FICTION | CHAPTER 1

Memo in a Beam of Light

Without a name, does she exist?

Flying at speeds no cerebellum can calibrate, Memo tastes bitter cold X-rays as ultraviolet cracks thin crystal thought forms in the glaring dark. Hitting the surface, a terrifying bliss: she’s raw to every cut, yet terminally safe in her body.

Memo had never thought about being on a planet before. Like all Sowilum* her age, she’d been raised and braised and steeped in the lore of how they all had come to be implanted on the third planet from their Central Star. She’d had fifteen years of stories layered on her like a veil, disenchanting any other notion, dispelling every mystery.

The body they’d been scattered to more than one hundred generations ago was round and wide, spinning as all planets were known to spin so that day might follow night and dreamtime might repeat in cycles through the dark, starry hours.

It wasn’t that she took this for granted — it was inscribed in her very DNA, this living memory of a collective trauma with a (so-far) happy ending. It was more that it was so natural to her that she never had a reason to contemplate what it MEANS to be part of a planet.

That she and all others were part of Star-Sown, or Sown as they call it, was a basic fact — as basic as other facts she could not remember learning, such as the realization that an oSowilum named Mondo was her father and one named Saoirse was her mother, and the two of them had defied common trends by joining from two different tribes because she, Memo, had been seeded.

These things she knew without being taught. As she breathed air, craved rain, loved driving fast, she also quietly dreaded the day that Being might show up on Sown and send them scattering again to find new soil farther from their native light.

The Scattering happened to all of them. Eons ago, the shocking experience had been genetically encoded in their understanding of how the Universe works.

The Sowilum had once cultivated harmony and love on Star-Child, the golden second planet from their Star. There they’d flourished for millennia with no memory of how the first among them came to be.

How amazing, Memo thought with a practiced twinge of envy blinking on and off in her whirling psyche. To wake and work each day without wondering: could this be the day we’re uprooted, cast out and dispersed into a panic of streaming photons? It’s impossible for anyone to imagine what that innocence would truly feel like.

Yet they were resilient.

Although the coded dread existed within all of them, it was thin and spare, overwritten by the harmony of one day following another across the span of lifetimes. They acknowledged it — and the elders reinforced the memory of it with stories — but it did not dampen their ability to thrive and be upbeat.

Which is how Memo was able to skim the surface.

Until now.

When the piercing awareness of how precious and important it was to be part of Sown, to live and breathe and BE on a PLANET she called home — this awareness now caught in her throat like a stifled sob. Because she was nowhere near home and it hurt, the profound confusion of her sudden change in circumstance.

Her entire life had followed the pattern.

Memo had been born, raised, fed, and soothed on the land where she worried, dreamed and scurried around while the planet upholding her orbited the Sowilum’s Central Star. Smooth rotations predictably tweaked seasons of growth and harvest, entertaining them with colorful evening dusk and morning star-rise casting each daybreak in golden hues of welcome obligation. It was everything, yet, despite its complete and total all-ness in her psyche, the planet beneath her feet was the one phenomenal detail deciding her existence that she plainly ignored.

She belonged to a specific entity floating large in the darkness, a body so big she could never hope to see all the way around its curve to an edge one might expect to roll right off of into blankness. Completely unlike this rock she now kneeled on, banged up and aching from the unprotected crash into its surface.

Here, despite dim conditions, she could stare the length of a couple of blocks in any direction and discern an edge that appeared jagged against the nothing it abutted. Starkly brutal, the small body was the very opposite of smooth or gliding in its jarring stillness.

If this rock was spinning, she couldn’t tell. It felt anchored to a point without a point.

Bleakly, the upward view sucked hope from her brambled state of mind: that fuzzy glow way out there clinging like lint on the black fabric of space was her Star.

Without its warmth and beckoning heat, Memo can’t explain how she recognizes that tiny bulb as the Star toward which she bends, but she does innately understand that’s what the vague light represents. Which means her home, that third planet orbiting on a perpetual loop — the place she knew by name before she even knew her own appellation — yes, she gets it: Star-Sown must be one of the many specks of light dazzling in a display emitting instant homesickness.

How in the world was she breathing? Not on Sown, how was she alive?

And if she really was h-e-r-e, what fate now suffered her brother in his heart — that broke pulse she was meant to help regenerate?

Had the Wanderer’s medicine survived in the van after it flipped over, staking itself upside down in the ditch beside the weaver’s field? Would the cooling bag maintain its chill and protect the vials at risk of being exposed to wicked summer heat? Would it all be found?

Would she?

It had been roasting hot that day. This day. Wasn’t it just hours ago? Everything hurt. The ground was black and cut like shredded coal. Was it only minutes?

Again, she verified her aliveness, processing a simple equation: if her mind was on fire — and fire requires air to burn, certainly she was breathing and therefore living. It made no sense.

“Why doesn’t Uncle call you something else?”

Memo heard her little sister’s questions from that morning rattling in her recall. It had all been so rushed, the chain of events that delivered her here. H-E-R-E. That’s the best she can come up with to name this place. Kinx had wanted to know why Uncle merely called her “Memo,” her ordinary name that meant nothing in particular to her. At three-and-a-half years old, Kinx was a constant festival of questions and that morning was no different.

“What do you mean?” Memo had asked impatiently in the middle of a hard turn that made them both lean in their seats on the way to the air-field. “You mean like your nickname?”

“I’m Kinnebeth,” she said confidently bouncing each syllable like a ball. “He says I kinked it up!”

“Uncle changes everyone’s name.”

“Not you!”

Memo nodded and rolled her eyes. “He told you why — when you asked him in the garden.”

“Meh-Me-Meh Meeee.”

Memo groaned. “Right. He told you why.”

“No he didn’t.”

“I’m just me, he said. Right?”

“Uh-uh. You’re ME!” Kinx squealed and giggled.

Memo tried to play along. “I know you are, but who am I?”

“Me!” More crazy laughs echoed through the speeding van.

What Uncle had said wasn’t that amusing to Memo.

He’d pressed his palm against her forehead and said — for real, he’d said out loud that Memo didn’t — not literally — not like the rest of them — she just didn’t quite exist. She wasn’t quite there.

He really, literally, casually delivered those words like a stone tossed into a stream flowing too fast to leave a ripple. Although she never admitted it, the statement made Memo feel like throwing up, but to her sister it was a matter of mirth and play.

All Kinx had heard him say was something like, you’re not a specific ‘me.’ You’re the memo.

A note no-one reads about nothing in particular, thought Memo.

“He didn’t mean what you think,” Kinx replied, sounding oddly wise for her age.

“Whatever.”

“Memo, no.” Kinx splashed water from her cup. “He says you’re no joke. Uncle sees things.”

This was Memo’s cue to laugh, but everything was way too tense for her in that moment.

The route she had to follow was unfamiliar to her and it all had to happen in a hurry, so she could get the flown-in medicine bag to the hospital before the shift-change at mid-rise. That hustle required acceleration in a loop that would form a wide figure-eight across the valley, making the stop at the airfield, then dropping Kinx off at Uncle’s before speeding hard toward the center of town where her mother was writhing in a panic for Memo to get there sooner than she’d left.

Like yesterday.

That’s why she didn’t have the right responses handy. When Kinx made light of it, pushing on the button she knew Memo would typically find hilarious, the only thing Memo could force herself to say was the clinical truth.

“Uncle’s blind. You know that. He can’t see.”

“I’m Kinx! He could see what I am because he can see, see? ‘No more tiptoeing around,’” she mimics Uncle. “No sir! I came to kink it up! It’s kinxing time!”

“Mom never liked that nickname.”

“Don’t care.” Kinx knows how much their dad loves it. Naz, too.

Their baby sister was born in the quiet days, when their mother had them all trained to crush the volume down on everything to keep their brother’s heart extra chill. But that’s another story. It worked. For three years after that time in early school when he almost fluttered out, their ultra-zen-muted ways were effective.

Eventually nerves started to relax and hints of revelry returned. And then Kinnebeth was born.

Like a fistful of sparklers, she arrived and made them all remember how to laugh, how to let loose, how to bloom free from meditation.

Memo and Naz were born on the same day, exactly one year apart. The world doesn’t fit without both of them alive and well.

What good is an hourglass with just one bulb to hold what was ever supposed to be a transitory substance? That’s why she was speeding when it happened.

If Kinx were H-E-R-E, she’d be one thousand percent freaking out. But don’t go there. Kinx got out first, before the wind went wrong. She’s NOT here, but safe at Uncle’s.

That’s right, Memo reassures herself. Her head hurt and for a moment, the sequence of events knotted and became obscure, like it happened to someone else, not her. She couldn’t remember if her little sister had been in the van when the dust-devil hit.

Frenzied, swirling-mad dust plucked and twisted by a sudden gust scraping unplanted weaver’s fields — the dust devil gyrated high from ground to cloudless sky, hypnotic in the distance half a block past Uncle’s house.

Memo had her foot on the accelerator, mind on her brother, split attention cleaved by incessant buzzing on her wrist, beacons stacking up from her mother. She did not plan to be spun vertical, transported like a weed torn from its roots to be planted on this ragged, dark surface so far from Sown.

The soil she called home now barely glittered among nameless stars.

“I’m the message no one will ever get,” Memo hears herself saying this out loud, numbing her despair, wondering why she’s bothering to speak at all. Could there be a place more nowhere than this?

His eyes were blank that day, as they always are — gray beads of isolation planted beneath lids and lashes. Yet he did look. If she’s honest, it felt — well, she’d never admit it to Kinx but he did seem to reflect before her as if he were LOOKING AT her from inside her own eyes. Memo saw herself receiving what Uncle spoke, standing eye to eye between the sunflowers, stuck in that breath together.

Time is narrow on purpose.

Strangling. It pinches off, controls the volume of sand grains eager to fall through it. Some might say the hourglass competes with itself: fatally stingy above, relentlessly greedy below. Where two bulbs of glass meet and open in the center is a functional limitation. Blown too wide, an entire day could slip through in a deluge — affording no time for tears or laughter. Fashion it too tight and narrow, life will stall, bearing down on events rather than rising up, the way things bloom.

In the quiet days, Naz would coax Memo to focus on the lower, accumulating bulb. Despite their nascent synchronicity, as sister and brother they were polar opposites when it came to speed and temperance. Where she broke pencils racing through to solve geometry, Naz could take all night to muse upon a right angle or parallel line stretching to infinity.

He grew his black hair long. She chopped hers at the nape.

Encouraged to slow down, Memo argued for the pinch, where speed, urgency and gravity collaborate to bring molecules down to the ground in a measured hurry. By contrast, Naz appreciated the way inanimate sand appeared to inhale as grains communally cascade to build a peak, collectively exhale into collapse, then align once more to form a point and repeat the process.

Getting somewhere fast was never the goal for Naz. He lived in the present, like a hummingbird hovering in the steady reach for tender drops of hidden nectar.

To taunt her younger brother, Memo used to place her thumb and forefinger on the neck of the inner funnel and make him believe her grip could form a valve capable of stopping time entirely while imperceptibly causing a tilt.

It’s been years since her brother almost died.

They’d actually gotten over it, moved on, resumed seasonal celebrations spiced with music, fireworks and high-decibel shouts of jubilation. She’d even forgotten to worry about him. Until yesterday, when the pinched-off place in the center cracked under pressure and Naz fell through the hourglass to hit the cobbled path climbing along the hilltop observatory.

His heart stopped in Astronomy class.

Naz had been doing fine all summer, better than ever. All year. And the year before. Her parents had grown easy, musical and fun, letting Kinx steal the show while the teens went back to school, per normal. Life was verging entirely on good. Then Naz started High School. One week in, the glass broke. Sand everywhere.

Down the hall, sharpening a coal-wand in art class, Memo heard the Astro teacher yelling for the solar heart-charger.

She rode with him on the gurney in the ambulance that followed.

Would there be a second ambulance ride for her body one day later?

Twins one year apart in birth, they could not be in worse shape, now split across a cosmic scene.

It’s too much to contain. “I’m the message no one will read,” Memo speaks again. Addressing the shrinking smallness of her Star now barely clinging to her vision, she laments: “How will I ever send this note home?”

“In a beam of light, if you don’t mind.”

What?

The voice is distant, rolling toward her like a soft tide from an unseen sea. Someone spoke, but who? There’s no-one H-E-R-E. But she heard it.

Where?

“Great.” Now I’m hallucinating, Memo thought, feeling more desperate than she had been when her scrapes were fresh, bleeding upon impact.

“Memo — it’s okay. Hold on.”

It said her name. Something H-E-R-E knows her.

“Breathe,” it said and a breeze followed. Neither warm nor frigid, the flowing air froze and melted her simultaneously as she collapsed into a passed-out puddle of shattered confusion.

*Pronunciation note: Sowilum sounds like soh-WEE-lum, where s-o-w is akin to the human, English word for sowing seeds in a field. By the same rule, their planet is known as Star-Sown, or Sown for short.

As a collective, they are “the Sowilum.” An individual is referred to as “an oSowilum.” Thank you for discovering this moment in Memo’s life with me. Her story continues and is an ongoing work in progress.