Kathleen Schaefer

In the evening around the dinner table, when you tell me I am too sensitive, the skins between the folds of my neck buzz and vibrate until they peel free. We watch them fly away on flaky, eczematic wings.

When our ship made landing after three centuries in space, we were ready for the inhospitable lands, the harsh nights, and the hard labor of terraforming a new planet. Aboard a generation ship, labor is familiar: every moment requires our attention. But here, nothing prepared us for the idleness.

Vivian is dancing on a waxed mahogany floor. This memory is not her memory, but she follows the motions anyway. Rock step, triple step, triple step.

Until he died and subsequently wiped all traces of himself from digital existence, I had no interest in my neighbor’s history beyond the nostalgias of high school baseball and college parties that we swapped over sodas. Now I spent hours trying to search for his name on the internet, hoping the AI trawlers had missed some crucial bit of data in their purge. There was nothing.

For my summer hobby this year, I sprawl across my couch, listening to my upstairs neighbours bicker while their literal demon dog sets fire to their furniture.

On the tallest peak outside our colony, a radio telescope repeats, in 37 languages, a single message: “Bring us home.”

My mother hands me the last marigold in existence. She’s potted it into an old mug, one with a logo of an electro rock band I saw live on the east coast as a teenager, before my music tastes mellowed and before we drew borderlines like spider legs across the continent.

The hotel is made of a hundred thousand living bones. That is an estimate. The exact number fluctuates as new cartilage fuses together and old skeletons wear to dust.

Dalia’s mind fuzzes with a nonverbal comfort in his arms. Having felt his daughter’s thoughts, he can’t imagine his brain, even unconsciously, choosing never to experience that again.

Today I pull the knife out of my arm and crush the handle until it twists into the contours of my fingers, just so he remembers I can bleed him with the edge of my pinky. Then I spear one of the shrimp sizzling in a layer of olive oil and offer it to him on the tip of the blade, an inch from his face.