The 𐓏𐓘𐓓𐓘𐓓𐓟1 were a sky people first before we came down to the Earth to begin a new life. One dawn, a week before 𐒻𐒼𐓂2 went into the hospital, we faced east and watched a pillar of white smoke reach up into the stratosphere. The rocket was carrying some of us up to become sky people again. If 𐒻𐒼𐓂 had her way, she would be standing right here in two months watching me make the same trip.
“Woo Woo Woo! Go!” she hollered, as if the rocket needed encouragement. One hand clapped her thigh while the other kept her coffee mug at the ready. The dry foliage in the yard trembled in the roar of the rocket’s launch. 𐒻𐒼𐓂 coughed a few times from all the excitement, but didn’t spill a drop of coffee. “Look at that little thing go, grandson.”
“It’s three times as tall as the house,” I said.
“Not to me it ain’t.”
A small fire burned in a rusted fire pit at our feet. She judged the growing light, then reached back to set her coffee down and grab a few sprigs of cedar from the baggie on her lawn chair.
“I’m gonna send up a message to your momma,” she said. A sliver of sun crested the horizon. “Right up there in Cassiopeia with all the rest of the women who commit the sin of knowing their own worth.”
She tossed the cedar into the humble flame, took the new smoke into her cupped hands and bathed in it. Reached to the sky, welcomed the sun. Once, twice. Four times in total.
I joined in. Mom, I composed in my head, please help. Either convince 𐒻𐒼𐓂 to go or give me the guts to stay.
We stood in silence for a while, smoke from our small fire chasing the rocket’s tail. Eventually, 𐒻𐒼𐓂 shuffled inside. I stayed, mulling talking points to try on her and abandoning them each in turn. Trying not to imagine what I would do with myself if I stayed. How we would survive in a world that was dying.
When I came in, 𐒻𐒼𐓂 was settled in her recliner, coffee mug refilled and steaming, watching a stream of an old tennis match.
The savor of bacon filled the house, all fat and salt and grease. My mouth watered. On the screen, some poor, unranked guy from Western Europe was serving to Rafa Nadal, her all-time favorite. It was old—older than me, even. Something she’d seen live as a kid. She’d seen this match a hundred times already—probably—but everytime I put on something current, she changed the channel. Said they’d ruined the sport with the smart rackets and smart balls and the lift of the body-mod ban. She most liked watching two young, fit, tan men, built from their own effort, panting and sweating. She most liked the past.
“𐒹𐒰𐓏𐒷3, 𐒻𐒼𐓂,” I greeted her as if I’d just come home.
“Bacon on the counter for you,” she said. She lifted her chin and nodded back behind her at the kitchen, eyes glued to the match. A small cough escaped after another sip from the mug. On screen, Rafa fielded the serve and whipped it right back with such vicious English there was no way for no-name to return it. “Toast too, but I’m not gonna butter it for you, spaceman.”
I went and grabbed a plate.
“𐒻𐒼𐓂, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but we have to,” I said through the kitchen pass-through. I loaded my plate, knowing to savor the gift of both her cooking and the bacon. “I have to tell them if we’re going or staying.”
“What’s there to talk about? You’re going. I’m not. ‘S all there is to it.” This said without emotion. Like it was no big deal. I looked down into my plate.
Everything was getting too dry. Too hot. The pinch was coming and every day now the rockets were delivering supplies and crew to the generation ship in low orbit. Passengers, human and not, were next. There was no ‘later’ left anymore, all we had was ‘soon.’ She knew it as well as I did.
Another serve from no-name. Rafa flipped it right back, moving his opponent to the left.
“𐓏𐒻𐓊𐓂𐓇𐓄𐒰4, come. Sit. Don’t think too hard, you’ll pull something. Watch the match with me before you go to work. You’ll never see a more wicked forehand.”
The no-name volleyed, but his sneakers skidded a little too far in the red clay. A matter of inches, though that was enough. It was all over his face that he knew what would happen as soon as he made contact.
I pulled a chair from the coffee table and sat next to the recliner, plate in my lap. “𐒻𐒼𐓂, I can’t go if you don’t.”
“Bullcocky,” she said. “You go to work every day without me. It’s the same as that, just slightly longer.”
On the TV, Rafa fielded the volley, barely breathing hard, and zinged it down the sideline, right at the deadman’s corner at the baseline.
“Please. The 𐓏𐓘𐓓𐓘𐓓𐓟 are making a move to a new country. It’s time to go.”
“Grandson.” She turned to face me. “You’re full of knowledge, maybe even more than me. But I know when you’re talking about something you got from a book.”
The last time we’d made a move to a new country was before 𐒻𐒼𐓂 was born, when we were forced from Kansas down onto a reservation in Oklahoma. Of course I’d had to read about it in a book.
“𐒻𐒼𐓂, the Council declared it.”
Rafa’s opponent raced to catch the ball, but he couldn’t recover fast enough from the skid. He stretched out, flailing mostly.
“Those old coots declare lots of things. S’what they do. Whole point of running for office is so they can go shaking hands, declaring this and that up and down the road all day.”
I looked at the plate in my lap. Her blue-ringed irises were too mirthful, given the topic. I couldn’t meet them. It felt like I was already leaving her. Or maybe that she was leaving me. It was the same either way.
“You’re a good boy,” she said, patting my hand and turning back to the TV. “That’s why you get some of the last of my bacon. So, eat up. You’re too skinny. You’ll need your strength for the launch.”
The neon green ball bounded to a halt. Game, set, match. No-name already had his face buried in a towel.
I pulled the folded infographic from my pocket and put it on the end table next to her seat. Then I piled all my strips of bacon onto my toast, folded it in half, and took a bite, returning my plate to the sink.
“I love you,” I said, planting a greasy kiss on top of her head.
“I know.” She smiled and sipped from her coffee. “Now go tell them 𐓊𐒷5 who’s boss.”
At work, I had to focus primarily on the buffalo, which were an entirely different kind of problem. Or a component of the bigger problem. We could get them on the ship and into their pens, that was easy. Well, it was easy considering it was like trying to push a temperamental car into a too-small parking spot and a wrong move could get you gored or trampled. There were so many ranch hands and cowboys among us, though, we could usually move them around just fine. We could sedate them and secure them in modified crash cushioning to keep them contained for their launch. We knew they could handle the g’s; even monkeys and dogs could do that. That’s how the space program started. The trouble was that for every buffalo who came, we had to leave someone behind.
The spreadsheet in front of me was an inventory of life. Noah’s shopping list, basically. The grasses—indiangrass, big bluestem, little bluestem, and switchgrass—were all collected and planted already. The sacred medicines too—sweetgrass, tobacco, cedar, sage, and 𐓨𐒰.𐒼𐒰 𐓐𐓂𐓄𐒷6. But the buffalo, deer, Virginia opossum, three species of bats, jackrabbits, raccoons, pocket gophers and their cousins, some dozens of mice species, and the rest of the mammals were harder. Not to mention the reptiles, amphibians, and birds. And the insects—many of which had already gone extinct in the last couple decades—we were having to be creative with, even importing some of our cricket stock from breeders. Every entry I made there was another human name left off the passenger manifest. The floor trembled as another rocket took off from the launch complex further out in the prairie.
“There’s just no good goddamn reason to take full-grown adults,” Nik said. “It’s a waste.”
Nik was Lenape/Pawnee, not 𐓏𐓘𐓓𐓘𐓓𐓟, and he was sourer than an unripe cranberry most of the time and only getting worse with each passing day. But then he did husbandry, not research, so sourness was often useful. He had a place reserved for him and his family as payment for his work, but only them.
“You know the adults can handle the strain best,” Jess said. Her beaded earrings didn’t even sway as she said it. A veterinarian, even-keeled, she had lots of experience staying calm in the face of testy beasts. “This isn’t arbitrary, it’s scientific fact. And more importantly, the 𐓊𐒷 need their elders too.”
“Oh, don’t get me started on that,” Nik scoffed. “Just tradish bullshit.”
Something had changed. Nik was practical, efficient, and rangy, like he was made of jerky. He was an oxford-shirt-tucked-into-Wranglers kind of guy. He knew the logistics of herd management, the storing of feed and all those things that kept thousands of animals alive. He knew the business of ranching to the same degree that I knew how to balance closed ecological systems. I hadn’t seen him so outwardly ruffled before.
“No—” Jess began.
“Yes.” Nik stabbed her direction with an index finger. “We’re not making some kind of statement. We need to save ourselves, not score Native points. This is about survival.”
“Exactly. That’s when we need our ways the most.” Jess raised her voice a tick. It wasn’t quite a shout, but it was as close as I ever heard her get to it. “Giving up all we are in the process? That’s not surviving, it’s just staying alive.”
“But staying alive is pretty goddamn important, ennit? Kinda the bare minimum. You wanna be the one to tell my eight-year-old niece we chose a cow over her?”
“The only reason we’re still here,”—Jess pointed out the window at Oklahoma, at what used to be called Indian Territory—“is we didn’t lose ourselves.”
“Hey,” I said. They both turned to me like they hadn’t noticed I was there. “We’ve already gone over all this. We’ve done the work and run the numbers. It’s too late to change the plan.”
“We’re changing it every time the Okies hit us.” Nik rubbed his chin. “Until we lift off, it’s in flux. We can still do the right thing.”
“Nik—” I said, but he was already in motion. He scooped up his sweat-stained Dekalb hat from the desk and left.
I looked to Jess. “What was that all about?”
“His wife’s family,” she said. “They got denied. No appeals. Now she’s not sure she can leave them.”
“Oh. Just parents?”
“Got two sisters, too. Both married with kids. They were all trying to get in.”
Outside, the rumble of another launch was punctuated by the small cracks of distant gunfire. Both becoming so common I hardly noticed them any more. Everywhere, all around us, everything was combusting.
I got the call from my neighbors that 𐒻𐒼𐓂 had collapsed and gone to the hospital just as I was leaving. She had been out in her garden in the afternoon, probably humming to her plants trying to keep them strong in the intense heat, and started coughing. She didn’t stop until she fell. The neighbors had to call 911 because I wasn’t there for her.
I rushed to the tribal hospital. The yellow ball of the sun was fighting to get through the restless, red clouds of Oklahoma dirt being thrown into the atmosphere. White smoke rose from the fires sweeping through the ranchlands in the distance. I counted the mounds on the hilltop, black silhouettes silent against the sunset. There were eight. Eight more buffalo lost today.
She was lazing in her hospital bed, plastic cup of grape juice in hand, when I got there. Some kind of crime drama played on the TV.
“What’s eating you, 𐓊𐓂𐓇𐓄𐒰7?” She only glanced my way, taking a sip of juice.
“I’m sorry, I rushed over as soon as I heard,” I said. “How are you?”
“Oh fine. Just a little inconvenienced is all.”
“I was worried about you.”
“Well what for?”
“𐒻𐒼𐓂, are you serious?”
“Oh, I just took a spill and now they want me to stick around so they can take pictures of my insides. Probably to use as teaching materials about the ideal female form.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I hadn’t known what to expect. I scooted a chair next to her and settled in. We watched the cops on the show rough up a few suspects.
“There are rumors they’re going to move up the passenger launches,” I said.
“Thought I was feeling more rumbling in my feet from all those little rockets.”
I wanted to press her about our decision, but the weight of the day hit me all at once. I bowed my head, hands laced behind it. “Okies hit the herd again. Haven’t gotten the details yet, just saw the bodies out in the grass. They didn’t even try to take any of it this time. Just left them up on the hill to rot. They were just—just killing. Not even trying to feed their families or anything. Just killing to do it.”
“They were doing it to hurt us,” she said. “Nothing about survival to it, just plain old spite, 𐓏𐒻𐓊𐓂𐓇𐓄𐒰. Same as it’s always been. Even if they weren’t afraid of us shooting back they would still be trying to get us indirect like that.”
We sat for a time. Let it all simmer and fade into the background.
“They’re going to finalize the passenger list in one week,” I said, making eye contact. Let it hang there between us.
“Is everything ready up there? That was quick. Good for us being ahead of schedule for once.”
“The ship’s been ready,” I said. “Double checked. Triple checked. Collecting all the plants and animals and getting them up there was the main thing. That and letting everyone say goodbye.”
𐒻𐒼𐓂 shook her head. “Why didn’t you just get married? It’s not too late, actually. I bet if you got on them dating apps today you could find a partner before the deadline. Or just go out in the hallway and see which of the staff are available. Don’t have to be perfect, but it’s better than being alone, let me tell you. Got so much going for you, too. PhD, free ticket on a spaceship, good with animals. Whole package.”
“𐒻𐒼𐓂, please.”
I waited for more snark, but she didn’t continue. We knew what each other were thinking anyway. It didn’t need to be released to be heard. Outside her window, night was coming down. She took my hand in hers and I leaned over and let my head rest awkwardly on her shoulder. She smelled like onions and earth.
“I can’t go without you,” I said. There was an emptiness in my stomach, where it seemed like I’d already left her behind by not being there when she fell, and all there was to me was just a hollowed-out-ness.
She let that sit. After a couple minutes, she pointed out the window at the night sky, darkness growing as the evening got deeper. “Remember when we used to stay up late and name as many as we could? Before your momma passed and went up there to join them. She’d say ‘You can’t keep that boy up so late,’ but smiling, not real serious like, cause she liked that you were learning. Now she’s looking down on us and probably even more thankful. Right around there.”
“Up in Cassiopeia,” I said. The wonky ‘w’ constellation was dimmer these days behind the atmospheric haze than it had been, but not unidentifiable.
“Yessir. Trapped up there for boasting about her beauty too much. Her and her daughter, Andromeda. It’s a mean world to us women who have a habit of being a little too honest.”
A steady wail of sirens went out and came back, like waves on the shore, dropping off new patients for the Clinic then heading out to get more. For what, we couldn’t know. So many small emergencies occurring at all times amid the backdrop of the all-encompassing one nobody seemed to be rushing to help.
“She’s up there,” 𐒻𐒼𐓂 whispered. “And I’ll be up there with her soon enough.”
“𐒻𐒼𐓂—”
She patted my back.
“Shhh. We were sky people, isn’t that what you keep telling me? Like I don’t already know? I’m the one taught you that when we pass, we return to it. Flare up, passing the boundary between earth and sky like one of those rockets. We get turned into new stars up there to guide those we left behind. Thing about Cassiopeia is you can still see it from the Centauri system. Did you know that? Bet you didn’t. It’s true. She’ll be with you always. Only from way out there, that angle, Earth and 𐓏𐒻𐓊𐓻𐒼𐓂 𐓨𐒻8, old grandfather sun, will be part of it too.”
I wanted to brush at my eyes, get any tears before they wet her hospital gown. I didn’t want her to know I’d ‘sprung a leak’ as she would put it. But doing so would have given it away too, and so I stayed motionless, staring out the window at the night, leaning against my grandmother’s steadiness.
The poachers kept coming back, harassing us every day, and that kept Nik busy so there’d been no more office arguments since the first. He had been called to try to change the herd’s range away from the boundaries and split off the most valuable individuals to keep them safe for transport.
Ma was one of the chosen buffalo who’d already been moved inside a couple weeks ago. I was in a stall with her, the oldest cow we had, picking and combing brambles out of her hair, when he approached. Two kids at his side. Just one of them was his that I could recognize.
I focused on Ma. She was as close to a matriarch as the herd had, and for that she got a nice clean stall in the barn. Plus, she needed to be in top shape for the transfer to the ship. I escaped the office to come see her whenever the math of the move got to be too much. With 𐒻𐒼𐓂 staying in the hospital, I was escaping here more often. Grooming and petting her, getting huffs and head shakes, the contented tremors that traveled down her flanks. She helped me remember why we were doing all of this.
At its peak, the herd was 2500 head. These days it was about a fifth of that. Drought, heat, and poaching had hit them the hardest. Ma had survived it all for nearly two decades. Sure, during the rutting season, one or two huge bulls were in charge. Different ones every few years, too, as some new challenger in his prime inevitably took over. But the rest of the year? That was Ma’s time to rule. She huffed at Nik.
He put an arm on the top of the stall door, leaned his chin on his forearm, and gave Ma a scratch on the curls of her forehead. I kept on brushing, moving down her flank. “Nik. Herd okay?”
“Gettin’ by,” he said. “They’re real pissy out there. The launches, the Okies. They’re hungry and thirsty too. Really on edge. Like most everyone, I guess. You remember Lucy? This is her cousin Melanie. Say hi, girls.”
“Hi,” I said to them.
“I heard about your grandma,” Nik said. “How is she?”
“Okay,” I said. I wondered who he heard it from.
“Think her situation is going to impact your reservations?” he asked. Tried to be casual about it but he was working his jaw harder than a bull chewing frozen cud.
So that was what he wanted.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Time’s running out.” Nik took his hat in his hands and worked at the bill, folding it mercilessly. “You ever consider just deciding yourself and then making her live with it?”
I set the brush down and patted Ma on the hind end. “Wouldn’t do any good. She’d kick my ass first and then pull strings to get it fixed second. For her, it’s only she stays and I go.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Nik nodded. “Be hard to abandon her though. Given the circumstances. That’d be hard, wouldn’t it, Melanie? To leave your granny behind?”
“Uh huh,” the child said.
“Yeah,” Lucy agreed.
Nik looked out the barn door like he was trying to see all the way to Tulsa. The girls split away and looked into the other stalls. Nik didn’t watch them go, just kept staring. “If you give us your spots I’ll leave our land to you.”
“Nik—” I started.
“Got 25 acres that aren’t wasteland. Soil’s not spent yet so we can grow a few things. Not like before, but some. House isn’t in too bad shape, but the frack-quakes are taking a toll. Most importantly, got a good well. A deep one. Water’s cleaner than the bottled stuff.”
“Are you serious right now?” I shook my head, turned back to Ma and started brushing her all over again.
“You just think on it.” He seated his hat back down on his head. “Girls,” he called.
He put one hand on a shoulder of each of the girls. “You could be set up as much as anyone can be to make a go at it down here. And,” he inclined his chin down at the children, “you’d be saving some lives.”
I turned away from him. I didn’t want him to read anything in my face.
The 𐒼𐒰𐒹𐒻𐒼𐒷9 was on all the screens in the hospital that afternoon, making an announcement about the accelerated launch schedule.
“We’ve made a move to a new country before,” he was saying on the broadcast. 𐒻𐒼𐓂 was sleeping, or at least pretending to, in the hospital bed beside me. “Ever since we came to this land, long time ago. Always changing, adapting, growing. We studied the stars in the sky; we knew they never moved backwards and we couldn’t either. So we kept going, no matter what we faced. Few hundred years ago, when the US Government was moving in, pushing us out, we had to make several moves to a new country in a 50 year period. From East Missouri to West. Then to Kansas. When they wanted that, then we moved from Kansas to Indian Territory. To here.”
“Can I come in?” A young doctor peeked around the curtain that gave us privacy from the hall. When she slid it back and joined us, I recognized her from the newsfeeds. One of the Hunka family. She was tall and used to be a bigshot volleyball player at OU. The kind of person that made the whole county proud. Didn’t know she was back and a doctor to boot, though we’d never really run in the same circles. I liked being outside in the dirt, she liked being inside on the hardcourt. She went to practice, I went to the public library and read fantasy novels.
I tried to focus on the broadcast so it wouldn’t seem like I was staring.
“We gave up our old ceremonies then,” the speech continued. “They were for another place and another time. Needed a whole new way of being. New dances. We changed what we did, but it didn’t change who we were. We will be the same even after this. They sent us to this wild barren place they didn’t want (until they did). This place that happened to be packed full of all that oil. And we sold it and they burned it and we made a lot of money, took care of our people. But we hurt our world. We were a part of that. We have that stain on our hands. So, we put those earnings into our future—”
“𐒹𐒰𐓏𐒷.” Dr. Hunka planted herself on a rolling stool that was far too short for her, tablet in her hands. “So, I’m sure they’ve already told you it’s the lungs,” she said. She turned the tablet toward me so I could see the black and white images. I could see the ghost of ribs and the white network of what looked like spiderwebs. Like the charts of constellations. “Same thing we’re all going to get if we stay here, basically. Not that that helps. Sorry.”
She pointed at the ceiling in a circular motion with her stylus. “It’s the air. All the dust and exhaust. Basically, it’s the same as if every breath we took was from a cigarette now. Here, this is scarring and inflammation. Emphysema. She spend a lot of time outdoors still? Yeah, I figured. Bunch of elders do. If it was 20 years ago, or she was 20 years younger, they would put her on a waitlist for a donor at this stage. Nowadays . . . . Can I ask, is she on the passenger list?”
“We are,” I rushed to say. On the TV, the 𐒼𐒰𐒹𐒻𐒼𐒷 was still going on about carrying our history with us into the future. Thanking everyone he could think of as he went. Talking about the need for community at times like this.
“That’s your best bet at this point,” she said. “There will be clean air on the ship. We can’t heal the damage, but it can be managed with acceptable discomfort.”
“Acceptable discomfort? What kind of nonsense is that? And why are you all talking like I’m not sitting right here?” 𐒻𐒼𐓂 sat like a little spark plug, arms crossed, bottom lip pushed out, one eyebrow raised in challenge.
Dr. Hunka apologized.
“That’s better,” 𐒻𐒼𐓂 said. “If you go out with my grandson I will forgive you fully.”
The doctor blushed.
“𐒻𐒼𐓂, c’mon,” I protested.
After that, they discussed 𐒻𐒼𐓂’s health and I stayed out of it. Eventually, Dr. Hunka shook 𐒻𐒼𐓂’s hand. I stood with her and she asked if she could speak to me outside the room. I nodded.
“As I was saying,” she spoke low, “being in the processed air of the ship will at least buy some time. If she stays . . . . Well, it’s advanced. Does she still smoke? She listed that she used to.”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “Didn’t even know she used to.”
“Well, that’s something. But still, every breath she takes will just add to the damage. The particulate, the heat, the dryness, it all adds up. She might have a year or only months. Hard to say. No matter what, it’ll be significantly less if she stays. She should stay here as long as she will. We have decent filtration.”
I nodded. There wasn’t much to say after that, and we both found ourselves looking up at the TV. 𐒼𐒰𐒹𐒻𐒼𐒷 flinched and there were a few cries from offscreen as gatorade bottles and beer cans flew in to clatter on the stage. The camera panned over to show a few lifted pickup trucks idling behind the press. Okies in the beds beneath Confederate flags held signs as they shouted. “Leave Ungrateful Injuns,” one said. “Go back to your RED Planet,” said another. One simply said, “Git!”
“Hey, doc,” I said, whispering because by now 𐒻𐒼𐓂 had to be eavesdropping. “About the ship . . . are you going?”
“Me?” She shook her head.
“Why not?” She was exactly the kind of person the move would need. Educated, athletic, with vital skills. A homegrown celebrity. I knew of a few with questionable tribal affiliation who had made it onto the manifest just by having similar resumés.
“This is my home, you know?” she said, shrugging. “Earth’s like a patient. Sick, but not dead yet.”
The thing about ecology is it’s not any one piece that matters. It’s about the system. About how everything interacts and balances out. For the last 70 or so years, that’s mostly meant figuring out how to reduce the impact of humans on every other living thing around them. And, in most of those cases, it’s been trying to correct previous failed interventions through yet further interventions. A cascade of mistakes. Western science was scrambling to catch up to the Indigenous knowledge that had thrived on the Americas for hundreds of years before the settlers came and tried to wipe it all out.
I could calculate the numbers reasonably well. I could say we need this many buffalo, this many acres of graze, that many rodents, insects, coyotes, foxes. We could expect to cull this many animals each year, leading to this much high quality protein in addition to the aquaponic agriculture and insect yield. I had already done this. We had a team, but since I was the mammal specialist, much of the calculations originated with me. Numbers can be misleading when trying to find the best balance of an entire system, though. Sometimes the right 20 individuals are worth more than 50 random ones.
Ma was one of the right individuals. She was equal to ten younger cows. We needed her. So her final checkup before she was to be finalized and prepped for transport felt like anything but routine.
It helped to keep my mind off the notification I’d gotten an hour earlier from the launch office. The one that said my paperwork had been accepted. My spot reserved. I hadn’t signed anything, but I knew who had.
I stood with Nik and several of the ranch hands and veterinary staff and looked down on Ma and Jess from outside her stall. It was just a checkup, I told myself. A formality.
Jess knelt next to Ma’s prone form panting heavy in the hay. She lifted a bottle and plugged a syringe into it. Drew out the clear liquid, flicked it. Pressed until a stream geysered up from the finger-length needle. Ma’s breathing steadied. It seemed like I could see the coldness of the dose flow through her.
“She’s not as young as she used to be,” Jess said, rising from the straw. “If we want to be sure, we should monitor her for another day or two.”
She pulled the nitrile gloves from her hands, closed the stall door, and leaned back against it.
Nik stepped forward. “You and I both know we don’t need to monitor her, we need to replace her.”
Jess shook her head.
“Can we just admit this is sentimental, if not downright stupid?” he asked.
I clenched and unclenched my hands. It was enough that Nik was bringing kids around trying to manipulate folks, but today his goddamn voice was suddenly too much for me.
“Nik, stop,” Jess said.
“Hell,” he had to go on. “Maybe, and this is just me using my damn brain here, we give her spot to an actual person even.”
It didn’t matter that he was talking about Ma, he was looking sideways at me. Because I hadn’t rushed to accept his offer. Hadn’t responded at all.
“She’s dead weight. Way too much of that in this plan—”
I hit him as hard as I could. He stumbled against the stall but didn’t fall.
Two ranch hands had me before I could make another move. “Shut up, Nik. Just shut up.” I growled. Nik wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“Jesus, get a goddamn grip,” Jess yelled, stepping between us.
“Not bad,” he said to me. He stood up, dusted off his hat before putting it on. “Don’t change facts, though.”
Seeing that Nik didn’t want to swing back, the hands let me go.
I pointed. “You check her for rat poison or pesticides or anything? How do we know he isn’t making room for a mess of in-laws?”
It was Jess who hit me then. Open palm slap, then she was up in my face. “Now you shut up.”
Nik stepped forward, put a hand on Jess’s arm gently.
“It’s okay, Jess. We do stupid things when the fear is in us.” He held my gaze but didn’t return my glare. “Say stupid things. Lotta uncertainty to get scared of these days. Hard on everyone. I let it get to me too sometimes. Not proud of that. But he knows I love these damn animals. Even, maybe especially, that old bag in there. Knows I would die for them, ain’t that right?”
I looked down. I’d seen him ride off after poachers more than once. Seen him work through the hottest days, tempting a goring from the testiest of the bulls to get the herd moved. Damn him for being right.
“Lotta goodbyes being said these days,” he kept going. His words landing harder than any counterpunch. “He knows I already signed the papers. Already had to have the hard conversations with the in-laws. Don’t he. Yeah, he knows it. See? Knows the way, in the end, that they had to get stern with my wife, same way I might be getting stern with him right now. They had to make her get her focus right. Get it on the future, not the past. Made her vow to make it as good as possible for our boys. Even if it’s hard. Even if it’s scary. Hold too tight to the past, it’ll just drag you under. Hold you down. He knows all that. Ain’t that right?”
I didn’t know all that. But then I did, too. I shrugged away from everyone and headed out of the barn. I had to get to the hospital.
Instead, I went to the old creekbed where I used to look for turtles and praying mantises as a kid. It was just a dry trough now. I started walking one direction and told myself I would turn around when I hit water or I figured out what to say to 𐒻𐒼𐓂. By dusk, I had had to give up on both objectives. There was no water, just cracked red soil and bleached white bones. No answers, just the pall of a loss that felt not singular, but constant and ongoing. A single message from 𐒻𐒼𐓂 waited for me on my phone when I got back to my car. “Come on over and see me already,” it said.
At the hospital, I passed Doc Hunka on the way to 𐒻𐒼𐓂’s room. We nodded to each other. I wondered if she ever left.
“𐒹𐒰𐓏𐒷, 𐒻𐒼𐓂,” I said when I entered, but the room was empty.
“She’s out back,” Dr. Hunka leaned in the doorway. “Forgot to pass that along when I saw you.”
Outside, in a lawn chair, head leaned back to look up into the sky, 𐒻𐒼𐓂 was sipping another cup of grape juice.
“𐒹𐒰𐓏𐒷, 𐒻𐒼𐓂,” I said again. I fell into the seat next to her.
“Rough day?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She hummed an acknowledgement. Took a swig from her juice and looked up into the sky. Eventually, she took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.
I pressed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose. I pulled up a file on my phone. It was a doubles match from an early 2000s Wimbledon. I had been collecting recordings for the trip. “I know you like men’s better,” I said. “But all the forums say this one is a match for the ages.”
“Oh, those Williams sisters!” She slapped her thigh. “They were really something.”
We let the tennis take over. Huddled around a small square light beneath the stars, I didn’t know how to begin, and she apparently didn’t feel the need to, so we didn’t talk. She used to make fun of people who felt the need to occupy silence with empty words. It exhausted her. Me too. I guess I got that from her. Some days we just did this. And after an hour or so, she would get up and say “Good chat.”
There were serves, volleys, slams. It was an incredible show of dominance. The sisters flowed like a dance. Like they were the two hands of a single tennis god. On a particularly good point, 𐒻𐒼𐓂 would snap the fingers of her free hand and whoop so loud I knew that the nurses heard it inside at their station.
At some point in the second set, I gave up being mad and took her hand in mine. It was warm, despite the chill in the air.
Before the match was over, 𐒻𐒼𐓂 leaned over and said, “Your momma would be proud.”
I hung my head.
𐒻𐒼𐓂 patted my hand. “It’ll be okay,” she said.
My breath caught. “I—”
“You can’t stay,” she said. “And I can’t go. It’s same as it always was.”
“But I can’t leave you.” My voice cracked. I couldn’t help but imagine her alone, condition declining. Scared, sad, empty, same as I had been when mom passed away. She would need me like I had needed her.
“I’ll be with you,” she said. “I’ll be closer to you up there than I would be if you were down here. You just gotta have the strength to wait for me.”
She let me have some time to compose myself.
“My spaceman. Know your 𐒻𐒼𐓂 will always look over you, 𐓏𐒻𐓊𐓂𐓇𐓄𐒰. Now, why don’t you put on another good match?”
“Thanks, 𐒻𐒼𐓂.” I bit the inside of my cheek. Then I raised my phone and searched for another classic from the ones I’d collected.
“But before you get it started,”—she leaned in and held her plastic cup up—“go tell that doctor I’m ready for her to slip me more of the merlot she’s got.”
Months later, I stood at one of the observation viewports, a few invaluable sprigs of cedar ready. In the central atrium of the ship, buffalo grazed in the reduced gravity. The calves bounded, testing how high they could frolic while the adults just tried to walk as normally as they could. (Though Ma seemed more like the calves than not, delighted by the reduced load on her joints.) Insects lazed through the air, beating their wings out of habit rather than need. A coyote secreted away a mole it had caught. The ship’s lifeforce was a steady thrum in the soles of my feet and a nagging pressure at the inside of my ears.
Outside, the black of space enveloped the ship. The stars were everywhere, like a handful of coarse white sand spread across a dead TV screen. The yellow glow of the sun pursued us. Mars glowed red, silently stewing, just slightly aft and above our path.
She had told me not to say goodbye. “We don’t say goodbye,” she told me. “Say ‘until next time.’” So that’s what I’d said.
“Now say it like you mean it,” she said.
So I did.
Now, before I get rotated off a wake cycle for a rest period, I come here. This is a 𐓏𐓘𐓓𐓘𐓓𐓟 ship, a 𐒹𐒰.𐒼𐒷 𐒼𐒷𐒹𐒿𐓂. 𐓍𐒷 𐓈𐒰 𐓨𐒰.𐓐𐒷 𐒰𐒼𐒰𐒹𐒰𐓈𐒰10, and so it is unlike anything that has come before. Through a door next to the viewport, there is a room built for the use of sacred smoke. There’s no true sunrise out here, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still have messages to send to our ancestors.
I find Cassiopeia. I count her major stars. There are actually 26 in total, all more visible here than they were on Earth, but only five major ones that 𐒻𐒼𐓂 and I had keyed in on.
“Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon,” I name them aloud. Today, there are six. “Hmm.”
I count again, making sure my eyes are not playing tricks on me. That I’m not just seeing what I want to see.
“I’ll be with you,” she’d said. “We’re a sky people. When we pass, we return. So no matter what, I’ll be with you.”
“Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon,” I say. I press my hand to the window. “And you.”
Author’s Note
Language is sovereignty. I am grateful to Reckoning for making it possible to publish the text with Osage (𐓏𐓘𐓓𐓘𐓓𐓟) orthography as originally written. For nonfluent readers, I have included phonetics in the footnotes so you can hear the beauty of language, even as you may not be able to read it. The most fantastical and unbelievable element of this story is that I have written characters decades in the future who speak 𐓏𐓘𐓓𐓘𐓓𐓟 𐒻𐓟 at the same infantile level I do now. This is representative of only my own clumsy competencies. The Osage Language Department and our elders have ensured that ours will be a different linguistic future than depicted here with their incredible dedication and efforts.