Laura Parker
Our second moon, Acheron, is not made of cheese like the first moon. Quite the opposite, in fact — it’s made of dead bodies.
I wonder how I’ll explain this to my future daughter as the space shuttle departs. I take Dramamine — takeoff makes me queasy, and I can’t afford to throw up on the job again. I put my headphones in to drown out the sound of frozen corpses shifting in the back, and shut my eyes to the shrinking of the Earth.
Overcrowding is a bitch. We barely have enough room to breathe, but they still let people choose not to be cremated because of religious rights. Then when the government finally let the Deceased Management Organization start sending new corpses to Acheron, the “Dead Rights Activists” picketed until the DMO agreed to have someone stay with them at all times. Something about their souls, I guess.
The shuttle lands.
“Back for more?” Jones is waiting for me on the base. He’s a sitter — he stays on Acheron with the bodies for a month at a time, sends the money home to his wife and kids. It’s not a bad gig if you don’t mind the solitude.
“You know I can’t stay away.”
We met at training camp when he caught me throwing up and I made him promise not to tell management that I’m pregnant. It’s a competitive market, so they can afford to not hire someone just to get out of paying maternity leave. By the time they found out, they’d already signed my contract. I’ll have to take some time off once this pregnancy thing gets further along, but for now, my bills are paid.
As a runner, I do the transport. In this economy, it’s a good job — $450 a run, no health insurance benefits but I get to control my schedule, and each run only takes two days so I can still make my prenatal visits. I can usually fit in about two runs a week, which leaves me three days off to work on painting the spare room in my apartment and baby-proofing the place.
Jones and I spend a few hours unloading the bodies onto the platform. This is my least favorite part of the job. The stench of slightly defrosted meat fills my nose, and I’m reminded of anatomy lab in high school when the girl next to me cried because she didn’t want to dissect a cat.
We chat for a bit afterwards, then Jones gives me a gift wrapped in newspaper.
It’s a onesie. A cartoon spaceship, aimed at the moon:
Future astronaut!
LAURA PARKER is a fourth-year nursing student from South Jersey, with a minor in writing and a concentration in sitting in on as many classes as possible before graduation hits and the free ride ends. She has been published in Glass Mountain Magazine’s Shards 2.5, and Prairie Margins Magazine. She also won second place in the Mimi Schwartz Creative Nonfiction Contest and recently had a piece nominated for the Kennedy-Gregg Writing Award. She enjoys DIY projects, buying and then ignoring plants, and (sometimes) writing.