I stared in that steamy little room at my feet, the veins – how red they looked full of hot blood from standing in the shower, how strange to have feet, I thought. I stared for a few minutes and couldn't tell if they were any different than they had ever been before. Sure, I’m still a growing lass at sixteen, but what did I think? That I was going to start hatching little pods of myself through my feet? Whenever I think these thoughts… I want to connect my ear to the phone to Walt and dream of schemes of Pods and Flies and Haunted Steam Baths and Wax Works forever.

Stranger things have happened than your Pods and Aliens… on Our Own planet, in this strange, bloody past I have inherited… * * * * * Illustration from Surrealizations

Stranger things have happened than your Pods and Aliens… on Our Own planet, in this strange, bloody past I have inherited… I was thinking, peeking from the side of the window where I could barely see the moon, cleaning up (my private) second-story bathroom, and returning to my room, where I kept the lights off, inhaled the sweet smells of perfume and soap and my schoolbooks in the dark, their mustiness reaching me from where they lay toppled on the corner of the bed.

In the dark, staring at the wall, I could nearly feel I was in another time. When I shut my eyes, the transition was complete.

But my thoughts wandered in circles, just like those iron shavings we play with in science class. Put the magnet under it. Make them twirl, and this is the beginning of understanding our travels to outer space. And there on the other end of the classroom is Walt, and his Comic Strips. One day we will be famous. One day… why didn’t I sit with him at lunch? Why can’t I just… speak up to him?

Why can’t I sleep?

Well I couldn’t sleep, and the events I’m about to tell you, in the third person, are absolutely true.

I got up, and it must have been midnight. How unnatural to get up out of a warm bed, all the hours of the night ahead of you, and start twittering around in the dark, preparing to go outside. I put on my best clothing, and powdered my face, and even carefully penned in my lips, as if I might be going to a talent show out there, rather than just a walk, a very secret walk, in the woods…

The young woman in the powder-blue angora sweater steps deeper into the lot of trees. Although she disavows trends – in clothing or thought – she still wants to feel glamorous, attractive, and hopefully enough like a leading lady with a ray-gun gouged into the small of her back, being slowly led, step-by-eternally-treacle-slow step, to the spaceport escape hatch.

A cold autumn wind rides over the branches and remaining leaves that cling and shrivel with the sound of dead, monstrous skin. This wind could be a translucent body easing its weight over the branches. The branches grate against the wind's skin, making the sounds above Barbara's head. This interaction is not impressive. Not impressive like humans. Not impressive.

Just towering above me. Natural, she repeats in her head, like a laminated mantra.

And so ineffective. Something is pulling me here, her feet repeat. Like the gravity at the core of the earth.

The young woman in the tightly-tied saddle-shoes sighed. All before her, in the atoms of the branches with their creaking, rocking, clattering like antlers – was endlessly-faceted space.

1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7