She’s picked up her grandson from school, taken him to the food carts, given in to his pleas to go roller skating instead of doing his homework. She watches from the bench. The strobe lights flit across her front like the ghosts of swallows. Thinking of the way they flocked in the sky, thousands of miles away, makes her dizzy. She grips the seat. It’s cold, solid. She breathes against a rising sense of displacement and frailty.
Her grandson zips around the circle. His skates move, shadowy, gliding with perfect haphazard motions, each foot its own graceful, independent animal. His skin pulses, the color of seafoam. He wears his hair long. It sparkles in greenish strands, flittering behind him, blowing in the gusts from the fans like iridescent seaweed. He’s gesturing to her. C’mon, gran! But the space station’s artificial gravity makes her feel that at any moment she could topple over.
She used to love skating, down below. She can feel the sun on her face, the salt in her nose, the boardwalk falling behind her like butter under her wheels. She’d felt like a giant then, a strange and glorious warrior, her shadow flickering, impossibly long and thick, as she winged her way past the beachfront restaurants, the salt-crusted statue of Neptune, the railings topped by perching gulls. She smells funnel cake frying, sunscreen on the breeze.
Relocation. What a load of crap. We’ll be pioneers, Mom, her daughter had said. She’d been wearing her lab coat round the clock, her face tilted up to the ceiling. The first colonists in the asteroid belt!
But the consequences… How to adapt to living in an endless field of rocks. Nobody’d understood how they’d struggle for nourishment, grow weak and petty.
Out in the rink, a preschooler loses control, staggers into her grandson’s path. He reaches out a glowing hand, steadies the child with a touch to her shoulder, spins in a circle to be sure she’s ok, continues his liquid stroll. The preschooler is jaundiced, skinny. She tugs at a lank pigtail, clearly uncomfortable.
Well, let her. Her grandson’s a good boy, even if he’s the only green one out
there. He gets funny looks. He’s come home with a purple shiner. Her daughter’s taken it too far. It’s the perfect combination of elements, Mom, she’d said. Magnesium, iron, manganese, copper, zinc. His body converts light into food! This wouldn’t have been possible on Earth.
Everyone had stripped the place of its metals, that much was true. The ocean she loved had turned red, brackish, the air permeated with sulfur. ‘Come on, Gran!’ The boy’s standing before her, his face so strange, like the frond of a fern, the chlorophyll pulsating in infinite, life-giving rivers beneath the skin. ‘I know you want to!’ How could someone so bright, so sturdy, be so fragile, so constrained? But he’d agreed. He’s not like the rest of us, Mom, her daughter said. Without doses of sun, he’ll go out.
The kid with the pigtails is over at the barrier, talking to her mother. They’re looking at her boy like he’s some kind of freak. He shouldn’t be alone out there, she thinks. He’s got an empty hemisphere of space around him, as if he’s holding a ten-foot pole. He pretends not to notice, but he bends, sharp and thin under the razor of solitude.
When she stands up, she’s wobbly. She makes her way to the rental desk. The kid behind it gives her a skeptical look, puts the skates on the counter close to him so she has to reach far to pick them up. She hadn’t even stopped skating when she was pregnant, she thinks. She’d been so confident, so secure. And she hadn’t fallen once, even as her center of gravity shifted, while she was knitting the miracle of blood, muscle, and bone that was her daughter in her womb. What’s happened to her?
The laces give her trouble. It takes a minute to get her footing on the rug, but when she steps onto the glossy wood it seems no time has passed.
‘Gran!’ The boy’s alongside her. His smile could split the stars. She feels a wave of impossible love, of pride, as he reaches out his hand, takes hers, comes to skate in front of her, backwards. They’re dancing together. The fan ruffles her hair, brings the smell of varnish, footlike skate odors, popcorn. She laughs. The boy twirls. He’s beautiful, prismatic, lighting the way in the dark.
This close, though, she sees his color’s fading. She’s opening her mouth to tell him they have to leave when the next song starts. It’s her favorite. It makes her feel invincible, expansive, as though she’s rushing forward into beauty, into grace.
Just this one, she thinks.
She speeds up, raises her hands in the air. He’s beside her, this child of cosmic dust, of elements from comets, exoplanets, floating boulders—all purified, let loose in his body. They swoop. They crouch, rise together. He breaks away. He’s flying free, weaving through the crowd, his green hair pulsing, fading like a lit string receding into the distance, and she realizes she’s made a mistake, that they should be outside, immediately, right now.
She kicks at the ground. It’s as if she’s racing down the boardwalk, outrunning a storm. She grapples with breathlessness, determined to find him, make for the exit, burst through the doors into the blaring light of the orange, faraway sun. Another song begins—slow, drippy, saccharine. She skates faster, bucks the mood, and the wheel of her skate catches on itself, contorts beneath her. As her body teeters, threatening to fall, she can see her daughter’s face. Mom. You promised. Her muscles catch her, swing her upright, and she’s plowing forward, swimming through the sea of bodies flickering in the strobe, toward the darting green will-o-the-wisp that is her grandson, hurtling toward him because she can, because she’s capable as hell, before it’s too late.
Right from the first lines, this writer has embedded a sense of menace and strangeness into the story. With strong technical skill, big themes of isolation, regret, and marginalisation are treated deftly. A highly original use of critical minerals in this sobering tale.
Amanda O’Callaghan
Amazing use of colour in a story that made the themes within it sparkle.
JC Niala
JR Fenn is a multi-genre writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Witness, Gulf Coast, and more. Her fiction chapbook, Tiny Vessels, won The 2024 Masters Review Chapbook Open and is now available from Red Mare Press. Other recognitions include the New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction, the Robert Colley Prize for Fiction, Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominations, and appearances in the Bath, Bristol, and Oxford Award Anthologies. Her writing has been supported by Ucross, Orion, Writing by Writers, and the Key West Literary Seminar, among other places. She teaches Fiction and Environmental Writing at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her family. Follow her at @jr.fenn (IG) // @jess.fenn.37 (FB) // @jrfenn.bsky.social (BSKY).
