Sci-Fi Flash Fiction by Jasper Woods
Romme never slept. This should’ve been a clue. But I assumed it was a condition and dismissed it. It just never concerned me. I shouldn’t’ve assumed. Should’ve wondered more. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently.
After Romme read me to sleep, he would slide out of our bed, out our bedroom, sit on our couch, and plunk away on the internet all night. I have to pee way more than any sleeping person ought and would always pass his beautiful, round face illuminated in the blue light of our laptop. TBH, all of this came with some initial wondering and then getting used to, but after our first year—poof!—normal. Didn’t cause us problems. I could always see he wasn’t porn-ing, or having some heated, all-night tryst over the interwebs. I trusted what he told me. “Just searching for who I am.” Adorable, I thought. Gave me the swoons.
Much later, when he told me what he found, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what to me was unbelievable, unknowable, all the un-ables.
Romme and I walked the park often. Loved the grove of trees. The clean smell of them. Their writhing stillness. During our giddy chats, we decided the lithe, swooping saplings were a troop of ballet dancers, enchanted and tableaued across the proscenium of bustling prairie grass. Birds embroidering their branching long arms. We would dance with them.
One fine day, as we sauntered along the crushed limestone path, pinkies interlocked, arms easy, swaying, I could tell Romme needed to get something out. When all was nominal to joyful between us, he’d be gazing to the dome of our sky. But on that day, his nose was pointed to the ground, lips twisting back and forth as though kneading the dough of his cheeks.
As we ambled, I prodded a bit at first but then let silence do its thing. We neared Bernard, an ancient blackjack oak we’d adopted. Our tree, our Bernard who sprawls out and up, as though they were the choreographer of the ensemble of saplings pirouetting and sashaying round about. Romme stopped at Bernard’s trunk, looked at me, smiled. The knee-weakening smile that brushed tension from my shoulders, warmed my palms. His smile said, Time to do our ritual. Stepping to Bernard, we pressed our hands on their gray craggy trunk, closed our eyes, and felt for a wish.
Mission accomplished, we nodded and encircled Bernard and each other in a group hug, squishing our eyes closed, grinning like a certain cat, and releasing a loud “Yip!” to furrow our wish into Bernard’s rough, wide trunk, so they might ferry it down into their roots, out through the eternal mycelium to be nourished and born back to us on a floating white seed one of us would catch and split. We’d look into each other’s eyes and in unison swallow our half of the seed.
We worked all of this out over time and after a few hits of weed.
Ritual complete, Romme said, “Let’s sit.”
We laid our backs against Bernard. I raised my eyebrows in a what’s up? arc.
He laughed. “You know me so well.”
I shrugged and sang, “Guilty.” My play at being cute and my overdone smile a weak attempt to lid a simmer of nerves. Romme wasn’t one to have trouble getting something out. There was no gate between Romme’s thoughts and voice.
“You know I love you forever, always,” he said.
I took a breath. Simmer now a boiling sorrow stinging my eyes. I nodded.
“I found out who I am.”
“Ok. That’s great?”
“It is.”
“But?”
Romme rolled his shoulders as though to slough off a barbell bowed with weights. “But I’m not from here.”
“I know that.” Romme was from the country, a farm, adopted. We’d covered all of this on our first date years ago.
“No. I mean from here here.”
Nerves now an active volcano, I blew out a burble, palms squishing my cheeks to stave off an eruption. “Romme please just say what you’ve got to say. It feels like you’re breaking us up and I’d sooner that just be done if that’s what’s going on.”
“It’s not but I don’t know if that’s going to be mutual.”
“Ugh. Romme! Just say it.”
And Romme did, as though I’d uncapped a thoroughly shaken soda can.
“To find my birth parents, learn my genealogy, my history, my people, I did the DNA thing. What I got back was super super weird.”
Eyes stretched to their limit, I nodded. It’s all I could do.
“Instead of being peppered across the globe as everyone’s is, my DNA hunkered down in a single spot in the middle of nowhere Kansas. A hamlet of three hundred—Trixonia.”
“Trixonia.” My head continued to bob.
“That’s where I’m from.”
“You’re from Trixonia, Kansas?”
“No. That’s where my people live here. I’m from another planet, Trixon9. A moon, actually, circling a dead planet in the Trixonia system, six hundred quadrillion light years from here.”
“That sounds really far.” Had to start somewhere.
“It is and it isn’t. But you and I might be moving into a long-distance relationship, if you’re willing to still have me.”
My head shook, eyes blinking as though they were shades being raised and lowered by a five-year-old on a sugar high. “How isn’t that really really far?”
“My people told me the trip only takes a breath.”
“Your people from Trixonia, Kansas?”
“Yes, the enclave, they call it. They—we have a chat room to find others. It’s a long story, but basically we migrated here. Some of us. I got lost along the way.” Romme’s bright blue eyes I loved to bathe in sparkled like Olympic fireworks. He was excited. I was not.
Jubilant, he said, “You see?! That’s why I’ve always felt like I don’t belong. Like an outsider. Because I don’t belong here.”
“Hold on.” I raised a firm hand, and my voice took on the tone of an objecting lawyer. “Romme. We belong to each other. To us.”
“Yes. That’s why I’m telling you. I have to leave so I can come back.”
He went on about how he needed to get to know who he was by going back to wherever he was from and hang out with his people and blah blah blah. I didn’t understand. Didn’t want to. Still don’t. I shared my bazillion other questions, arguments. “You met my parents, can’t I meet yours?” “Can’t we just move to Kansas?” More.
Romme answered. Assured me he come back. Wouldn’t be long, but he didn’t know how long.
Over the next week, I went into a fugue. I cried. We cried. I played aloof. He gave me space. I was supportive and accepting. He was thankful. I was selfish and petulant. He apologized for what he felt he had to do. I surrendered and pretended nothing was going to change. But then it did.
I found his note, held it in my trembling hand, read it, and then raced to the roof.
Been a time since I ran and up thirteen flights = never. The thuds of my heart a mix of my sprint through the bitter-smelling stairwell, my please please please prayer Romme would still be here, my fear he would not. What kept me climbing despite my screaming thighs—a thin hope to see him just once more. Share a word, a touch, a glance to keep him here. Keep him tethered to this world, to me.
I burst through the hard gray door to the roof. The sky, low with clouds, enveiled the tops of the silver buildings lording over our apartment. The roof’s black, rubbery floor smelled of oil and spread out in all directions to the knee-high brick squaring its edge. I spotted Romme. Held back a relieved gasp. He stood at the far corner, one purple high-top on the roof’s floor, one on the ledge, gazing beyond the clouds, beyond the dome of our little bubble through the vastness to his home.
My thighs groaned, No more running!, so I walked toward him, attempting casual. “Thought you could get away without saying goodbye, huh?” I managed a wilting smile.
His head turned and I stopped. Romme’s crystal blue eyes were replaced with glistening black orbs, elongating toward his temples. Stubble of brown hair crowning his bald pate was now a flood of thickening, black dreads. His skin grayed. He still wore the blue jeans he’d pulled on that morning, the pilot’s leather jacket (found it at Thrifty Corner, last year’s anniversary gift), the faded black t-shirt, but all were tighter and would soon burst at their seems. I swallowed my surprise as well as a fleeting hubba hubba. I sauntered on, thinking, Keep it light. Keep it cool. “Wow. Happening fast, your … your ….” What’s the word? Transformation? Metamorphosis?
Gracious and kind as ever, Romme helped out. “Re-becoming, I think is how your words would describe it.”
Your words. Ouch. Now Romme’s words were his home’s words, not this world’s words, my words. Once, our words.
But, his voice was still Romme’s. This stuttered my step. I clenched my fists to absorb a sob. I don’t want to miss your voice. The soft, deep, reverberating tones, playful at our morning parting for the world of pointless work, reading me to sleep as I cuddled an arm across his chest, arguing with me about what he felt he had to do—go home.
There on the roof’s edge, I did get my wished-for glance and a touch. More words were pointless. After I kissed his now-black lips, Romme told me to back up. I did. What appeared to be a very large, blue, gas flame encircled him, and Romme was gone.
Been a week. New nightly routine: wander to the park, summon Bernard to grant my wish, hold it in my chest as though it were a dove, walk back into the city and its smell of piss and trash, climb thirteen decaying floors (my thighs are now very toned), walk to the roof’s corner, and release my wish to sail beyond our sky, cross the vastness, and wait for the return of my beloved’s blue flame.The End
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