This Is Where I Won't Be Alone

by Inez Tan

He scratches Plato, who doesn’t stir from his slumber.

  Moon, moon, loyal old friend.

  That evening, when Tamara is doing nothing in particular, her phone rings. It’s such a rare occurrence that some of the newer dogs start to bark frantically. Tamara feels a surge of guilt. It was her turn to call.

  “Mom!” says Quinn breathlessly on the call screen. Her face still hasn’t lost all the roundness she gained in her pregnancy. “How are you? How is Acey?”

  Tamara hears her own voice say mechanically that she and Acey are fine. She realises she should ask about her granddaughter, but the name suddenly escapes her, so she asks, “How is the little one?”

  “Awful. Teething,” Quinn says. But she’s smiling.

  “Some of the dogs have been having trouble with their teeth lately too,” Tamara fibs, just to have something to say.

  Luckily, Quinn hasn’t been listening closely. She’s repositioned the phone somewhere so that the camera looks out over Quinn and the wide-eyed toddler in her arms. “Hey, Cynthia?” Quinn’s voice floats over. “Remember what you wanted to say to grandma?”

  “Habby,” Cynthia gurgles, with a huge open-mouthed smile, “Habby, buh-day!”

  “Lord,” says Tamara involuntarily, under her breath.

  “Cynthia wants to know when she’ll get to meet you, grandma,” says Quinn’s voice.

  “Maybe next year,” Tamara lies even more guiltily. Going to the moon was always a childhood dream of hers. She had waited until Quinn headed off to college, and then she up and left. When Quinn and Luis got married, Tamara took a ship down to attend the wedding. But she missed the dogs terribly when she was there, and she swore, secretly, to never leave them again.

  Tamara knows she does not fit the profile of a cookiebaking, apron-wearing grandmother, not the kind Quinn would like for her children. To Tamara, it seems better to be absent; it’s certainly easier, which is not an insignificant factor. Quinn, of all people, should understand.

  And that upsets her more, the thought that her own daughter has forgotten what she’s like.

  “Hey, Cynthia?” says Quinn, looking away from the screen. “You wanna say hi Grandma? Huh? Wanna say hi to Grandma?”

  Tamara loses sight of her daughter as Quinn pockets the phone. She can hear Quinn bouncing her daughter on her hip. “Come on, Cynthia! Come on! Let’s go outside! Come on!”

  Tamara absent-mindedly runs her hands through nearby fur. Ixchel, her favourite husky, gives a complacent sound all in his throat.

  “Oh, look!” cries Quinn, her voice muffled. “Look, Cynthia, look! It’s the moon! It’s Grandma on the moon! Wave to Grandma, Cynthia! Wave to Grandma!”

  Tamara pictures her daughter and her tiny daughter standing outside their house, overlooking the susurrant cornfields down the hill, and she’s glad that Quinn can’t see the expression on her face. First, Norma and Pavo, and now this. She’s turning into such a sentimental old woman.

  She remembers her girlhood in New England, remembers waking up and seeing the rooftops of red brick buildings glitter with freshly fallen snow. Now, the velvety grey surface of the pitted moon makes her think of how everything must turn to dust and powder.

  “Hi, Cynthia,” Tamara says softly. She peers out into space.

  We go out into space, to the silent landscape, carrying the bodies, carrying their names. Pavo, Norma—meaning the peacock, the carpenter’s level. Within our mythology we craft ourselves.

  We drive the trash out to the far side of the moon and bury it securely underground. We have a responsibility not to create any debris that could blaze back through the atmosphere and lay waste to other planets.

  Sometimes the other trash collectors fool around. If they find something shaped like a ball, they kick it far across the fallow plains. Myself, the seething desire I sometimes have is to rip open the bags and scatter the material within, knowing that the contents will fly until they reach equilibrium in orbit, travelling along a path that encircles the moon. I would cry, Look, we cannot escape the things that were ours! Throw nothing away, for we are all God’s creations!

  But God tells me, that is not the way I would have you serve. That is not the way of love. My ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts. So be faithful in your work, Jacob. When you dig down deep, you will find the ladder to heaven.

  The wretched refuse will be your teeming shore.

  Yevgeny is making the last trip of the day, back to the landing port, steering between rocks that are between 3 and 4.6 billion years old. He is still surprised to think of how he made his home on this great rock that pulls the tides, that literally changes the shape of planet Earth.

  The moon has always made people wonder. They gazed upon it and came up with endless inventions: lovesickness, lycanthropy, fleets of witches riding broomsticks. Thinking the moon was made of silver, men gazed towards it and jingled the change in their pockets. Now, someone must drive this shuttle daily between the main base and the port. Since Yevgeny started, he hasn’t been back Earthside once.

  He’d like to retire before he’s fifty, when the body really starts to wear down. There’s not much in the way of medical care on the moon. On the other hand, the longer you stay moonside, the harder it gets to readjust to Earth. Some of his old friends, like Rigo, like Taurus, like Yang, flew down to Earth only to cross straight over again. Couldn’t make it back on the home planet. Missed it here on the moon.

  It’s pretty, too. Never a rainy day.

  In the driver’s seat of the shuttle, Yevgeny folds his leathery brown arms over his chest and goes right to sleep. Above him hangs a crescent-shaped bite of a blue and green orb, swirled with white. Colour out there too, and life.

  William Anders, a member of the third NASA group of astronauts, was the first to send the home planet photographs of itself. The images are hauntingly beautiful. They give us a glimpse of our place in the universe. We remember him for saying, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

  Acknowledgements

  “Somewhere is better than anywhere.”

  —Flannery O’Connor

  I WOULD LIKE to thank the following publications, where several of these stories first appeared: Fairy Tale Review, The Irish Literary Review, Letters Journal (Yale Institute of Sacred Music), Print-Oriented Bastards, Psychopomp, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Singapore Unbound.

  Long before I knew I was writing a book on home and belonging, I was lucky enough to have many, many people pour themselves into me, whether they were down the street or half a world away. So much of what’s in here was given to me by someone else. This is where I get to say thank you.

  Thank you to my teachers and friends at Williams College, where these stories first began: Andrea Barrett, Lawrence Raab, Karen Shepard and my terrific thesis adviser, Jim Shepard. Thanks also to Hwa Yue-yi, Emily Yu, Effua Sosoo, Lia McInerney, Molly Olguín and Christopher Logan, for being the most incredible friends, then and now.

  Thank you to my teachers and cohort at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ MFA Program. Special thanks to Lauren Prastien, Katie Willingham, Samiah Haque, Melinda Misener and Peter Ho Davies, who believed in me when I didn’t.

  Thank you, Kundiman, for wanting to see these stories go out into the world. I’m so honoured to be part of the Kundifam!

  Thank you to my teachers and cohort at the University of California, Irvine MFA Program, for investing in me and giving me more space to grow. I am truly grateful for your encouragement. Special thanks to Michael Andreasen and Kaily Dorfman. You are the cream in my coffee and the honey in my tea.

  Thank you to friends in Singapore—Ong Shu Wen and Chia Po Linn (we have been writing since we were ten!), Zhen and Matt Choo, and Zhang Ruihe. For years you have jumped into black holes to pull me out. You mean more to me than I can possibly say.

  Thank you, Epigram Books, for providing a home for these stories: Edmund Wee, fo
r tirelessly championing local literature; Jason Erik Lundberg, for your editorial wizardry; and Yong Wen Yeu, for your showstopping cover art.

  Thank you to my family, for always being there for me. Thank you, Sng Wei Tien, for your boundless enthusiasm.

  And finally, thank you to my parents, for loving me and supporting me from the very start.

  About the Author

  INEZ TAN holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of California, Irvine. Her work has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Softblow, Rattle, Fairy Tale Review and the anthology A Luxury We Must Afford. This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone is her debut short story collection. Find her online at ineztan.com.