Aubrey Hirsch
1. THE DISPATCHAmong the Stars
My granddaughter, Ray, is obsessed with constellations. She can find them all, even the obscure, complicated ones like Berenice's hair and the keel of the Argonauts’ ship. “I’d never even heard of that one,” her father says in the letter, “but she knows them all by heart.” She is only three, but she’s already a genius.
Then Ray is 16, getting ready for a school dance. There’s a picture of her tucked into the envelope: a sleeveless dress, pink lips, hair piled on top of her head. She smiles with her mouth closed. She doesn’t like the gap between her front teeth, but her father refuses to let her fix it. It reminds him of my daughter, his wife, who died when Ray was born.
Two months later, when I arrive at Starbase 174, another letter is waiting. Ray is five. It takes me a little while to realize that this may be the first letter she wrote to me herself. I’ve seen so many in her handwriting by now: Ray age seven, Ray age nine, Ray age 18, 22, 26. Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure. There could be other, earlier letters, waiting at other starbases.
The letters were her father’s idea. He was always more of a writer than a talker, according to my daughter. When she died, he found it difficult to call me on the video monitors. “Your face,” he said, “it’s her face, too.” Or the radios, “Your voice is her voice.” It distressed him to think about this older version of his wife, now that he knew she would never exist. So instead, he wrote to me.
At first, he sent the letters electronically, hurtling from satellite to satellite, at nearly the speed of light. But soon he decided he wanted me to have the actual letters, “the things we’ve touched,” was how he put it. We’ve been on different starships for all of Ray’s life: his a science vessel where Ray’s father is an engineer, mine a retirement cruiser where I sit in comfort watching the stars. When he reaches a starbase, he leaves me a letter to retrieve, in case my ship ever happens to pass that way. It’s difficult to wait so long for their words, but I will admit, it’s nice to touch the things they’ve touched.
At Starbase 614, Ray has gotten into Irish dance. She has an Irish best friend who is teaching her lifts and overs and sevens.
At Starbase 355, Ray has just learned to roll over. “She finally sleeps well!” her father writes. “Just needed to be on her belly to dream.”
At Starbase 512, Ray is asking about her mother. It breaks her father’s heart, he writes, to tell her she will never come back.
For the first 15 years, I found the letters only rarely, but we’ve been dancing around the galaxy so long now that the letters are nearly everywhere. Sometimes there are several envelopes waiting for me at a starbase, if their ship has visited more than once before mine ever made it to that sector.
Ray is nine and has given up playing the flute. Ray is 20 and in love with a boy named Mark. Ray is five and cries every day when the nanny takes her to school. Ray marries a woman named Angela. Ray earns high honors her first semester of college. Ray gets a flute for her sixth birthday.
It’s a chaotic way to observe a life, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. At first I kept the letters organized by date, assembling them in a binder in a linear progression I could follow from her birth. I became frustrated by the blank spaces between them, the chapters I knew were missing. I was scared I would live to see the end of the story. Watching the binder fill felt like watching sand slide through the narrow opening of an hourglass.
Now I keep the letters in the order that I found them. I find I much prefer to experience Ray like this: a woman of 24, cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the first time; then a girl of seven who has read about skipping rocks and is sad there aren’t any streams on starships; a baby whose father, in a lightning strike of genius only true desperation can inspire, fills her crib with pacifiers so she can easily find one in the night; one moment, a hopeful young adult; the next, a sullen child; a teenager; then a toddler; now a baby; now a wife.
The Ray in my letters doesn’t age. She lives the dream of those of us lucky enough to grow old. She isn’t welded into a train car, hurtling from one year to the next, always in the same direction: relentlessly forward, forward, forward. When Ray loses something, it isn’t gone forever; it’s waiting for her to connect again a few starbases over. One day, Ray can shop for her wedding gown. And the next, feel what it’s like to wiggle a loose tooth. She can have a favorite book that she knows by heart and then, one morning, pick it up to read it for the very first time. Ray can feel her wife’s last breath dissipate into the air, and, two years later, bring her breakfast in bed on her birthday.
Time cycles around her like the constellations in the sky: now fish, now fawn, now charioteer. When the great bear sets, she need only wait, content in the knowledge that he will rise again.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYLaptop
Drawing monitor
Stack of neglected tax documents
Chapstick
Kids headphones for Minecrafting
Magazines with recent work: TIME, Story, The Nib
3. BIOGRAPHYAubrey Hirsch is a 2022 NEA fellow in literature and the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a short story collection, and This Will Be His Legacy, a flash fiction chapbook. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared in The New York Times, TIME, American Short Fiction, Vox, The Rumpus, The Nib, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at aubreyhirsch.com or follow her on twitter: @aubreyhirsch.