All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

by Bryn Greenwood

I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked.

I might get a whole dozen words out of her before the sun came up. I might even get the three I liked best.

Because a lot of guys don’t like to use condoms. Your daddy sure doesn’t.

MA'AM??

I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

In the meantime, the things that hurt other people healed me.

From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.

In another three hundred thousand years, Voyager 2 might reach as far as the star Sirius, but it would never come home. That was how I felt, as I walked down the driveway to my car. I was moving forward into space, but I would never come home again.