In Terms of SafetyChris Scott
5600 words Eunice decided to try something new. She began the meeting by displaying on the big, bright screen behind her an illustration of two women sitting on a park bench, presumably in conversation, while a man holding an ice cream cone approached them, presumably to interrupt them. Using her virtually non-existent photoshop skills an hour before the meeting began, she had labeled one woman Europa, the other woman Enceladus, and the man Earth. Eunice took in the blank faces seated around the table and cleared her throat. “I don’t know if any of us remember memes, back when the internet was still mostly coherent and usable, but… this was a popular one when I was a kid. My sister and I were especially fond of it.” The faces remained blank. Eunice looked with pleading eyes to Ian, one of a dozen people seated around the table, who flashed her a nervous, toothy grin, and jokingly stretched his collar. Eunice sighed. “Tough crowd today. Alright. Just wanted to lighten things up a little. Maybe break the ice…” Eunice considered this for a beat, made the snap decision to double down, “Icy, you know, kind of like the surface of—” General Buchanan interrupted with his booming, gravelly baritone, “Dr. Choi, have the linguists made any more progress?” Eunice hadn’t noticed General Buchanan come in. She looked to Ian, who acknowledged her failed attempt at comedy with a quick “Eh, it was worth a shot” facial expression and motioned for her to move on. She turned off the screen. This group was all business, all the time. Understandably. “No, General. No significant breakthroughs since last week. The two entities are still communicating fast and furious as ever. We’re recording, cataloging, analyzing all of it. But the radio signals are growing fainter. At this rate of degradation, we have maybe three, three and a half more weeks of transmissions before they stop talking to each other altogether. Then lights out for 20 years.” Eunice took her seat. “So, same ol’ same ol’, in other words.” This was Dr. Ferguson, physicist, helpful as always. Eunice could remember a time when she was able to conceal her frustration and impatience with this room, but that was many weeks and many meetings ago. “In other words,” Eunice said, “Two extraterrestrial languages from two extraterrestrial species, monitored by a third species—us—who is not the intended recipient for any of these communications? Nobody in this room should doubt the remarkable progress we’ve made, all things considered.” “Nobody here doubts that, Dr. Choi.” This was Ana Bartolomeo, director of NASA. Slightly more helpful, as always. “Nobody doubts you.” Polite murmurs of agreement filled the stuffy, poorly ventilated room. On the screen now there were four heavenly bodies. Enceladus orbiting Saturn, and Europa orbiting Jupiter. Below them was a live feed of audio transmissions from each moon, translated into red and blue sound graphs and numerical values, whenever they appeared. The room studied the sounds in total silence. *** A year and a half earlier, the Mariner-5 space probe—part of a large cluster of probes exploring and mapping our solar system—was ambling through the cold void of space near Saturn when it made a surprising and incredible discovery: a faint but clear radio signal being broadcast from somewhere in its near vicinity. The crew monitoring Mariner-5 from the Kennedy Space Center engaged its AI-powered operating system to alter the satellite’s trajectory from its previously planned destination into the furthest reaches of our solar system, into an orbit around the ringed planet. Three months later, Mariner-5 had a lock on the signal’s source: Saturn’s sixth largest and ice-entombed moon, Enceladus. Mariner-5’s trajectory was adjusted once again into a closer orbit around Enceladus, where yet another incredible discovery was made: Enceladus was not only broadcasting a radio signal, but receiving one as well. One that was determined to be, based on the strength of the signal and the relatively short delay in sending and receiving on Enceladus’ end, not far away at all. At this discovery, NASA employed the nearby Artemis-3 and Mastodon-12 probes to join in the hunt, while Mariner-5 continued relaying its groundbreaking data back to a growing audience of highly interested ears on Earth. In the end, Mastodon-12 won. The other signal was coming from Europa, orbiting Jupiter just 46 million miles away, while Saturn and Jupiter approached the Great Conjunction—a period of time when the two planets traveled so close to each other they briefly switched orbits. This cosmic tango occurred only once every 20 years for an exceedingly narrow window of time. It was around this time that astrobiologist Dr. Eunice Choi was abruptly uprooted from her comfortable perch at the top of her field, and a prestigious position at MIT to join the group of other accomplished astrophysicists, chemists, mathematicians, psychologists, sociologists, and all manner of high-ranking military personnel she would one day attempt to win over with a silly, old-fashioned meme. All brilliant, all top in their field, all awestruck and summarily rendered speechless by the discovery of not one but two extraterrestrial intelligences in our own solar system. Our own backyard. Communicating freely with one another in languages totally incomprehensible to our human ears. Incomprehensible at first, anyway. A team of linguists pulled in from all four corners of the United States—the only country privy to this discovery, for now—had made remarkably fast headway on deciphering some rudimentary fundamentals about the two languages, in all their guttural clicks, high pitched sing-song, and almost computerized ambient droning. Paradoxically, working with two extraterrestrial languages in conversation with one another was much easier than humans trying to volley back and forth with one species alone. Similar to how a quarter can be placed next to a prize-winning heirloom tomato for scale, the Europans and Enceladeans helped unlock each other’s languages for us, in how they responded and related to one another, how they regarded one another across space. Humanity was by all appearances on the cusp of a historic, era-defining breakthrough. And then we’d hit a brick wall. *** “As you said, Dr. Choi, our window is closing. The President is concerned about our lack of progress. So is the NSA for that matter,” General Buchanan said. Eunice hated being intimidated by him, hated the condescension and thinly veiled annoyance even more. But she did enjoy getting to be condescending right back. “To be clear,” Eunice replied, “The window is closing for Europa and Enceladus to communicate with each other. Their radio signals are weak, either because they can’t or don’t want to communicate at greater distances or with anyone else beyond their neighbors of every 20 years. That would explain why we’d never heard them before we just happened to fly by during the Great Conjunction. But the Great Conjunction means nothing to us. Mariner and Mastodon are in fixed orbits around the moons. We can engage, or not engage, whenever we choose.” General Buchanan smiled without teeth. “Thank you, Dr. Choi, we know all this. But what you just said—engaging with them whenever we want?—that’s an assumption based on very little information. Maybe they go dormant for twenty years. Maybe these two entities or species, or whatever they are—because again we don’t know—maybe they only spring to life every couple decades, chat a little bit, and then go back to sleep. Maybe they’re symbiotic in some way. I believe it was you who told this very room how improbable it is that two extraterrestrial civilizations would spring up, independently, so close to each other. Maybe they’re not independent at all.” “Their verbalities, their language structures, could not be any more different. Even their tonal—” “We don’t know.” General Buchanan wouldn’t be deterred. “We don’t know what they look like. We don’t know if they’re even biological, or mechanical, or some kind of ancient artificial intelligence. We don’t know what their technology is like, what their civilizations are like, if they even have organized civilizations, how they survive at all under miles-thick crusts of ice with next to zero sunlight whatsoever, which is where we assume they must be located because our imagery shows nothing but blank white space on both moons. We have, what, radio signals? Messages in bottles we just happened to stumble across? And we don’t even know how they broadcast any of these messages in the first place.” General Buchanan sat back in his chair, briefly collected himself. “We have, what… Safe. Not safe. Safe. Not safe. That’s it, right?” “That’s a lot, actually.” Eunice looked to Ian for some reassurance. “It’s a lot.” *** The linguistics team consisted of a dozen experts and data analysts, tasked with monitoring the hours and hours of recordings Mariner and Mastodon relayed back to them. Analyzing, dissecting, recording, trying to make sense of it all. They quickly realized there was one signature, a note, that appeared far more than any other, on both entities’ ends, and this signature was often paired with mathematical equations and values that physicists and mathematicians began to match with certain formulations representing atmospheric pressure, temperature, distance, speed, and so forth. Occasionally the signature would be adjusted when paired with, for example, an extreme heat—something akin to the surface of the Sun—which no known biological organism could possibly survive. And then they had it: Safe and unsafe. The Europans and Enceladeans were communicating almost exclusively in terms of what was safe or survivable to them, and what wasn’t. “This chemical is safe.” “This atmosphere is unsafe.” “This light is safe.” “This temperature is unsafe.” And so on. This was a major breakthrough by any measure, but there was hardly time to celebrate. Once they’d figured out this one piece, ‘safe/unsafe’ became the key that could potentially unlock important information about each entity. At least up to a point. And it could have been all the legend they needed to decipher other dimensions of each entity’s linguistic map, except it soon became apparent that the Europans and Enceladeans cared to talk about nothing else beyond this. In fact, their communications seemed entirely fixated on this one topic. Hours, days, weeks listing all manner of conditions and circumstances, and labeling them safe and unsafe, seemingly for the benefit of the other species’ knowledge. Dr. Choi knew the difficulty, veering on impossibility, of attempting to understand an extraterrestrial custom. “Maybe it’s sacred,” her mentor and astrophysicist Ian Belding had told the group. “Religious, almost. The product of two species surviving in the most inhospitable of circumstances, buried under miles of ice, in frigid oceans of water and salt and volcanic eruptions. Perhaps this is how they express their faith and trust in one another, their vulnerability and tenaciousness. Their language is life itself.” The discovery was profound and fascinating to a few people, but to everyone else in the room, the prevailing attitude was: That’s it? *** “The President would like this group’s opinion on the merits and potential risks of a second attempt at communication,” General Buchanan continued. There was some grumbling around the table, some shuffling of papers, and then an uncomfortably long silence. Ana Bartolomeo was the first to volunteer an opinion. “My thinking is: We tried. We put our best foot forward. And we got our answer. Now we just… listen.” General Buchanan was clearly unsatisfied. “Right. Anyone else?” Dr. Stanley West, mathematician from Yale, was next. “It’s possible we were misunderstood or too direct. Or maybe misguided in trying to solicit a response so explicitly. We could go back to Dr. Choi’s original suggestion. Offer up some information about ourselves, open-ended. Nothing overly detailed, just a couple basic things.” General Buchanan shut it down. “That’s a non-starter for the Joint Chiefs, and if you asked any one of our allies—which we’re not prepared to do yet—but if you were to ask them, they would tell you the same thing.” “Which is?” Dr. Choi asked, though she of course already knew the answer. General Buchanan turned to her, switching on the condescending tone he often employed, the tone you’d use to address a small child. “Any information we give them about us is information that could be used against us. Even something seemingly benign. An atmosphere that would incinerate us. A chemical compound that would poison us. Why would we volunteer this information to them for no reason? It would be, using a word that all beings in our solar system can apparently understand, unsafe.” Ian broke his usual silence. “The Europans and Enceladeans don’t seem to think in these terms.” “Good for them. I do. The President does. The Department of Defense does. That is our job.” “We should consider the possibility,” Dr. Choi offered, “That violence and hostility is completely foreign to them. Not something they can even fathom.” “Oh I have a long list of things that are unsafe to them. I think they can consider it,” General Buchanan said. “We have elements that are unsafe. Temperatures and atmospheres that are unsafe. Speed and velocity. I’m talking about life callously destroying other life. Maybe that’s a human defect they’d never understand,” the volume of Dr. Choi’s voice started to tick up. “I know plenty of other species right here on our own planet that understand it just fine,” General Buchanan said. “An Earth defect then. It’s quite possible, probable even, that only maladjusted, poorly evolved lifeforms like us, like our planet, go around harming and killing one another for food and sport, or just because we feel like it.” “Excuse me?” “Dr. Choi…” Ian tried to budge in. “We already know all their vulnerabilities. Why would they give a shit about ours? We did it your way, General, and we failed spectacularly. Now you want another crack at it? Why?” “Eunice.” Ian was glaring at her now. So was General Buchanan. The rest of the room found other ways to occupy their eyes. Eunice suddenly found it hard to breathe. “We’re so in the thick of it, we can’t—We’ve witnessed something incredible here. Two alien species showing themselves to each other. No politicking or posturing, no threats, no armor. That’s all I’m trying to say. They showed us what they needed from us, if we had cared to actually look, and respond in kind. But we couldn’t do it. And what we showed them…” She trailed off, momentarily lost in her thoughts. “Why would we think a second attempt would produce different results?” *** Eunice became interested in first contact stories in the seventh grade when her sister Esther, who’d taken notice of her burgeoning love of science fiction, gave her an old copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The text itself was a little dated, having been published nearly a century earlier, and the story’s cautionary allegory of the destructive and life-destroying force of colonization angered and saddened her. But it was Bradbury’s depiction of an advanced and beautiful extraterrestrial culture that immediately captured Eunice’s young imagination. His stories of the strange and wonderful Martians and humanity’s haphazard attempts to communicate and collaborate with them invaded her dreams and soon, her every waking moment. After she’d read and reread The Martian Chronicles until it was nearly memorized, she began hunting down every first contact story she could find in books, television, and movies, and when she wasn’t consuming these tales, she was pestering Esther into imagining with her, indulging her obsession until it became their obsession, discussing and debating all of the infinite possibilities for what an advanced alien society might look like, and how we might find them. Or how they might find us. In high school Eunice discovered she could do more than just imagine, applying to the top biology departments across the country where she could study life on Earth while keeping one eye always to the stars. Her impeccable grades and tireless work ethic landed a scholarship to Stanford, a degree in biology, a master’s in biochemistry, and a faculty position at MIT’s astrobiology department, formed after recent discoveries on Mars made it clear that the discovery of life outside our planet was near at hand. In almost no time at all, at the young age of 38, she was the director of the whole shebang. Esther, who had never been quite as driven as her younger sister—eyes to the stars but feet firmly planted here on Earth—had forged a rich and fulfilling teaching career for herself in Washington, DC. But she lived vicariously, always, through Eunice’s accomplishments, their childhood conversations continuing into a middle age that found them holding regular late night phone calls where they’d discuss for hours on end NASA’s most recent findings or the latest sci-fi adventure epic and everything it got wrong about how aliens would behave and look. When Eunice had first been contacted by NASA and informed of Mariner-5’s discovery, her imagination ran wild, even while she suspected—just as everyone else involved did—that it was another false alarm, a crossed wire somewhere. Surely, surely there wasn’t intelligent life in not one but two other locations in our own solar system. But the proceeding weeks and subsequent findings confirmed it was no false alarm. This was really happening. Though the inner circle remained small, the meetings got more intense and moved to locations deeper and deeper inside the Pentagon’s five rings. The rankings of the military officials involved in said meetings got higher until soon the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General David Buchanan, was present at nearly every one. There were briefings upon briefings. The President was briefed. The Vice President. The Secretary of Defense. People Eunice never imagined she would hold an audience with. When the breakthrough with the aliens’ languages finally happened, all of them expressed tremendous gratitude with Dr. Eunice Choi and her team, their utmost confidence in her abilities and instincts. Eunice saw an opening, an opportunity to make a lifetime of imagining a reality. Now that they understood the fundamentals of their languages this was, she argued to the group, the perfect time to make contact. To announce our presence. The usual suspects were opposed, risk-averse, cautious to exposing humanity to a potential misunderstanding or, God forbid, some kind of attack. But one by one they were overruled and begrudgingly came around to Eunice’s side, helped in part by the fact that the aliens were likely already aware of us, given Mariner’s and Mastodon’s close orbits. They almost certainly had to know they were being monitored by a third party. Better to clear the air now, establish contact on our own terms, in a language they could more or less understand. And then the debate over what to say began. Eunice proposed keeping it short and sweet, mimicking their communications almost verbatim, but with some key information about humanity. Conditions and circumstances that were safe and unsafe for us: Boiling water does not feel good on human skin. Sugar and carbohydrates are safe to ingest; carbon monoxide and arsenic, less so. An olive branch that would convey we were more or less just like them, tucked away in our own little corner of the solar system, trying to survive. Trying to find safety. General Buchanan didn’t like it, which meant the entire national security apparatus didn’t like it, which meant the President didn’t like it. And on this they would not budge. Surely there are ways to communicate that we come in peace, without also portraying ourselves as small, vulnerable, and insignificant. The majority of the group agreed, including, much to Eunice’s chagrin, Ian. The language that was eventually drafted, re-drafted, and re-drafted ten more times was standard, boilerplate stuff: a rehash of what we’d already exported to the universe on the Voyager-1 probe in the 1970s. We are a diverse and abundant people (read: there are many of us), we are technologically advanced (read: we have big weapons), and we’ve included our solar coordinates in the interest of full transparency (read: we are very close by and watching you, so don’t get any ideas). Eunice didn’t love it, and it irked her to be so unanimously overruled, but the prospect of her childhood dream finally being realized eventually overwhelmed any misgivings. They broadcast their message of diplomacy to Enceladus first, since theirs was the moon we’d first heard. The 78 hours and 14 minutes of silence that followed were perhaps the longest three days of Eunice’s life. When the response was finally received, they initially wondered if perhaps the signal had cut out, if something had gotten garbled in the broadcast, lost in translation. There was only a single sentence, a single word really, depending on how exactly the Enceladeans organized their language structure. But it was one the humans recognized immediately: Unsafe. *** Eunice was the first out of the room, and began walking briskly down the corridor, eager to not show any more emotion, eager to not say anything else that would further jeopardize her standing with the group. Ian, despite being 30 years her senior, once again proved himself to be surprisingly spry, catching up with her quickly. She flinched when she felt his hand on her arm, and he gently nudged her around a corner, away from the stream of scientists, generals, politicians, and academics that were leaving the building. She resisted the urge to look at the ground, held his gaze instead. “I’m sorry about the meme.” He smiled patiently. “Yeah, because the meme is what I’m concerned about. I enjoyed it, for what it’s worth.” Eunice steadied her breaths, bracing herself for what was coming. “You know how much I need you, right?” “Ian, I’m flattered but—” He cut her off. The time for jokes had passed. “Excuse me: You understand how much you’re needed in that room, right?” Eunice closed her eyes and swallowed. “I do, actually. I do know that.” “Good, good. That’s good,” Ian looked both ways, making sure nobody else was within earshot. “David Buchanan is an asshole.” It was Eunice’s turn to smile. “I know that, too.” “But of course he’s an asshole. You know that. You’re the most brilliant person I know, but you don’t need to be brilliant to know that. His whole job is to be an asshole to us. You know all of this. So what’s going on?” Eunice sighed, “I’m tired of these meetings.” “At least they’re not daily anymore.” Eunice leaned back against the cold white wall, feeling claustrophobic in the immense sterility of the endless, winding corridors. “Vast and cool and unsympathetic.” Ian squinted. “Not a bad way to describe the Pentagon.” “H.G. Wells, actually. That’s what he called the Martian invaders in War of the Worlds. ‘Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.’ I’ve read it, like, five times. I used to dream about this, you know?” “Being vaporized by tripod war machines in Victorian England?” Ian cocked his head to the side. “First contact. Being here. In that room, with those people, poring over reams of data, being one of the first humans in history to hear sounds emitted from alien vocal cords, or whatever their version of vocal cords is, debating and arguing, reaching a consensus, making first contact. But Ian, never once, not one time did I ever imagine we’d be met with casual indifference. A simple ‘no thanks.’ That never, ever occurred to me. Why would it?” “Eunice, please listen to me…” “We blew it, Ian. And it wasn’t a miscommunication or a misunderstanding. They listened to what we had to say, processed it, discussed it, and said ‘nope.’ And what I was trying to say in there, what I’m saying to you is: They made the right call.” Ian scoffed. “We can’t know for sure what they meant.” “We quite literally monitored Enceladus communicating to Europa the exact solar coordinates we’d sent them and note it ‘unsafe.’ We heard Europa send the same message back to Enceladus. Either they read something between the lines, or for all we know, they’d already been watching us for years, decades, centuries. Watching wars and mushroom clouds and genocide after genocide. Of course it’s unsafe for them. Of course it is. How could it not be? Why would we expect otherwise?” Eunice sighed deeply, fighting back tears. She was so tired. “In the movies we get wiped out for being what we are. In the real world we just get ignored. It never occurred to me. That’s all I’m saying.” Ian had always been the king of pregnant pauses. He chose his words deliberately, on his own time. “I know you’re not my student anymore. You lapped me years ago. But nothing is over. None of it’s set in stone. David Buchanan wanted to send nuclear warheads into both moons’ orbits on standby just in case and it was an insane idea, but it probably would’ve happened if it wasn’t for you. You set the tone for all of it. We listen to you. We depend on you. I know this isn’t what we wanted, but everything could’ve gone very differently if you weren’t in the room.” “I can’t—” “So all I’m saying, Eunice, all I’m saying is, if you want to leave, and I don’t think you do, but if that’s your decision, just… please give it more thought than a pique of frustration. Don’t remove yourself on account of David Buchanan, or me, or anyone else. We had a setback, yeah, but there are still important decisions that need to be made, important work being done in that room. I don’t want it happening without you. And if you think Esther would have…” Ian paused here, thought better of it. “Just sleep on it.” “Okay.” “Okay?” Eunice forced a tired smile. “Same time next week?” Ian suddenly gave her a hug, and it was, she realized, as they stood embracing and silent in the nondescript, cold white corridor, the first time he’d ever hugged her. Eunice navigated through three separate security checkpoints on the long walk out of the Pentagon’s labyrinthian hallways, a number of x-ray machines, thermal imaging machines, and two thorough pat-downs to ensure she hadn’t smuggled anything out of the building. The security, while onerous, was understandable, and impressively, it had seemed to work so far. In the year and a half since the discovery, there had not been a single leak to the press. For Eunice’s part, there were very few people she would tell, even if she’d wanted to. Her father had again returned to North Korea just a few months before the first signal was intercepted, during a blissfully substantial, though likely impermanent, reprieve between armed conflicts. And the one person Eunice would have most been tempted to spill the beans to had departed from this earth years ago. *** One sunny Thursday afternoon, exactly two years, three months, and 17 days before Mariner-5 would receive its first transmission from Enceladus, Esther Choi was riding the bus home from the high school where she taught science, an empty coffee thermos and a stack of papers to grade in the messenger bag at her side, when a stray bullet made its way through the crisp blue sky, and then a window, and then Esther’s neck. Eunice was guest lecturing in Cambridge when it happened, returning to her office that afternoon to find a series of missed calls from her father, who rarely ever called her at all, and she knew before she returned his call that Esther was gone. She could feel her absence somehow, understood that she was gone even before her father informed her, even while another part of her brain immediately pivoted to denial and the shock that numbed her all through the flight home to Pittsburgh, the funeral, and the days spent listlessly occupying her childhood home, alone, even after her father returned to North Korea once again. Three months after Esther was killed, a 22-year-old man named Elijah Bowden was pulled over for expired tags, and a search of his vehicle turned up a gun that he should not have had, and later forensic evidence and an eventual confession confirmed that that gun had fired the bullet that had taken Esther’s life. Elijah was never able to offer up a good explanation for why he’d fired his gun that day, or who he’d been shooting at. His defense attorney eventually landed on the narrative that he’d fired a shot to ward off a peer who’d been threatening him, meaning to scare him, never intending to actually hurt anyone, and the bullet had struck the bus instead. That seemed to be as much responsibility as Elijah Bowden was willing to accept, and in spite of herself, Eunice liked to imagine his story was true. An eye witness described how Esther had collapsed in her seat and her fellow passengers, realizing what had just happened, rushed to her aid, quickly understood there was nothing they could do, and tried to comfort her during her final moments. Eunice liked to imagine this was true, too. At his sentencing, Elijah apologized to Eunice and her father, but he would never look them in the eye. He did not cry. He looked broken and completely emptied out. First degree manslaughter, 25 years, chance of parole in 13. When Eunice was whisked away to Washington, DC for a top secret briefing where she was informed for the first time about the transmissions, she sat slack-jawed, her mind reeling in wonder and fear, and then she returned to the hotel room that would become her home for the next however many months, and she wept for what this meant, and for the irrevocable truth that Esther had just missed this momentous, life-altering discovery by a couple short years. A fraction of a blink of an eye in the scheme of things. She would have been astounded. It would have meant everything to her. How could this be bearable? *** Eunice stepped into her sweltering hotel room, her ongoing war with the broken thermostat having seemingly taken a turn for the worst. Despite the temperature in Arlington approaching the teens outside, her room was overwhelmingly hot. She struggled with the thermostat once again before giving up, the scene with General Buchanan earlier completely draining her energy and mental bandwidth. She tried to think of something to do to take her mind off the heat. Television annoyed her. Science fiction books had lost their appeal to her the minute Europa and Enceladus started talking. And she obviously wasn’t allowed to bring any work home. Eventually she made her way to bed and lied awake for an hour before eventually succumbing to something resembling sleep. When she did, she found herself in a familiar recurring dream. In this dream, she’s riding a bus through a nondescript city, the stoney and vacant faces of passengers surrounding her. At some point she turns and realizes Elijah Bowden is sitting directly next to her. Even though she’s had this dream so many times before, the shock of it always takes her breath away. He’s looking at the floor, head down, the same posture he held those long days in the courtroom. “Why did you do it?” she asks him, but he doesn’t hear her. For some reason, he can’t seem to hear her at all. “What were you thinking? What was going through your mind?” She raises her voice but it makes no difference. He remains stone-faced and still. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” she shouts. Nothing. She starts yelling at other passengers, and gets the same non-response until eventually she turns and sees her, seated at the back of the bus alone: Esther, a look of total contentment and peace on her face. For a long time they just look at each other, and Eunice is too overwhelmed to speak. Every inch of her heart is breaking. Some part of her understands that Esther is the only one on the bus who can hear her. Eunice finally opens her mouth to speak, and then she wakes up. Eunice pulled the sweat-drenched sheets off her body, made her way to the kitchenette for a glass of water. It wasn’t yet four a.m. but she knew she wouldn’t fall back to sleep. She crossed the room to the window and opened it, the blast of black frigid air assaulting her body, and she briefly imagined she had been plunged into the cold vacuum of space after recklessly flinging open an airlock, the total absence of atmosphere and absolute zero of nothingness ending her life cell by cell. She pulled a robe over her, fastened it tight, craned her neck out the window to angle her gaze past the high-rises and looked up into the night sky. The light pollution choked out the stars and other celestial bodies above, but she knew Europa and Enceladus were up there, could pinpoint their positions almost exactly, using our own moon to orient her. She lifted an empty notebook and pen from the desk next to her, and sat in silence while she counted the minutes. Eunice started writing. Every word she’d tried to say but couldn’t or wasn’t able or wasn’t ready to face, filling up the blank white space of the paper, and when there was no more room she turned it over and filled the space there, too, until she was done. She’d written everything. Very gently she tore the page from the notebook, began folding it with careful creases and symmetrical angles, wings shaped for maximum lift and glide, and when she was finally satisfied with the design, she drew her arm back and pitched it forth, sent it sailing from her hotel window and into the black. Then Eunice closed her eyes and watched her words float up and up over the buildings and lights, defying gravity, into the clouds, and beyond our atmosphere, in search of eyes that might someday find them, gentle hands that might send something back. |
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Chris Scott
Chris Scott's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at www.chrisscottwrites.com.
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