A Path in the Sky

An eight-year-old girl stood knee-deep in the cold creek with a large white bucket, pondering the stones beneath her feet. For some time, she remained quite still, her eyes never leaving the water. A breeze rustled the trees that lined the bank. Spots of light skipped across the surface. She watched small fish dart about her ankles and away downstream. Then, just at the corner of her vision, there was a small movement. She stepped forward and in one motion plunged the bucket through the water and brought it up sharply, then peered into it.

“How many?” someone called.

“Four,” Elise answered.

“Toss them here.”

Elise tipped her bucket and let the four crawdads spill into a large mesh crate. The boy holding the crate hefted it on his hip and continued down towards the other children that were spread out along the creek.

Elise took a few more steps upstream. She felt the creek bed change from slippery rocks to soft mud. Her toes wriggled greedily as deep as they could go. Sand and silt kicked up from the bottom swirled through the water and clouded around her legs. Light hitting the surface caught particles of sand and made them sparkle, like a snow globe. Like the Milky Way.

Elise had only one clear memory from her old life. It was the first night, after the world ended--or changed--or began. She was four years old. The three of them were outside, lying on their backs. They had dragged all the comforters and pillows from the house and built themselves a massive bed on the trampoline. “The world is inside-out so we may as well be, too,” dad had said. They had all piled on--dad, David, and Elise, and after quite a bit of bouncing and pillow fighting, they had finally settled down.

And then, suddenly—“Look!” Elise had cried, a wild finger pointing straight up at the sky.

The night above them was glazed over with more stars than any of them had ever seen before. There were layers up on layers of them, twirling and sparkling, and through it all, a great purple-blue swath of swirling clouds.

“The sky took the lights. That’s why its dark down here. The lights are in the sky,” said Elise.

“Actually,” said dad, “it’s the other way around. Because there is no light pollution anymore, we can finally see the stars.”

“What’s that?” Elise asked of the purple clouds.

“That’s a path,” said David. “The path that’s going to bring mom home.”

“Ohhh.”

“It’s the Milky Way,” said dad. He put his arms around David and Elise and held them close. They fell asleep like that, their hearts tracing paths through the sky.

Elise did not remember what happened after that. She did not remember leaving their house, coming here. She did not remember what they did those first few months, how they survived. Try as she might, she could not remember the last time she had seen her father, or the last thing he said to her. She could not even remember what had happened to him, and David refused to tell her. She could only remember the path in the sky.

In the creek, Elise lifted her gaze from the nebulas in the water to the white, fluffy clouds in the sky. She often wondered what the end of the world had looked like from up there. Could her mother see it happening, from the space station? Did she watch the lights go out from a porthole window? Did she watch the colors of the earth change?

“Elise!” Her head snapped down and she became aware of David striding up behind her with the crate. “Get your head out of the clouds and catch some more! Do you want to eat tonight or not?”

Elise dove forward and plunged her bucket through the water once again. She came up with three crawdads, a shotgun shell, and--

“Hey!” Elise’s hand shot into the bucket and closed around a gold chain with a locket in the shape of a heart.

“What’s that?” asked David.

“This is my necklace!” She held it up to the light and let the dirty water drip off it. “What’s it doing here?”

“It probably fell off your neck, dummy. You really shouldn’t wear that in the creek.” David took the bucket from her other hand and dumped the crawdads into the crate, plucking out the shotgun shell and tossing it aside. He held the bucket back out to Elise, but she did not take it. She was frowning at the necklace. He sighed and dropped the bucket in front of her, where it began to float away. “Come on. It’s time to go back.” David made for the shore.

“But I didn’t wear it today,” Elise said to herself. She stared at the locket for a moment longer before thoughtfully stowing it her pocket. Then she chased down her bucket and joined the line of kids clambering up the creekbank.

After a tasty dinner of crawdads skewered and roasted over a fire in the parking lot, Elise made her way into the old elementary school that was now her home. Preparing to scale her bunk bed in a corner of what used to be the art room, she suddenly paused and remembered the necklace in her pocket. No, she most certainly had not worn it today. She was sure she remembered putting it in the empty watercolor tin that she kept under her pillow.

Had someone stolen it and then lost it in the creek? She glanced at her friend Rosa, already asleep on the lower bunk. Aside from David, she was the only one who knew about the necklace. Elise shook her head. Rosa would never. And besides, how had the necklace been found upstream, when everyone else had been downstream?

The mystery would have to wait for another day. Elise was too tired to sort it all out. She slid the tin out from under her pillow and opened it. She froze.

There in the tin was her own necklace, clean and shiny, right where she left it.

Slowly, Elise pried open the locket in the tin. There was her mother’s smiling face, same as ever. Her curly hair, her sparkling eyes, her dimple.

Then Elise opened the locket from the creek. She looked at her own messy hair, her own round eyes, her own dimpled cheeks. She looked at the photo her mother had taken of her when she was four years old. The photo she had placed in this locket.

The locket she had worn into space.

“Mom is dead, same as dad. And if not, she will be soon. Supplies can’t last forever up there, and they have no way of getting back down.” David had examined the locket for about 0.2 seconds before tossing it back. His eyes had widened so briefly that Elise was not sure it had really happened before his face went flat and cold again. “Besides, there must be countless lockets like that. How do you even know that photo is of you? It could be any old ugly baby.”

Elise ignored this comment. “Maybe they had escape pods.”

“Those are only in the movies.”

“I’ve never seen a movie.”

“Books, then.”

“I don’t know how to read.”

David was done with the conversation. With an exasperated sigh, he rolled over in his bunk and turned his back to her. “Go bother someone else’s brother.”

Elise sat down on the floor in the hallway and leaned against the wall. She pulled the lockets out of her pocket and held them both open in her palm, side by side. Mother and daughter.

Then she had a thought. She jumped up and poked her head back into David’s room.

“David?”

“What?” He turned his head.

“What about the path?”

David stared at her for a long time. Elise could not read his expression. Finally, he rose and hopped down from his bunk. Elise smiled, for a second.

“See David, it must be—” David reached the door and shut it in her face.

“Get your head out of the clouds,” said a muffled voice.

Elise’s feet pressed gingerly on the cold tile floor. Both necklaces clinked against each other on her chest. She stuffed her pockets with all the snacks she had managed to hoard under her mattress. Then she crept through the quiet building and slipped out into the night.

In the parking lot, Elise paused and looked up. The Milky Way stretched above her in a great cloudy arc. Her eyes followed it through the sky to where it touched the horizon, just above the creek. It was pointing upstream.

As she walked, Elise talked aloud to keep herself company. She told herself the stories of all the precious few memories she held onto from before.

“I had a grey stuffed elephant with pink ears.”

“I used to like taking baths.”

“One time we went on a trip and climbed a mountain.”

“Mom told me she loved me before she left for space, and she smelled like candy.”

Elise was not sure if this last one was true. She did not actually remember the day her mother had launched, and she certainly did not remember the smell of candy. But she was sure her mother had loved her.

It occurred to Elise that she did not actually know her mother’s name.

“That’s the first thing I’ll ask her, when I meet her.” And she marched on.

After an hour or two of walking, Elise was getting tired. She crouched down on the bank and chewed on the venison jerky she pulled from her pocket. She stared into the water and absentmindedly touched her necklaces. She blinked hard to keep awake.

A sound reached her from just beyond the trees. Something was clanging faintly, like a screen door left open. Elise stood and listened. She walked further up the bank and peered through the trees.

Up beyond a bend, in the distance, something large and metallic glowed in the moonlight, leaning against the creek bank. Elise walked faster. All around her, shapes grew out of the darkness. Hunks of metal, shredded into strange contortions. Elise dodged between them, her walk becoming a run, her run becoming a sprint. She ran as hard as she could alongside the creek, she ran until she could hardly breathe.

And then, she was there.

A massive hull rose in front of her, so high that she could not see over the top. Like stars in the Milky Way, certain spots along the surface became illuminated to her as handholds and footholds. A pathway leading into the sky. Without hesitation, Elise began to climb.

She reached the top and peered over and down. Before her, a yawning darkness sank into the belly of the craft. Dimly she could make out the outlines of various equipment, some sort of large boxy shape, straps hanging every which way.

The eight-year-old girl clung to the edge of the mangled spacecraft. For several minutes, she remained stock still, eyes piercing the depths beneath her. Not a single breeze stirred the air, not even a breath escaped the girl’s lips. She watched oil drip from a crack in the opposite wall. She smelled the acrid scent of melted rubber.

Then, in the furthest corner of the darkness – a sound.

Elise leaned forward.

“Mom?”