Young Writers Society

The sky stretched out for a million years ahead of her. The stars gathered in clusters, pale streaks of the galaxy against the perfect black that glued the universe together. They surrounded her on all sides except for the wasteland underfoot.

Each step she took cracked new lines in the tough, impacted pavement. She wondered how long it had been since someone walked across her tiny section of the expanse. A hundred years, or maybe more.

There was no one in sight. There were no trees, no breaks on the horizon, just cold hard ground and the stars, gazing down on her.

She adjusted her pack, and continued to put one foot in front of the other.

This dead place had no surprises when it came to her footing, it was easier to travel at night and build her shelter against the blistering, unrelenting sun during the day. Days were even lonelier, only her and the parent star, admonishing her for her sins.

Forty-seven days, they told her. The wasteland had once been a jungle, but since a war centuries ago, any growth here had shrivelled up and died and left the dry, cracked skin of the earth bare to the sun. If you were insane enough to try to cross it, it would take forty-seven days.

It transpired that she was exactly insane enough. This was her twenty-eighth day. Every purple dusk, the sky gaping in the most glorious array of colours, she sat cross-legged on the cracked earth and convinced herself she could manage another day.

Every day her pack got a little lighter, her muscles a little leaner.

It was a pilgrimage, in one way. She was atoning as she walked. But she was also walking towards something better.

The stars that shone the brightest were the constellations she learnt in her childhood, birds and heroes and kings and queens, joined here by a million others whose stories had never been deemed important enough to tell. She would spend the middle portion of every night making up the stories for the lesser beings of the sky: the subjects of celestial monarchs, or choirs serenading them. Her favourite thought was the tiniest stars were bees, pollinating the sky gardens, keeping the brightest and most beautiful stars glimmering. 

Stars dipped right down to the horizon on every side. The moon was a bright white crescent, high up above her. The exact same moon as had been hanging over her village when she left.

She would miss her mother and father. She would miss her sister – but her sister wouldn’t miss her. The village would quickly forget her and her reputation would be solidified: a wanderer, a girl with too much stardust in her eyes.

So be it. She was off to find a new life. A new village, maybe, or a city, or a ship.

She liked the idea of living on a ship, on going on those five, ten, fifteen year voyages through the galaxy. Starlight was peace. It was simple, it didn’t ask anything of you.

Everything else was chaos.

It was time for a break. She spread-eagled herself on the flat, fingers digging into the bone dry dust, staring up and the indigo of the sky transformed itself into a whole new colour spectrum of purple and blue and pink, the pinpoints of light scattered on its surface like droplets of white paint.

She had always felt so lonely at home. That was probably why she did what she did. But here, she had millions of friends. Every star had its own system. There may be people living on any of those planets. Billions upon billions of opportunities for her to make new connections, if she felt like it. Fathomless possibility stretched tight over the dome of the sky. She reached her fingers towards the horizon, imagined brushing against it.

She hadn’t spoken a word in twenty-eight days. She had groaned and grunted taking her boots off at night, rubbing the blisters for the first week, until her feet learnt to bear weight of her sins. Now they were hard and calloused, and filthy, and they made her smile

The tiny hydration pills she spent most of her money on had meant she didn’t waste valuable pack space on water. But she was looking forward to a shower, to wiping the grime and sweat from her body.

Not yet.

She ate a little, then stood and stretched and tramped on.

She thought that a month in, surely she would be bored, half-ready to turn back were she not already halfway to the other side of the wasteland. But the truth was, she never wanted it to end. She never wanted to say goodbye to this sky, to this perfect vastness where there was nobody else to bother her. No parents to disappoint. No brother-in-laws to seduce.

No mistakes to make, because there was only one choice. Put one foot in front of the other.

A port shrugged up to the wasteland on the other side of the map. She could wash up there and get a ship to the city, where she would seek transportation off-planet. She estimated that it would be another ten days before the silhouettes of jungle and mountain appeared on the far horizon.

She wasn’t sure how that would feel.

A part of her just wanted to stay here forever. To be alone.

This part of the night, no matter how hard she tried, devoted itself to unwanted memories.

His breath had been hot on her neck as he whispered how she felt like an adventure.

(It was an accident, the first time, she still solemnly believed that. But the third time, the fiftieth time, it was harder to explain).

She wasn’t certain who kissed whom first, only that they had collided in a messy, desperate, passionate way without warning.

(Over time, it only got messier, more desperate, more passionate, and she spent more nights awake, staring at a blank ceiling, wondering how to defeat this monster they had created).

She was certain, however, that she was the one who fell asleep first the day her sister came home early, and found them in a tangle of sheets and sleep and regret.

(If he fell asleep first, she would sit up and keep vigil, read a book or a map or watch the sky, making sure nothing as horrible as her sister walking in would happen).

They banished him from the household, of course. She was a bigger problem. She was still their daughter. They still loved her, even though she heard her father say to her mother, but my dear, you can hardly blame her. You know her. There’s nothing between those ears but space.

So space was what she was setting out to find.

One foot in front of the other. Each step was one further away from the messiness of humanity, and deeper into the wonderful sterility of space.

She had forgotten what it was like to talk, to form words on her tongue and sing them into being. She would have to learn again when she reached the other side, if she planned to get passage on a ship. Hopefully a quiet one, hopefully in a position that didn’t need her to talk too much. She could be a good navigator, she liked maps, and numbers, and they just keyed their findings into the ship mainframe.

Perhaps she would find someone she liked to talk to. Perhaps she would find someone with whom she liked to be silent. Perhaps it would be someone who didn’t find her so alien, who didn’t think wanderlust a sin, or a love of the unknown an exotic thrill. She considered, briefly, what it would be like to make a new friend, or a new family.

She didn’t know. People were unpredictable.

Stars weren’t. Stars were history lessons from light years ago – a constant, unchanging, distant. Stars didn’t care when you slept with their husbands. The stars welcomed you with open arms anyway.

She turned in a slow circle and appreciated her surroundings again.

Yes. Perhaps there were new people waiting for her to finish her atonement, who would forgive her.

Or perhaps there were just stars, and she was entirely content at that notion.