Dannie Cullen

You were in your fourth when I found you swimming in the oceans of West Santiago (or floating, at least). It didn’t matter that there was a severe lack of water in West Santiago. Or a severe lack of ocean for that matter. Things like that never mattered to you. Instead you say, “space is always a good place to swim.” 

I was surprised you remembered that to be honest. Skipping parallels was almost unheard of by now and most people were gone by their third. It was a big risk to take and I couldn’t work out why you were here. Perhaps you had sensed the shift in the aerosphere. The undercurrent of disquiet. Ascending to the vacant space of what was once beside me. Around me. Shaking hands across leisure… the cool waters of caves and waterfalls… skin against skin.

God I missed that.

God.

Your hands were covered in rust and as I dipped them into the night you told me stories of shipwrecks and spiders and you sang me tales of great white birds that could speak your name. 

You didn’t remember my name. Neither did you remember The Last War of the Last Satellites but that… that was probably a good thing. The last satellite crashed off Jupiter’s Jovian ring system and we would have probably been dead if we hadn’t both been hitching a ride off-planet. 

I hear you make some joke about Leo and we laugh and I can feel my bones slipping from my soul and into the fifth. I wonder if I can fight it this time and stay. Instead your fingers reach under my skin, pulling at my very being, squeezing gently above and below, blades in the middle, all heart in empty spaces. The feeling is familiar, as if everything that has happened is connected. As if there was some sort of greater plane. An Outer Sector. 

I barely have time to think about it before a light beckons us into the liquid night below.