Generating Hope

Generating Hope

Carter Meland

Generating Hope

Carter Meland

They’d wheeled the hospital bed into her living room, just as Hope had asked. Set up in front of the picture window, she’d receive hospice care in view of her oldest friend, the mesa that rose above the desert a mile away. The mesa would keep her company when her other caretakers were busy.

From the bed, she could also see the caskette stationed just to the left of the window. The caskette was as familiar as the mesa; it had been in their living room since she was nine. She’d always found the sleek contours of its early-1950s design attractive as a piece of household furnishing. As a girl, it reminded her of both the family’s Electrolux vacuum cleaner and their Philco television. The caskette had the low-slung, horizontal lines of the vacuum and the bulky, bulbous presence of the television; taller than a coffee table and shorter than an end table, she’d started using it as a landing place for her potted succulents after she inherited the house.

Though made of cast concrete, the caskette seemed to have come from the future. Now that she was dying in that future, it seemed to her it could only have come from the past. Her dad always said, “The past is never past, Little Miss. Sometimes it can come back at you hard and sting you like a scorpion.”

The locking mechanism on the front of the caskette was in the same spot where her mother connected the hose to the Electrolux. The shining chrome of the mechanism was as bright as the trim on the vacuum cleaner. The day he brought it into their home, her brother had told her, “The lock can only be opened by a duly sworn representative of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—and they will only ever open it if we are assigned more waste.” Her brother, studying education at the university, often spoke as if he was a teacher in front of a classroom.

She wondered about this waste as a nine-year-old and still wondered about it ninety years later on her deathbed. On the same day her brother brought the caskette home, her teacher had shown an instructional cartoon about atomic power for what seemed like the eighteenth time that school year, but it hadn’t mentioned waste. Instead it showed atomic energy as a team of impressively muscled giants, glowing slightly and towering over cities and farms, either protecting America with nuclear weapons as warriors or supplying energy to the nation as electrical engineers. Because of that cartoon, she had pictured atomic power as a helpful presence, a protective warrior or a productive engineer. Those images seemed as natural to her as the sight of the mesa out the window, but they didn’t help her picture nuclear waste at all. Atomic energy was a formidable giant, but waste? What was it, she wondered.

She remembered approaching the caskette after her brother left. Attracted by its rounded edges, she placed her hand on it, asking, “What are you?” and she felt a jolt of rage surge up the nerves in her arm and lodge in her mind before she jerked her hand away in surprise.

She knew at that moment that whatever was in the caskette was not a what but a who, not an “it” but a “we.”

Us.

The heat of anger, blinding white and roaring, burned in us so bright, so intense that we didn’t recall jolting her, didn’t remember reaching into her mind and generating that connection linking us to her. We were unbalanced then, a churning whirlwind, furious at the way men had damaged us, had split us open, taken away a part of who we were and turned it into energy for themselves, never considering our life for a moment. The damage and pain they left behind turned to rage that flashed through this lead lining, reaching into her. Our anger was all fire then, our memory lost in scorching fury. We only remembered that day because she thinks of it often, always wondering who we are.

As the decades passed, we grew to understand our rage and regained our memory. We knew that if we shared too much of what we’d endured it might overwhelm her. Her experience was our only link to the world we’d been removed from. Though we knew one day that connection would fail, we didn’t want to lose it too soon.

The thin sheet draping her body reminded her of the sheet they wrapped her great-grandmother in before they lowered her into the earth.

We felt her eyelids flicker with this memory and, along with her, we caught a glimpse out the window to the mesa, painted with the shadows of springtime clouds. Mesas like that had once been our home. This one had been her playground as a child and a quiet place to sort out her feelings about life and motherhood and dying as she grew older. She had introduced her children, grandchildren, and even her great-grandchild to the mesa, sharing with all of them what her great-grandmother had told her when she was a young girl. “Always remember this, my little one,” the elder instructed, “the mesa is alive; it is our relative. One of us, part of us.”

She remembered asking how her great-grandma knew it was alive. The old lady smiled as if it were too obvious to answer, saying only, “Just look at it, my girl.”

Laying in the bed now, she remembered being puzzled by her elder’s words until the next time she went there to play. The pool on the east slope of the mesa was a favorite stopping place. Fed by a spring that bubbled out of a cleft in the rock and trickled down the slope, the water there was always cool and fresh. Frogs darted among the reeds that lined the pool’s banks. She realized that the mesa was alive because it gave life to the pool, the frogs, and the reeds. When she cupped a handful of water for a drink, she knew the mesa cared for her as well.

Looking through the window from the bed, she recalled with a smile how the frogs called out and hopped into the pool when she tried to grab them. The memory made her wish she could visit and touch the warm stone from which the water emerged one more time.

Through her eyes, we watched the shadows of the clouds roll across the face of the mesa.

“What a beast,” her brother said as he finished positioning the caskette near the window. He’d wheeled it into the living room on a dolly. “Stationmaster says it weighs over three hundred pounds.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Only a kilogram of that is waste.”

“A kilo-what?” she asked.

“-gram,” he said. “It’s a little over two pounds.”

Though the war in Korea had ended two years ago and he’d been home for nearly a year, she liked the way her brother kept his shoes shined and his trousers pressed, his hair trimmed high and tight—a phrase she’d learned from him—as if he was still expecting a snap inspection at any moment. He had loved his time in the Army.

He tapped the caskette but felt none of our rage. “This thing is kind of like the Army, Hope. It really gives me a sense of who we should be as a nation, that we’re all in this together, all generating something fine and true, a better future.”

Her brother’s words made her think of that cartoon. It certainly made atomic energy seem like a fine and true future, only it didn’t seem to know about waste. Neither did her teacher. Miss Wood spoke often about atomic power, but she spoke of waste only once, the day after the President announced the “Caskette Initiative.” Her teacher wrote the phrase in curling cursive across the blackboard before explaining that every family in the United States was going to be asked to store the waste in their homes in small, specially designed casks. “It’s like the draft is for the Army,” Miss Wood explained. “Everyone will get a caskette when their number is called. It’s an opportunity to help our nation move forward.”

Her brother hadn’t waited to be drafted for the war in Korea; he volunteered. Likewise, he had signed up the family for their caskette before the government had a chance to draw numbers. He hadn’t asked their parents for permission either. He acted, as always, out of duty.

When her dad got home that evening and saw it sitting there, he shook his head, went into the kitchen, and got a glass of iced tea. He came back and sat at the dining table. Through the archway that separated the dining and living rooms, he could see the caskette. She remembered sitting on the floor near it, but not near enough that it might jolt her again, when he finally spoke.

“The government should never have expected us to do this.” His tone was somewhere between anger and disappointment.

“But it’s our duty, Pops.”

“Duty?” Dad shook his head. “You served, son. I served. We’ve done our duty.” He sounded annoyed as he took a sip of tea.

“President Eisenhower says it’s the task of every true American family to take on this responsibility.” Her brother deeply admired President Eisenhower. “He wants all Americans to be invested in the government, so that it’s one for all people. He says taking care of the caskette will help save us in this Cold War.”

“I’m invested in the American government,” her dad grumbled. Even as a child she knew he meant taxes.

“It’s part of the Atoms for Peace, Pops.”

“Don’t start, son.”

“It’s all about turning the destruction of war into something that will uplift our nation, Dad. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace is for everyone, not just the generals. If we benefit from cheap electricity, we also need to bear the responsibility for what’s left over.”

Because of that jolt she’d felt earlier, she remembered looking at the caskette when her brother said this. She knew we were not left over.

“But it’s still radioactive,” Dad said. “And it’s in our living room.”

“It’s perfectly safe, Pops. It’s lined with lead that contains the radiation and it’s sealed so that no one can get at it. Only the government boys have the key to unlock it,” he said. “There’s less radiation coming off this caskette than there is out there in the desert. Radiation is a natural part of the world, Dad. That gizmo is cheating the world of its radiation.” He laughed.

“Bah,” her dad said. “They just don’t know what to do with what they’ve created and now they want us to take on their problem.” Agitated, he tapped his fingers on the table. “Eisenhower is not like Truman, son.” Her dad loved Truman and his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Old Harry said, ‘The buck stops here.’ Ike is just passing the buck on to us.”

“No, he’s not, Pops. If everyone takes a share until the government settles on a long-term solution, then we will all know what’s at stake.” He sounded more like a high school teacher every day. “The President says this is the best way to get Americans to understand the costs of atomic power.”

“They’ve already taken more than enough from us.” She knew they had taken her grandparents’ ranchland before she was born so they could develop atomic bombs there. Her dad worked in those labs for more than two decades after they were built, a jack of all trades, keeping the place running so the “science boys,” as he always called them, could do their work.

He gave them twenty-two years of his life and then they gave him cancer.

“It snuck up on me, Little Miss.” Little Miss was a special name her dad had made just for her. Those words were sweet in her memory, even now in her final days, his voice thick and rich like honey. “I probably should’ve worked at some ranch instead of the labs. Money wouldn’t have been as good, but getting kicked in the teeth by a horse would be a lot more pleasant than this.” He tried to smile as a cough racked his body. “You have to take care of things now, Little Miss,” he said when the cough ended.

Two days later he stopped coughing.

Another thing they took from her family.

A few days after that initial jolt, she returned to the caskette. We still see this day in her mind’s eye, her hand reaching tentatively toward the caskette, the tips of her fingers just brushing the surface. She knew if she placed her hand fully on the caskette she’d risk being jolted by our rage again. With her fingertips just skimming the top, our anger felt more like an uncomfortable heat, nothing she couldn’t handle.

“Who are you?” she asked, remembering we were a who, not a what. “Why are you so angry?” She laughed even as she asked the question. “That’s silly, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t be angry locked inside a box?” She was tempted to tap on the container but thought better of it. “Are you lonely in there? I’d be lonely if I was locked away from the world all by myself.”

She talked to us periodically for years upon years, our anger cooling into a type of grief for what had been taken from us, until one day she raised a different type of question. It was not about us, but about them. “They never asked, did they?” She was a young mother then, her tiny daughter toddling near the fireplace. She’d inherited the house after her mother passed.

She was right. They never asked for our consent. Men dug us out of the earth and crushed us into grit, so they could “enrich” that energy deep in the heart of us and convert it into fuel for their lives, power for their comfort and convenience. There was no give-and-take in their way of seeing the world. There was only take.

“They never thanked you either, I’m guessing.” She paused for a moment, watching her daughter cross the floor toward her, gaining confidence with each faltering step. “My great-grandma said her people never took anything from the earth without first asking and making an offering. Good relationships grow from respect and gratitude, she told me.”

She’d been no more than five or six when her great-grandma had explained relations to her. She remembered the old lady’s hands. Cracked with lines, they looked like the dry earth she saw on the top of the mesa. She rested her hand on the caskette. Her toddling daughter touched the caskette, imitating her mom, but felt nothing of us. She scooped up the child and said to us, as she had many times before, “You must be so lonely.”

Her own sense of isolation led her to think of our loneliness. Endlessly busy with caring for the children, maintaining the household, and doing all the million and one little things that made their home a happy place consumed all her time. There were moments when she wondered if she were still a person separate from her identities as wife and mother. She felt split, as if her life had two halves, before family and after.

“You feel split as well, don’t you?” she asked, knowing we needed to be kept under lead for thousands of years. Separated from the earth that was our home, never feeling the other mineral and microbial lives who had been our companions for eons. Scientists created our isolation through fission. Fission produced the heat that generated electricity by splitting the atom, but those men never considered how fission was a terrifying rupture of our being, the split that in the end transformed us from fuel to waste. Everything we saw and felt came through her and we feared that our loneliness might swallow us when she died.

She knew that the split in her life was both a burden and a reward, a necessary part of generating family. As her children grew, we felt her sense of burden lifting, and as the anxieties of parenthood and livelihood eased, she began to fuse her many roles as woman, spouse, and mother into one singular identity, herself.

All sense of burden fell away for her the day after her daughter had a child, our companion’s first grandchild. When she ran her hand over the caskette, we felt she had grown somehow. Her memory showed a long walk to the mesa that afternoon, each step chiming with the thought, “My grandbaby is here. She’s here.” She hiked to the pool, then up the slope to the cleft in the rock where the water emerged. That’s when the feeling washed over her. “I’m the mother of a future,” she realized. “I’m Hope.”

She understood at that moment why her parents had given her that name.

The memory of that day warmed her in the bed. She looked toward the mesa and mumbled, “I’m the mother of generations.”

“What did you say?” Her daughter suddenly appeared at the bedside.

That was happening more and more these days, people just suddenly appearing from nowhere.

“You need a drink, Little Miss.” We felt her jaw tighten; she wanted to say only her dad could call her that.

She opened her eyes and we saw her daughter smiling, holding a cup with chipped ice to her lips. “Call me Mom,” she tried to say, but ice rattled out of the cup, freezing the words on her tongue. As the ice melted to cool water on her dry throat, she imagined it soaking into the cracked earth on top of the mesa and she thought of her great-grandma’s ancient hands.

The children called her Mom or Grandma when they were little. They only started calling her Little Miss when they reached that age when they test boundaries. Her daughter had started early, when she was just eleven. Always pushing boundaries. Her daughter never asked if she liked being called Little Miss. She just renamed her.

Her daughter, still pushy, was now “electing,” in her words, to “monetize” the caskette. Each caskette could hold five kilos and theirs held only one. “We can sell our space to rich people and then they no longer have to fulfill their ‘duty’ and care for the waste.” Her daughter had none of her brother’s sense of responsibility toward the community.

She looked past her daughter to the mesa, then turned her head toward the caskette. She knew we—she, us, the mesa—were community, relatives, even if her daughter had lost sight of it. She knew the living spirit of the mesa was the spirit living in us. She knew our living spirit because it was in her as well. She nurtured that spirit with walks to the mesa, nourished it by sipping water from the pool there. It was a living heart in the dry desert.

Tears stung her eyes. She worried that no one felt as she did anymore. We felt the tears begin to spill out of her eyes, tracing the lines in her cheek. She worried what might happen if they placed us with younger versions of ourselves, ones still raging at what they’d lost. She wondered what their burning anger would do to us. Would we be able to absorb it, or would it trigger that deep rage in us once again? We wondered the same, her thoughts becoming ours.

“G.G.!” Her daughter’s granddaughter burst into the room with a seven-year-old’s enthusiasm for living, dusty from playing out in the yard, knees scabbed from crawling around on the ground. G.G. was short for Great-grandma and we knew our companion loved that name. The child skipped to her bedside and put the shed exoskeleton of a scorpion on our companion’s belly. “I found it,” we felt the girl pat her G.G.’s shoulder, “under that old juniper out back.” Our companion smiled as she turned to face the dust-stained child. The girl lowered her head and we saw the child’s eyes expand in her vision, two wide brown moons. “I’m glad you’re still here,” the girl said, and then kissed her on the cheek.

“Little Miss, you be careful of your elder,” her daughter warned. Our companion pulled the child’s hand to her chest; it was still warm from playing in the sun.

The girl put her mouth next to her great-grandma’s ear. “We’re both Little Miss, G.G., aren’t we? Grandma says we’re two peas in a pod.”

“It’s our caring hearts, Little Miss,” our companion mouthed. There wasn’t enough air in her lungs to bring the words into the world. She took the exoskeleton off her chest and held it out to the child. “We take care of all our relatives.” She gestured toward us with the scorpion.

The girl plucked the exoskeleton from her G.G.’s hand. “Teacher says scorpions shed their skin in order to keep their life—” the girl paused as she searched for the word. “To keep their life renewing.”

She remembered seeing “Caskette Initiative” on the blackboard, in her own teacher’s curling cursive. She remembered being jolted by our anger, remembered her brother’s hair, high and tight, his desire to be a teacher. Remembered his car blown off a mountain pass before he ever got the chance.

“Little Miss, leave your G.G. alone.”

We saw through our companion’s eyes as the girl hopped away from the bedside, running over to place the exoskeleton in with one of the potted cacti on top of the caskette. “Is that where you want it, G.G.?”

Though she said “perfect,” no sound came out, so she smiled instead.

“Scorpions like rocks and yucca, right G.G.?” Little Miss said. She adjusted the exoskeleton with a gentle prod of her finger, giving the scorpion shell a direct view of the mesa. “Welcome home, exoskeleton,” the girl pronounced. “Your body is out there, renewing.”

Renewing, our companion thought. Renewing is generating. Generating life. Hope.

“Run along, Little Miss,” her daughter scolded. “You scoot. G.G. needs her rest.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she tried to say, but the irony would be lost on her daughter. The young Little Miss was a rich body of life in a world everyone wanted to deaden into money. She wanted that body near, but before she could reach for the child again, the screen door banged shut.

Without the girl to focus on, she stared at the mesa in the distance. “That’d be a nice place to die,” she thought. “It’s a place of so much life.” Thoughts like that played through her mind for minutes that turned into hours that turned into a trickle of hazy memory, until she heard her dad.

“Little Miss,” he called in that honey-thick voice of his.

Her eyes flickered, expecting to see him standing by the fireplace, but she saw only moonlight spilling over the caskette, then that other Little Miss appeared at the side of the bed in her pajamas. “I heard you call me, G.G.”

“Take me there.” She wasn’t sure if her voice had made any sound. She nodded at the mesa out the window, and the child helped her stand and walk unsteadily toward us in the caskette. We felt a flush of warm emotion wash over her. She believed she was walking to the mesa and as step followed faltering step, she recalled a day a year earlier when she and the child had hiked out across the desert to visit the pool. As she remembered the day, it became less certain to her whether they had actually walked there or if it was just something she wished they’d done. She couldn’t be certain, but it felt real. The child’s hand was warm in hers now and it felt like they had crossed the hot hard-packed earth until they reached the water.

They approached the caskette in the moonlight, but she saw only the mesa. “The mesa always holds the heat of the day,” she tried to say to the child, but the words were dry in her throat. She took the girl’s hand and placed it on the caskette.

“They’re warm,” the child said.

There was so much she wanted to say, but her throat was parched, just as it had been that day when they walked to the mesa. She remembered how they’d slipped off their shoes and socks and waded into the pool. “Remember how we sipped the water?” She tried again to speak. “How good it felt on our throats?”

She was drifting as she so often did these days, between past and present, between life and whatever came next, the line between them becoming ever thinner. She recalled putting her hands in the pool, scooping up some water. She drank it, feeling it trickle down her throat. “See, Little Miss,” she’d said that day a year ago. “The water takes care of us.”

She scooped into the pool again, only this time the water in her hands wriggled with tadpoles. “The water cares for them as well, my girl.” She held the tadpoles so the child could look at them. “It’s their home.” The child touched one tentatively, her eyes wide, then squealed with delight as it darted out of her G.G.’s hands and fell back into the water.

“Did you see that, G.G.?”

“I did.” She released all but one of the tadpoles in her hands back into the water. “Look at this one, Little Miss.” The tadpole was in the final stage of transformation, the skin pulled so tight it was transparent.

The child peered at the tadpole and saw the body nested inside the skin. “She’s a frog, G.G.”

“She is,” our companion said. We saw her looking into her hands as she sat by the caskette, seeing the tadpole, her memory overpowering reality. “She’s moving from one state of life to another.” She lowered the tadpole into the water.

The child nodded soberly. We saw her still wading in the pool, our companion’s memory of that day.

“These changes are a part of life, my girl.” Our view of the child narrowed as our companion smiled. “It’s nothing to be afraid of. If we never changed, we’d never grow. But change is only good if it’s natural.”

She told the girl how change generated growth, how everything changed, even the mesa. “Because it changes, it’s alive, Little Miss.” She felt as though she were repeating words her own great-grandmother had said. She told the child how the mesa would come to harm if no one watched out for her, and how the frogs, the little peepers who sang for the spring and the reeds and the mesa, also needed care. “This heartless world will crush them all, Little Miss,” she said, “if we let people see them as money, rather than relatives.”

She began telling the girl about us. “Under the mesa are more of our relatives, including some powerful rocks.” She remembered patting the soft white stone of the mesa that day. “The mesa holds them away from us, because they can make people and other animals sick.”

She remembered the child looking up from the tadpoles and asking, “Why, G.G.?”

“They don’t want to, my girl, it’s just their nature.” She explained how some people took us and made us into money, first as fuel, then as waste. “Only they’re not waste, Little Miss. No relatives are. They still live, just not as they were meant to—and they weren’t changed by their nature, like the tadpoles change into frogs. No, they changed because people interfered with them. They’ve been harmed and need our care now.” She talked about how everyone forgot what we’d given to the world, and what we lost of ourselves. She said, “People lose something of themselves, too, when they forget to approach all our relatives with care.”

“Grandma and I take care of you, G.G.” The girl released a tadpole back into the water.

“Yes, you do, Little Miss.”

Our companion leaned back against the mesa, her feet cool at the edge of the water. She said, “Those rocks are unhappy with what’s been done to them and we need to figure out how to care for them.” She thought about the tadpoles. “We need to act with care, so they can change. That’s what good relatives do for one another. We need to nurture them so they can grow.”

“How, G.G.?”

“All I’ve ever done is think about them and try to imagine what they feel, but I’ve never figured out how to help them grow.” She turned her neck and let her cheek rest against the mesa. “I don’t know if it’s possible,” she tried to say, but her voice was gone again, as was the memory of that day. They were back in the living room, leaning against the caskette.

The line between this life and whatever came next grew thinner. She thought of her great-grandma and patted the smooth warm skin of the child’s hand. The three of them were links in a generating chain. Egg to tadpole to frog. Her memory turned to her great-grandma being lowered into the earth in that thin sheet. “Maybe that would be best for them,” she tried to say.

“What would, G.G.?”

“Just return them to the earth.” Her voice rasped. “Make them a home there.” Like the government had promised. Her brother, she thought, would be so disappointed if he knew the duly sworn representatives of his U.S. government had failed to fulfill their duty.

Thinking about her brother brought tears to her eyes. She began to cry thinking about all the relatives she’d lost. All the ones who’d been harmed. All the ones still needing care. The child rubbed her hand. The line holding her here was almost gone. Like the tadpole, she was about to shift from one state of life to another. Did the tadpole know it was becoming a frog? Maybe, but she had no idea what she would become next.

She looked around the moonlit room and, remembering his voice from earlier, hoped her father was nearby. “You have to take care of things now, Little Miss.” She tried to say the words that her father had said to her before he passed on, but the words… her voice… didn’t work. She clutched the child’s hand, hoping it would anchor her to this state of life long enough for her to regain her voice—but instead it opened a channel between us and the child, through her.

With that opening we drew both of them into our memory so we could show them who we were. We showed them the flashing burst of heat from our brief life as fuel and the burning rage that came with our transformation into waste. Our companion remembered that transformation as the startling jolt that connected her to us. They both felt how fission broke us apart, turned us from dangerous stone to hazardous waste. Deadly.

“They’re just like the scorpions, aren’t they, G.G.?” the child whispered. “Poisonous.” She twined her fingers with her great-grandmother’s. “Only people made them worse.”

Over the decades our rage cooled. We tried to convey that these were just brief incidents in our long life. We shared with them that even the next ten thousand years of fatal danger we posed to our relatives was no longer for us than a few months was for people. Mineral life such as ours is measured in epochs and eons; decades, centuries, even millennia were only hours, days, and weeks in the long reach of our life. We’d never noticed months and years and decades when we were whole; we just saw the world as it was, a vast spinning web of life and energy and connection. Relation. The gravitational pull of distant planets was as familiar to our senses as the gentle wash of rainwater seeping deep into the earth, touching us when we were lucky.

The girl said, “They like water, too, G.G.” Our companion patted the child’s hand, gently. Weakly.

We saw the stars wheeling above in those times when we lived on the surface, their light touching us like water, feeding the memory of our birth, our real birth in the collapse of a star many times more massive than this planet’s sun. As that star neared the end of her life, the energy she once generated began to fade. As her life dimmed, the force of gravity, once held in check by the heat she generated deep in her core, overwhelmed her and she collapsed in on herself so quickly and with such force that she exploded outward in a blinding flash of light and superheated gases.

“She died, G.G.” The girl was on the verge of tears, leaning into her elder. “Their star.” Our companion said nothing. She lacked the energy to even try. Her hand was limp in the child’s.

Our mother didn’t die, though; she didn’t even become our mother until that moment. We shared our memory with the child of how she shifted from the star state of life to the supernova state of life, the one that actually gave birth to us.

We shared with her how the tremendous force and heat of her explosion created new elements. Instead of destroying us with fission as men had done, she created us with fusion. Mother fusion birthed us as she shifted from generating heat to generating heavier elements, like ourselves and our siblings, iron, silver, and gold, and all the mineral life in the universe, rocketing us out into the vastness of the galaxy, where other stars drew us into their orbits and over the eons we found one another, gathering ourselves together in asteroids, moons, and planets like the Earth.

“They’re our home,” the girl said. We felt the corners of our companion’s mouth curl softly into a smile.

We showed them more then. Showed them how the superheated dust and gases ejected in the explosion became the shimmering veil of a distant nebula within which our mother incubated more stars. In losing her life as a star she generated more heat, more light. More life.

The child saw our memory as a swirling kaleidoscope of color and light, saw scorpions shedding their skins and tadpoles turning into the frogs who sang for the water and the mesa. She saw our birth as a miracle of this fantastic burst of energy.

While the girl saw life renewing, our companion saw herself in our mother. She felt her light dimming, her heat fading, and squeezed Little Miss’s hand, letting the girl know she was happy. Happy that the child understood us as deserving of care and attention from everyone who had benefited from what they’d taken from us, our natural state of life; happy that the child understood that the mesa, the pool, and the frogs needed the same nurture.

Our companion looked at their hands linked, saw her own skin growing transparent, and thought about how tadpoles shifted from one state of life to another. She saw us born in the heat and pulse of that exploding star. She thought again of our mother as she felt her energy failing and we suddenly saw our mother in her, saw why we’d always been connected. We hoped the child could see the star within her great-grandmother at this moment of collapse, could see her explode in a brilliant flash of color and light, mother to stars. Shifting from one state of life to another. Not dying, always present. Generating hope.