THE ASTRONAUT — LINDY BILLER
/My 6-year-old wants to go to Mars. He dreams of floating around like a dust bunny in zero gravity, looking down at the gumball-sized earth through a small, reinforced porthole. His heart, when I press my ear to his chest at night, whispers the same word over and over: away, away, away. I make him a cardboard box spaceship and take him to the empty lot across the street, releasing him to the December breeze. Once it would’ve been snowing here. It used to snow all the time. Downy pillows of white. When I was little, I rolled around in it, rolled it into round-bellied men with stone eyes and stick arms, men who melted into glittering skeletons before collapsing. My son has never seen snow. He wears cotton pajamas with moons and stars and rocket ships on them. He says that when he becomes an astronaut, he’ll name his shuttle after me: Laeli, my real name, even though he just calls me Mama. He rides his bike to the library and checks out books about the space program, the Big Bang theory, the entropy of stars. He launches his bottle rocket in the dirt field behind the school, speckled with broken glass and abandoned shoes and other kids’ bottle rockets. My son is small for his age, and he says this will give him a better chance of survival. He will require fewer calories, less oxygen. He is 13 before I realize how serious this is. He takes the entrance exams for the city’s junior aerospace program, an Earth-to-Mars pipeline for gifted children, and he aces everything. I shut myself in the bathroom and cry into a washcloth for twenty minutes. I go into debt to pay for his classes, his virtual books. By age 16 he has started practical training: the flight simulator, hydroponic farming, field trips to 30,000 feet—his empty stomach heaving while the pilot flies a parabolic maneuver to simulate microgravity, my son’s freefall cocooned within the curved walls of the fuselage. I begin grinding my teeth at night, molars worn down to hard seeds. I buy him a telescope and help him set it up on the roof of our building. I sit out with my son on clear nights, looking through the eyepiece, the long tube, the high-powered lens. My son shows me the twinkle of dead light. The pockmarked face of the moon. He adjusts the angle and shows me where he'll be after he’s gone: a luminous orange circle, smudged in places, like an old penny. I touch the hollow of my stomach and think he has always been this way: kicking, somersaulting, wide awake even at night. I’m so proud of you, I tell my son, several times a week, and he smiles, glows a little, and I imagine the words trailing after him like the tail of a comet, small pieces of me burning as he arcs upward through the atmosphere, away, away, away.
Lindy Biller grew up in Metro Detroit and now lives in Wisconsin with her family. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming at Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, X-R-A-Y, and Chestnut Review.
