Radio Sphere

¹

Forbearer—

I am unsure how well received this letter will be. I understand that emotions— outright outrage and terrible frustrations— are all we parted with. I hope time has devoured our sins.

It was difficult for me to say goodbye to our planet’s timber skies, truth be told, despite what false front I’d managed at the time.

The inescapable, constant hum of machines and solid black out the windows once frightened me greatly. Our destination is the effulgent blue pearl; their solar system is not much different from others we’ve observed. Now I’m actually happy to be out here, our people were never much for exploration and now I can see why; the depths of space are severely lonely. I keep remembering why we left and I am sorry it pushed us apart.

Great hope and wonder now fills me.

These Refulgent Creatures hold many mysteries. I’m excited to meet them! Each day I try to imagine a little about how they think, what they value, what they enjoy. How far have they come since the transmissions we’ve seen? How fictional are the scenes they play out? While traveling at such great speeds we are unable to certify any transmissions since we left.

How bottomless is the chasm of perspective we can learn from them, and the other way around?

²

I had a dream that I was making love to a woman in the bath tub. Her face was familiar, somehow, but I could not place it. The water was warm, right out of the tap. It wasn’t candle but electric light illuminating the room. She started apologizing because, she said, only now did she start to find me attractive and I ignored her because I was busy.

Thrusting and grunting, but that was automatic, I was busy reflecting on the history of this room. It was my bathroom and at the same time not. Colorful blue and orange sunset wallpaper covered everything and the tub still stood on its feet. She got offended, but what could I do? There was no blood to lubricate my dream—thoughts, there was only an instinctual command line that resonated through me that demanded a child come from this union. Instinctual, but yet I wondered how the walls looked so clean and bright unlike anything I’d ever seen before. She got out of the tub.

“Just because we can fit together,” she said as the water and soap bubbles cascaded down from her lopsided breasts, “doesn’t mean we are a team to fight injustice or both wear skirts.”

Now I recognized her, Samantha from work and she was beautiful down to the scar that tore through her left thigh and curved to the top of the butt cheek on the same side stopping short of her spine.

We hadn’t finished, and my brain demanded at least some of the blood back to figure out why. Samantha walked into the hallway, into the bedroom, then locked herself in the closet to cry, which was ironic to me because she had wanted a door—less walk—in style closet but that might have been a different dream. As she walked across the carpet, all I could think of was those droplets of water still falling from her curves would find their way down into the long fibers to discover ancient dust and commingle into mud.

I awoke in my ecru colored world with its painted blood—brown walls and I felt like a
woman on her deathbed
, and I was Elizabeth again. I didn’t choose the decor. Out my window, the Boston sky was the color of raw cinnamon, as it always was. It was a million degrees because I rented this old couple’s attic, and through the center of the room scorched a chimney that mathematically meant I never got cold up there. They always kept a fire going, my rented old people, who owned and operated a museum in their retirement out of the old Faneuil Hall, in nearly everything else they were sparse.

It was delightful to be in my own skin again, even if it was barely sub—volcanic, because I had grand plans that I needed to get to if I was going to make it to mom and dad’s before curfew.
³

I started the day by retracing the path my dream woman— I meant the woman from my dream, not the woman of my dreams— Samantha, took from the tan tiled bathroom with painted, not wallpapered, walls decorated by my old people with Jesus
⁴
sayings and cleaned at least seven times weekly by me. I got really excited because a few months after moving in I started working on a disinfectant to purify my home, and it was nearing perfection. I think I was weirded out; it was strange because I was a man in my dream… but stranger? She called me Sarah which isn’t even my name.

I was given a record player seven months ago for my nineteenth birthday and moving out present from Chad with a few 45s,
⁵
so I took the Bowie Earthling album I’d been listening to a lot over the last week off and put on Nena’s 99 Luftballons, whoever had it before had been a fan of German
⁶
stuff, other albums included In Trance by Scorpions and Somewhere Far Beyond by Blind Guardian. If I were a boy I’d want to be called Anslem or Marcel or Tholand because those names sound strong.

The carpet could not have been defiled by a dream, but I scrubbed it with diluted hot vinegar mixed with nahcolite and ethanol for twenty—five minutes anyway. It’s not like I could just get a new carpet.

Ever since the simultaneous nuclear detonations above the clouds
⁷
people have been strange, Grandpa says, like never before.

The result of the explosions in the upper atmosphere knocked out most of the electronics as far as Monsantonia,
⁸
Grandpa knew all about it and most of what devices survived seemed random to me. I didn’t use a lot of electricity, so I never had to worry about using up my power rations, plus I had the hand crank.

I spent five hours at The Laundromat playing DS,
⁹
I mean washing clothes, but I finished a ton of Yoshi’s Island
¹⁰
and just felt awful accomplished.

The only remaining washateria in Boston looked like an old homeless city, an outdoor sprawl of rusted machines lit by torches
¹¹
and covered by whatever tarps they could find. The oxidized washers filled the Common
¹²
in jagged clumps that ran off generators brought in by Logan at the end of each month. A large sign posted exchange prices for goods— ethanol, water at various qualities, grain, fuel and workers. It was difficult to focus on the game at times because this clunker of a dryer sounded like it was popping giant kernels of popcorn. I had to keep getting up to switch loads and fold because I hadn’t washed clothes in three months, kept noticing this guy with sunken eyes in a gaunt face watching me fold as if I were teaching him how; he thought I didn’t notice him studying me until I mistakenly looked up and caught his eye.

“I’m leaving at three to go pick apples,”
¹³
he said.