Escape Pod

A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman
by E. Catherine Tobler

The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you're crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There's no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. His presence reminds you school is over and relatives will be coming soon and you don't want to see them. They will ask you who can't see beyond the edge of your hammock about grades and ambitions and Plans For the Future. Aunt Fran is dead and there's just no fixing it, but funerals help us move on, Mom says so, and Mom Knows Best. You don't want to go, because going means it happened and going means something is over.