out of the bright places, dive-bombing over and over for the fake-sun.

Then the dark blue mini-van--black in the dim light--pulled around the corner and into view.

Extrasensory

Thanks for the word, Joseph.

*

They used to call it extrasensory perception, or ESP. Now they just call us know-it-alls, or KIAs.

My name is Sirla, and I work for the marketing department of an advertising agency. They use us to gauge reactions to new campaigns in focus groups. The rats come in, they watch our commercials or read our print ads, they eat our sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and all the while I probe their brains for their reactions.

Personally, I enjoy the food reactions the most. A guy last week loved tuna salad so much that he practically wet himself. Apparently he goes to focus groups to supplement his pathetic income. I wanted to slip the guy a few cans of coffee or something on the side, but they don't let the clients see me. Keep me locked in a room with two way glass. If the subjects knew they were being scanned, they'd never come back. Plus, commercial use of my abilities is against the law.

But all the big name firms do it.

Ever since the bio-spray raids of 2008, KIAs have popped up everywhere. Something about our bizarre mix of DNA made us less susceptible to the virus. Instead of dying or living the rest of our lives hooked up to oxygen, we got a two day cold and the ability to read other people's thoughts. Good for us. Not so good for those with common DNA.

Like my parents. And my dog.

But hey, there's more food for the rest of us now.

Algorithm

Billy always followed the same algorithm when he packed: first the personal stuff, then the business stuff. Last, he packed the fun equipment, all in cozy, non-descript brown paper bags.

Over the years, Billy had been hassled more times than he wished to count by the border guards in almost every country in North America, South America and Europe. "What's in the bags?" they would ask.

After some simple explanations like, "leather" or "tools", he'd be waved through. But if he lucked out and landed in the nosy guy's line-up, they would open up his secret bags and wham! Billy found himself in a small and sterile room for hours of picky and unenlightened judgment. And yes, rubber gloves were often involved.

The worst trip, in Billy's forty-something years of travelling, was the one he took with his mother. She had always wanted to see Romania to visit all of the Dracula tourist-centric sites. Billy packed only a bare minimum of fun equipment, figuring his chances of picking up interesting ladies were limited with his mother around. Some things are best done alone anyway.

The customs guys at the airport didn't speak much English. Apparently, a North American tourist had passed through a week before with a bomb hidden in a brown paper bad. Bad luck for Billy. The worst of it was that they put him in the small sterile room with his mother.

His high school Calculus final was a walk in the park compared to the humiliating exam he and his mother endured that night.

She did not travel with Billy again.

Steals

He steals my keys every chance he gets. Then he sits back and watches me hunt like a maniac for them in the morning; a sly grin partly hidden behind his coffee.

I'm getting even. In a big way.

My first thought was to hide his keys, but that's too easy. Then I thought about the usual stuff: saran wrap on the toilet seat, toothpaste in his shoes, that sort of thing, but they're all too juvenille. I need something unique and oh-so-devious. He can't suspect it's me either, because I know his guard must be up.

Today, I'm doing it. I should probably tell you what I'm planning, but if even a hint leaks out, the whole notion will fizzle. Nope, but I can tell you this:

Even his mother will laugh. And she's dead.

I purchased a few supplies at the corner store last night. I told him I was going out for a walk to the mailbox. Luckily, the stuff fit in my coat pockets. He never looks through the closet. I've already moved them anyway.

Just before breakfast, I set the first electronic components up. I've placed them on a timer, set for a time in the next few days. I won't tell you when. It's still open for negotiation, depending on what I purchase at the wharf today. I've heard the pickings can be pathetic this time of year. I might have to try the warehouse district if they don't have what I need.

Sheers

Just remember, this is FICTION. Any similarity to my acutal mother is purely coincidental.

*

My mother always loved the sheers on the front windows of our house. It didn't matter that she didn't own the house and they looked like granny curtains, what mattered was that somehow she had made it in the world of Suzy-Homemaker and Good Housekeeping because her front windows looked proper.

I remember the day that she installed them. She must have stared at the instructions for hours, holding a screwdriver in one hand and a hammer in the other. They were the only two tools she felt she'd mastered. Advanced tools like levels and wrenches were beyond her grasp--strangers lurking in the rear sections of the hardware store where only men belong. Once she had digested the elaborate drawings, she started in to hanging the track. I thought it was crooked, but I would've never told her. She would have cried and I can't stand it when she cries.

Sitting at my laptop now, contemplating the nuances of my own existence, I think of the word "sheer" and wonder who the heck decided it applied to curtains. In the dictionary, I found references to unmitigated qualities, exclusivity, pureness, and vertical extremes, but nothing about big, flimsy curtains that barely cover a window. The hip things to install now are roller blinds with the ugliest valences ever constructed. The last time I shopped in that section of Home Depot, I discovered that they actually sell roller blinds that behave like sheers. In the daytime, you can see out but people can't see in. At night, people can see in and you can't see out. Just like sheers. I guess they're the cool version of the old classic. We've finally stepped out of the 1950's ladies and gentlemen. Let's all buy roller blinds.

Okay, back to my mother. After all, she's the sheer lover. The curtains had two components. The inside part was white, with a kind of embroidery thing going on. The outside layer was another set of sheers that were pink. Man, I've hated that colour my whole life and I think those sheers are to blame. Why would anyone need two curtains? The only place I've ever seen the two curtain fiasco is in hotel rooms.

Maybe that's what my mother was going for? The hotel look?

Who knew?

Crushed

He crushed my hand under the gyro-stabilizers. I didn't see it coming. As a matter of fact, I thought he loved me.

Jarvis was the perfect bad boy--he ran weapons in the eighth worm-path, used more drugs than he sold, and never committed to a relationship for more than a shift. So why was I attracted to him? Maybe because I saw him as the perfect experiment. Or maybe because he reminded me of Bixton, the first guy I ever kissed behind the storage shipments on Loading-Bay six.

The first few dates went smoothly; we laughed, we spilled the sordid details on previous relationships and how they ended. When we both passed our viral tests, the bedroom fun began.

And lasted.

The next thing I know, I'm humming the latest stream tune and a stabilizer is landing on my left hand.

The buzzers screamed, but not as loud as I did. The medics arrived soon after and doped me up with the best pain relievers in their kits. While they didn't kill the pain, they wounded it badly enough that I could make it to the hospital without embarrassing myself by crying like a baby.

They said the hand will survive, though it might not work like it used to. They asked how it happened. I thought about lying, but not for long. I named Jarvis. I gave them his ident details. They detained him.

I didn't cry then either.

Though when he gets out next night shift, I think I'm going to be in some serious trouble. That's why I'm sitting in the departures zone, hoping for a stand-by seat on whatever has room for me.

Fought

We fought like dogs most nights. The long, complicated arguments with insults slung back and forth like a political mudfest. And that wasn't the worst of it.

We deserved it.

I've come to the conclusion--now that time is on my side and glacial ice ages of water have flowed under the bridge--that most arguments between couples are about miscommunications. I know that shouldn't be a surprise, hell television shows are full of communication asymmetry. Comedies base their foundations on it. So why do real life couples become immersed in it, consumed by it, and unable to see clearly to the rational side of the tunnel on the other side?

Because we're egotistical beasts. We think we're right. We think our opinions are the most right and our feelings the most valid and that our job in life is to pass on that impressive wisdom to the populace at large. I wonder now, that it's too late, why I wasn't able to let up sooner. Why I couldn't sit back and listen to the other side of the conflict. Why my priorities got so bent out of shape that a pretzel would be envious of my delirious logic.

So now we ignore each other. Occasionally a Christmas card arrives in the post or an email pops up on my birthday. We won't likely ever forget each other, but the good moments have evaporated forever. How was I to know that there was a finite supply of water in the cistern of love? We filled it up in the first month we were together and the relationship ended when it dried out. The smart ones, those who nurture the cycle, manage to make clouds and rain and whatever moisture is lost through attrition barely dips the surface below the full line. But those of us who are too absorbed in our own priorities, we look the other way when some spills to the ground. And we shrug when a cloud blows beyond the horizon, figuring another cloud will be by soon.

But they never return.

We only got one allocation. Next time, I'll treat it with care.

Is it a poem?

Chocolate puppies stare bitterly at their sordid fluff.

*

I bought one of those fridge magnet sets full of words to inspire the poet in me. I just had to post the first one to this blog. I promsise I won't make a habit out of it. :-)

Yanked

I yanked the control bar with all of my might, praying to the Guardians of Mylanor that the damned wagon would slow.

But it didn't.

My horse, Dwindle, galloped on, terrified that the Bligators were still chasing her. You'd think she would have learned by the age of six that a Bligator can't run more than ten feet without collapsing. They're big and mean but they have no stamina.

I tried to pull back on the reigns, yelling in the most pleasant and gentle voice (is that even possible) for Dwindle to ease off. She would kill us both if she didn't stop before we reached the Heglig River. I could smell water in the air now, a relief after so many hours riding through the dusty plain.

"Stop, you bloody stupid horse. Or I'll eat you for supper tonight!"

That seemed to get through to her. Though it was a total lie. I can't digest horse meat--too tough. She slowed to a canter, then a trot.

She must have been thirsty, for as soon as she spotted the river, she sped up again. But this time, I had her under control and we didn't tip on the steep gravel road to the east bank.

The nearest bridge was half a day south of us. The sun was sinking low in the sky, so I decided to make camp for the night. Too tired to hunt for firewood, I ate hard cheese and a few balls of rice. Dwindle nibbled on the reeds near the river's edge and sipped on the water to rinse it down. She'd had her fill of field grass.

"Hey."

A woman stood on the other side of the river. Her hair shone bright as amber and she was dressed like a man, in travelling clothes.

"Hey, back," I yelled.

"Has your horse had the skibbers?"

Skibbers was a nasty intestinal ailment that could drive a horse mad or in some instances kill it. "No. Why?"

"It's been in the towns upstream," she yelled. "And it might flow in the river."

"Thanks for the warning."

I hauled Dwindle away from the water. She protested fiercely, so I tied her to a shrub beyond the reach of the Heglig. It wouldn't hold her for long, but I could cleanse the water over a fire.

Storm

I witnessed a great storm this morning on the lake. So thanks to nature for this one.

*

The sky whispered of a storm. Not much, just a bit of haze on the horizon and the occasion rumble of thunder. I swam in the lake, calm and peaceful, a cool relief from the clinging humidity.

Normally, I would have exited the water at the sound of thunder, but it sounded absent, muffled, as though it hid under a blanket beneath the world. So I floated, filling my ears with water, and listened to the rush of air in and out of my lungs.

Thunder clashed, closer this time. I stood, for the water was shallow, just above my hips. I scanned for dark clouds and some billowed at the other end of the lake. The flag filled with a gust and flapped for a moment, straightening the big red maple leaf into a symbol of pride, then flopping back to hang against the pole.

I dove forward and swam for deeper waters, searching for fish. I always wear goggles when I swim, to protect my contacts from whatever germs lurk in the depths. A large white fish with yellow highlights and a black stripe pecked at the plastic lenses. I leaned back. It stared at me. I stared at it. A cloud passed overhead, darkening the water.

I poked my head above the surface, and the change startled me. Waves rippled in long lines a few hundred meters beyond. The flag was flapping wickedly in a strong breeze. A veil of heavy rain painted the trees on the far shore.

How could the storm move that quickly? The water had been calm only moments before.

I swam for our shoreline. The raft started to oscillate in the waves. The ladder end fell as the north end rose on another crest. Then the north end sank and waves crashed across the green carpet. I concentrated on my stroke, swimming as fast as I could for cover. In the shallows, I rose to my feet and trudged the last few steps to rocky land. Lightning struck, close. I felt it through the delicate hairs on my arms. Another strike. The thunder hit me simultaneously from each. I needed to get out of the water.

Weakling

Okay, so I'm a bit of a weakling, and I should have left her long ago, and she probably only stays with me for the fringe benefits, but I can't exactly get away from her. The mission lasts six years and there's no jumping off in dead space.

That's what we call it, because it isn't the "space" we learned about in grade school. It isn't full of photo-perfect stars and planets and asteroids. That kinda stuff is for cheap science fiction magazines where ships can travel faster than the speed of light and we all know how impossible that is. We travel through the domain of the wormholes, jumping from one to the next through the junction boxes that the engineers maintain.

The walls of a wormhole, if you can call them walls, block out everything: light, sound, time, your own freakin' sanity. It's no wonder that Lissy and I are barely speaking to each other. We've both been starved of basic human needs for far too long.

Except for you know. We make time for that whenever we can. She's "fixed" so we don't have to worry about the future, and believe me, it could be a lot nicer with more affection blown into the mix. But a guy's gotta live, you know? And there isn't anything else to do. The ship flies itself. The wormholes direct it straight ahead. Whenever we come to a junction, there's a bit of work to do, o'course. Setting orthogonals and paying tolls and such, but at most we get a day's worth of entertainment out of a reroute.

This latest wormhole's been over two years long. Our relationship turned sour about eight months ago. I'd give anything to download intellishrink software. Have a session or two, or fifty, to get some animosity out into the open. But every day is the same. She sits in the co-pilot seat and hums to herself while she types random drivel into the computer. She says she's "writing" but she won't show me any of it. I bet she's typing: "I hate the bastard!" over and over again. I don't believe for a minute she could be thinking words as fast as she's typing them out.

"Wayne?"

"Yes, Lissy?"

"I'm finished."

"Finished what?"

"The novel. Wanna read it?"

Discovery

They labelled my discovery "miraculous". I thought it was pretty mundane. Slablits visit new worlds all the time, but apparently not Earth. How was I to know?

My warning censors have been off-line for years, decades really. So I didn't read the giant "stay clear of this planet" warning before I landed to rejuvenate. My mistake.

Now they're all over me. What do you eat? Where do you come from? What do you want from us? Plus all of the paranoid guys with their primitive projectile devices. I've keep my cool, haven't zidled them, not once. It would be so easy. They don't even suspect I'm wired for security. Their technology couldn't scan a pile of dung let alone a Slablit wired for intercepts.

On the positive side, I'm enjoying the food. So many varieties, though they all taste tarnished to me -- they've polluted their ecosystem without restraint. On the negative side, they don't have any contraband worth smuggling. Most of their "sinful" (that's what they call their intoxicants) offerings don't affect me at all. What I would give for a slider of bruunks right now. On the hot side, easy on the motion variants.

For now, I'm refuelling with whatever soil I can scrounge until I can extract some isotopes dirty enough for the blast drivers. In the meantime, I've heard the dessert is worth a trip. Plenty of granulares and dry, dry, dry. My ship could use a good abrasive. Recycled moisture gets downright rank after a generation or two.

I can't wait to run my feelers through the layers of warmth, descaling whatever I can. My dribs are curling just thinking about it.

Uranium

Thanks for the word, Mark. And thank you, oh gods of the internet, for giving me access to high speed internet once more!

*

Twenty packs of uranium in my hold were enough to get me killed. The Scranters scrounged this DMZ for hot ships. Twenty more hours and I'd be free and clear.

Then the warning siren started wailing. Two ships, intercept course, class seventeen Artrops with double armour--the perfect pillaging machines.

So I backed my engines, buying me about a second of time and purged my logs. They'd steal the packs but they couldn't report the incident. Whatever rumours they'd start about the origin of their windfall wouldn't have my ID plastered through them. And with any luck, they'd take the decoys and leave my cargo undisturbed.

Most smugglers have their tricks--secret compartments, shielding devices, or big ass guns. I'm a decoy woman, always have been. No matter how big a gun I get, they always have a bigger one. And secret compartments are old-school, besides most high end pirates have better scanners than the military, let alone freelance shippers. Whenever I trade in uranium, I shield the packs with multiple appliances, but radiation has a funny way of sneaking through the best of containment options.

So I crossed my fingers, bit my lip and waited for whoever would come aboard.

The ships clanked, startling me. Space is pretty quiet and I knew they were coming, but I covered my out-of-practice ears and shrieked.

They deactivated my hull safeties and stormed in, shockers at the ready. Three Umfels skittered along the deck, stopping in front of me. If they were wearing translators, they didn't use them. Two grunts and a gun up my nose and I can figure out what they want. They shifted their weight around in circles, from flange to flange, like spiders stuck in molasses. Gave me the creeps to watch them. Still we stared at each other.

Then boots clanked through the hatch. Not the smoother patter of Umfels, but the unmistakable steel-boots-on-a-steel-floor of a Pukq. The worst kind of malicious ass-riders in the galaxy. This one was a female; her third antennae stuck out of her shiv-suit like a scorpion's tail, arched above her head and ready to strike.

Retired

I retired the day after I buried my partner. Eighteen years we served together. Both of us had been around the block, he on various outposts and me on twelve freighters. Then we both ended up on the Wig.

They called it that because it looked like a giant, out-of-control wig of alloy hair sprouting from a turbine head. Every power hook-up on Compset connected to our grid. The wig was life, and Mowpav and I were the night crew that kept her breathing fire.

On the night we met, he hung from his harness, a blow torch in one hand and a roll of solder in the other. I clanked my own harness to pillar 17, I remember it distinctly. I have this thing about prime numbers. They've always been good luck for me. So to start a new job with a prime gave me confidence.

Mowpav swung down and tapped me on the shoulder with his wire. "Hey, bud. How's about we work together every shift 'til we either kill each other, or find a trust."

I smiled and said, "Done."

We stuck like a weld from that point on. Mow and Hup, the stuck-brothers of the night. We took a lot of ribbing that first contract, mostly from the other welding crews who rotated all over the place. They all had kids, and would trade their own mothers for more nights off. So long as Mow and I shared a shift, we didn't care about the hour.

Neither one of us had anything to go home to. Or to lose, for that matter.

Then I lost Mow. Not to a fall, or a burn, or lung-rot. Damned fluke. He died in his bed, aneurism they said. But it was a load of medical bullshit. My betrayal killed him, plain and simple. His heart broke and his brain split apart and he fell into another place where welds always hold, torches never run out, and he can fly without falling.

I let him down and I can't ever say I'm sorry.

Meeting

The meeting ran later than a staff meeting should run. Well into the night. After all, our lives were at stake.

I wanted so much to have the epiphany that would fix our problems; the insight that would resolve the ventilation jam. My friends were counting on me to design a solution to our slow asphyxiation.

But I was out of ideas and the team had eight hours of oxygen left.

Billox suggested scrubbing the induction tubes, maybe scraping another half hour out of the system. Galma kept tapping a torx-head screwdriver against her leg and muttering curses under her breath. Marply sketched a half-dozen routing diagrams on the board, bypassing the jammed pipes and melted control systems.

But we didn't have the parts to make a new router. We didn't have enough tubing to access the good supply. Most importantly, our air support expert had fried himself when the first electrical surge toasted the system in the first place. Now Huintel was watching him in the infirmary--probably dabbing cold facecloths over his face and praying to the powers-that-be to teleport a miracle our way.

In the meantime, we met, discussed, and tried to brainstorm our way out of the shit hole we found ourselves in. Man, did I need a drink.

Hour Glass

The customs dudes laughed at me when they found the hour glass in my luggage. After all, what good is a gravity-centric device on a zero-g spaceship?

I ignored them. My husband gave me the heirloom and there was no way I was going to leave it behind. It looks ridiculous bungeed to my cot. The sands are floating around in it, and the occasional one bumps another through the hole, but for the most part they all hang out in their own half. So I'm living the same hour perpetually.

Funny. Since when Rick gave it to me, he said he was, "buying me some time." Well it worked, honey. Now I've got all the time in the galaxy.

I bought this ticket to free me from my past. From cancer, pollution, and everything that has made Earth a pit of a place to live. I thought the change would be liberating. Yet every night, I stare at my hour glass and I miss it all. I miss my husband. I miss his grave; the last physical attachment I had to him. I miss gravity. I miss the feeling of solid ground beneath my toes and a big, open, blue sky. I miss sushi at Makka's and I miss the sound of crickets.

Crickets always reminded me that the ecosystem hadn't completely collapsed. Someone told me once that they're bringers of luck. I haven't felt lucky of late. Maybe I should've tried to catch one of the little critters and brought it along.

The customs dudes would never have allowed it aboard.

Country

It used to be that my home country defined me, to some extent, as a person. I was Canadian. I was from Canada. I was proud of my land, my people, my culture.

Now, the idea of a country is a feeble memory stored somewhere in the recess of my tired brain. Two hundred and eleven, or so, Earth years have passed since I flew out to the reaches, searching for a fresh start. My children were killed in a flood, my husband ran away with a baker, and my success as a writer fell from mid-list to the obscurity of delete bins and yard sales. No point hanging around a place where I don't belong and have nothing to contribute.

So I gave up my identity for money. All I've got now is the twelfth. That's the rank of our hunk of ore; our position within the hierarchy of raw materials. The twelfth most valuable asteroid in a belt of harvestable non-planets, three year's ride to the closest hop from the least interesting refuelling station in...where the hell am I?

I miss it. Being Canadian. It's not much to say I'm twelfth. A twelver? Twelfthish? I'd give anything for a beer made from actual grain. Or to make a snowball, or listen to a loon.

One thing we do have is mosquitos. I got no clue how they stowed aboard. They breed in the air ducts and buzz me at night, with their high pitched torture song.

Peach Pit

Thanks for the word, Rob.

*

I sniffed at the peach pit, trying to suck another speck of enjoyment from the remnant. I hadn't had fresh fruit in seven months. No matter how slowly I ate, I couldn't stretch out the moment for long enough.

A trickle of juice dotted my chin. I wiped it with my fingers and sucked them again. I popped the pit back in my mouth, ejected whatever I could, then I gripped it between my molars. I pressed, not so hard as to hurt my teeth, but hard enough to test the structure of the pit. Would it taste any of peach?

I spit it out. Holding it up to the light, I studied the pattern of ridges and holes. I remembered a math lesson from years back that talked about the golden ratio. I tried to find a pattern I could count. No thirteens jumped out at me.

I couldn't just throw it out. But eating it wouldn't serve any purpose. I could keep it, suck on it from time to time, but that would be too much of a tease. Making me want fruit more than anyone should. If only I could plant it. Grow myself a peach tree. But the soil on Tridale-2A4 was sterile and anaerobic. We shed it from our suits before we entered the facility. The only thing that came close was the endless dust, micro-particles that nothing could contain. And you can't grow a tree in a bowl of dust.