Z. E. Wayland

Along the spin of Earth's orbit and within an auxiliary wing of a space station, the switchboard lights up with a call from the far reaches of space. Obra grabs a handle and pushes herself through the weightless air with ease. The best part of working outside the atmosphere. She stops at the foot of the machine and sighs. Headphones on, she pulls the cable, connects it, and with practiced tone says, “Operator.” As the person on the other line talks, her face scrunches up, casting her gaze to the planet outside the window. “Mother’s Day on Earth?” Obra gently glides along the room, a little more tense than before. “No, you’re a few days late. Oh, you still want to patch through? No, no. I’m just surprised is all, just give me a moment.” She realigns herself back to the machine where she stamps the information and pulls a wire to another socket. Even the little lights on the dashboard flickering in morse to each other. From another corridor, Chris, a coworker, drifts in to get ready ...

     — After Su Hui Left, right, up, down, spiral in, spiral out, each the correct way to read what you say. This brocade fabric with woven words, made to communicate what can’t be said, bound instead in character that can’t be found on the tongue somehow tucked inside my face. This cascade is beautiful, a display of lines and waves unsounded in my mouth, symbols grounded in meaning, and somehow foreign to the babe born in the same place as you. I try to recite, only say aloud the dust repeated on your shroud. I ask your forgiveness and expect none For my lost, exiled, and forgotten tongue.

Beowulf casts me through the past, not to mythical Scandinavia but to my childhood with a different book in hand. Sitting on the beige carpet floor with my legs crossed, a book of monsters splayed across my lap. Each page and chapter was dedicated to a different monster that lived in the world. I got it for my tenth birthday. Since then, the large pages were slightly bent from the number of times I flipped back and forth between them. On each left-handed page, the names were in big letters: Chupacabra, Jersey Devil, Yeti, and of course, the European Dragon. A four-legged monster with scales, wings, large enough to tear a tower from a castle; the same kind Beowulf would die fighting. On the other page, a disgustingly detailed rendering of its anatomy, muscles, veins under the skin. Skeletons gave way to organs with labels for the stranger pieces. An annotation pointed to its underbelly and advised its readers the soft spot to strike. I studied feverishly the shapes and names so that I w...

 I. Dad says, "It's as true as the sky is blue." When white clouds arrive to paint the sky, above the wedding tables where I hide, they change the light, the color, and the hue. When cold rain flies in, it will grey that truth, like the colors I'll wear down a wedding aisle. When the sun rises, it explodes the light from dark to white, blue, pink, and others too. This I want to turn and dispute his fact and catch his sky-blue eyes, steady as storms that hurtle across the world, drowning rafts, airplanes, and islands in unknowing wrath. I would be next in its path to be torn, so instead, I look away, "Okay, dad."

The warrior sails through tide and turns so she could take her blade, broken in two, back to the base of the volcano. Her boat settles against the soft island sands along a familiar pathway. Here, the island grows endlessly from the constant flow of lava drifting across the floor. The path back is a little longer than she remembered. The warrior carries the two pieces in a wrapped cloth cradled across her arms. She rests them gently where the lava forks a circular path around stone. With reverence, she steps back into the constant rising hear of the elevated plateau and holds her hands up towards the volcano's top. "This, child, is broken beyond repair. Cast it into my flames and let it sink into the earth," the volcano says. Its voice a rumble of the earth, a popping of a flame, a slow certainty of the world. The voice echoes all around her like the gentle touch of wind. The warrior clenches her hands together and shuts her eyes. That is the answer she was expecting, but...

When we translated light waves to sound waves, the first thing the Sun said was, "Turn it off." I thought we were supposed to celebrate the moment that we made contact, real contact, with something as immense and stunning as that burning ball of gas we orbit around. Nobody said anything in the control room. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be the one to bring up what clearly echoed through the speakers, to be the one to point out that our message was not well received. The silence stifled me. I couldn't live with such a simple answer, not after all the work and research and resources that I invested inside of this. "Maybe, it's telling us to turn off something else we have," I said to everybody. We all turned to Samson. His eyes squint against the display of that yellow and orange ball of fury as though it was a face. They shared an intensity. Only one of them blinked and told us, "Ask why." The message is translated immediate...