Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch: Melissa Bowers’s hybrid piece “What I Know about Space” uses descriptions of the cosmos as a distancing tactic, its vignettes functioning as satellites swirling around a deeper issue for the speaker. The meaning and reinterpretation of “space” paired with the facts presented ultimately create a layered effect that interrogates issues of identity and purpose within families. As the speaker moves through time, the celestial bodies above her remain constant, offering her an escape from her mutable present, or at the very least, the small comfort of a distant, unchangeable expanse.
To hear Melissa read this piece, click here:
What I Know About Space
If you ask fifty people what makes Saturn different, they will all independently give the same answer: Rings. Try it—they will, it’s a fact. They’ll be right, but they will also be wrong. Jupiter has rings, and Uranus. So does Neptune. It’s just that Saturn’s are so spectacular, everything else fades, invisible by comparison.
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From the hood of a ’99 Silverado, you can count eighteen stars before someone reaches for the zipper of someone else’s jeans.
Three miscarriages, two children, and a financial catastrophe later, you can count 174 stars through a smudged bedroom window before giving up and rolling to the edge of the mattress.
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A new moon isn’t actually new: it is old, weary, hiding, the overwhelm deepening each crater until its only choice is to disappear. From there that moon will spend weeks trying to rebuild itself, a full month learning to be whole again sliver by sliver.
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This planet could fit inside the sun a million times, but the closer we get, the more inhospitable our environment becomes. We are warm and comfortable only so long as we circle from a distance, wear dark glasses, stand in the shade, protect bare skin, guard as much of ourselves as we possibly can.
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To be an astronaut when you grow up, there is a checklist of other things you must also be:
√ Highly educated
√ Experienced in some related field
√ Able to pass stringent physicals
√ Selected from a pool of » fifteen thousand qualified applicants
√ Determined
√ Brave
√ Committed. And not in the way we thought we meant it, the I do or I will or I promise. Rocket ships don’t just turn back on a whim—they systematically leave bits of themselves behind after lift-off, discard parts piece by piece, until all that remains is essential for survival.
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If a three-year-old wants to be an astronaut when she grows up, she puts on a space suit and trusts she will become one. At last we agree on something, this pact communicated through a locked glance over our lifted coffee mugs: neither of us will mention the checklist, not yet. Maybe not ever. We’ll just let her believe.
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Normally, people can last three to six minutes without oxygen. In a vacuum, you have fifteen seconds before your own body betrays you—before every exposed liquid begins to boil, before you swell to almost-explosion. But your blue-tinged skin is still elastic enough to hold in the mess, to keep everything just this side of a gruesome burst. Even from up close, no one can see your organs rupturing.
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What I know about space is that I need more of it, and less of it, and more of us, and less, in the way an asteroid orbits safely as it considers whether to disintegrate or break violently apart, whether it would eventually be worth it to shatter the Earth.
Melissa Bowers is the winner of the 2020 Breakwater Fiction Prize as well as The Writer’s inaugural personal essay contest, and her stories have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for Best Small Fictions 2021. Melissa’s work has also appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, Atticus Review, Greensboro Review, and Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Find her online at www.melissabowers.com.
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