by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
As they danced together, Anno and Drathur finally had the moment of semi-privacy they needed to discuss the morning’s altercation and its fallout. The conversation went more easily than Anno expected, as Drathur had already arrived at the same conclusion. She didn’t even have to say it; he said it for her: “Of course we should invite Kya to come back to New Heffe with us. I don’t know if she’ll want to come — the population is ninety percent Heffen, but she makes all of us happy. She fits right into our family, and we’d be lucky to have her.”
Anno rested her head against Drathur’s shoulder as they swayed to the music together. She nodded, knowing he could feel the movement of her head. She was relieved to not have to say anything. Talking to her mother had left her feeling like she never wanted to speak again. What good did it do? When she’d spent her entire childhood trying to tell her mother who she was, and somehow, her mother had never managed to hear her above the roar of her own preconceptions.
But Anno didn’t have to explain herself to Drathur. He just understood. Not always. But enough of the time. At the moments when it really mattered, when she didn’t have enough of herself left to explain herself. Only to be herself, and sometimes, barely even that much, because being a parent drains you. And so does going home and visiting where you’ve come from, facing your past and looking it in the eyes.
Anno had loved almost everything about this trip — it had brought pieces of herself back to life that she’d almost entirely forgotten. It had made her happy and been a welcome change from the routine day to day life can fall into at home. But she was ready for it to be over. She was ready to go home. And she hoped Kya would come with them.
“I can’t wait until the reception is over,” Anno said, pulling away from Drathur. She moved to the side of the clearing, focused on her wrist computer, and started composing a message to Kya, inviting her… no, entreating her to come back to New Heffe with them. But before the message came together as more than a collection of half-thought-through sentences, Anno was struck was sudden doubt.
Maybe by dragging Kya away to New Heffe, a place that was ninety percent Heffen, she was being as self-centered and dismissive of Kya’s own background as their mother. Maybe she just wanted a babysitter to help with her kits and didn’t really care about Kya’s needs any more than the myrmecoidal matrons. They wanted a felinoid as part of their enclave to prove a point about different species getting along; Anno wanted her sister to come home with her to prove a point about Xeno-Nativity being too confining.
Did any of them really have Kya’s best interests at heart?
Before Anno could finish dithering over the message, trying to push it into a form worth sending — or worth deleting and forgetting about entirely — she found herself interrupted by the brides.
Am-lei and Jeko were as giggly as the schoolgirls they’d been years ago. Am-lei talked so fast, telling stories of the day and how the wedding had come together with all kinds of little last-minute bumps in the road, that Anno half expected her proboscis to get tangled in itself. Jeko mostly smiled and laughed, but she’d always had less to say than Am-lei. She was the shy one. A shy elephant.
After a story about how the sparkling drinks for the wedding had been briefly mixed up with a shipment of alcohol for The All Alien Cafe, Anno managed to break into Am-lei’s fluting speech long enough to present the brides with her wedding gift, which Drathur had thoughtfully brought over and handed to her when he saw her talking to Am-lei and Jeko. Anno hadn’t known whether to expect them to open their gift right away or put it aside for later, but Am-lei ripped the wrapping paper off the flat box as soon as it was in her talons.
The moment that the picture of little Jeko and caterpillar Am-lei became visible under the torn paper, Am-lei’s manic, bubbly energy stilled, and Jeko’s trunk reached out to touch the pane of glass protecting the photo as if she were trying to reach back into the past and assure her younger self that everything would work out with the new friend she’d just made.
“This is beautiful,” Am-lei fluted.
“I didn’t know there were any pictures like this…” The tip of Jeko’s trunk strayed over the glass, tracing out the outlines of both young figures. “Thank you. This is perfect.”
Anno wondered if Jeko had been in love with Am-lei since all the way back then… She knew Am-lei hadn’t fallen in love with the weird, shy elephant girl at first sight, but then, Am-lei had been pretty distracted at the time by her impending chrysalis state, constantly itchy as her caterpillar body had prepared for its big change.
“I can send you a digital copy too,” Anno said. “But I thought you’d like a physical one too.”
Jeko nodded. Am-lei simply stared at the photo as it reflected in the many facets of her disco-ball eyes.
“You took this photo?” Am-lei asked. “That’s why you have it?”
“Yeah,” Anno agreed. “I’ve always liked taking photos.” She’d snapped a ton of shots of her kits all over Crossroads Station in the last week and a half, and she still had nearly endless folders of photos she’d taken of all her younger siblings way back when she’d lived on Crossroads Station.
“You did,” Am-lei agreed.
Jeko pulled her trunk away from the framed photo and coiled it around Am-lei’s narrow shoulders. Am-lei took a turn touching the photo with her talon, also tracing the lines of her and her beloved’s youth.
A subtle shift in Am-lei’s posture showed that her focus had moved from the photograph in her talons to the friend who’d given it to her, even though her multi-faceted eyes made it impossible to track any direction to her gaze. “You always were good at balancing the push and pull of living in this metropolitan, melting-pot culture of a space station with holding onto the important threads of everyone’s own, individual culture,” Am-lei fluted. “I was terrified of metamorphosing before you got all into researching all that stuff mom and Grandma Amy had kept shoving at me from the Lepidopteran archives they’d located. Just like you got into researching the cultures and histories of all the species of your younger siblings.”
“Really?” Anno asked, shocked. Am-lei had never seemed scared to her, not of anything. “I don’t remember you seeming scared…”
“Well, I mean, who wouldn’t be terrified of having their head split open so that they can hang from the ceiling for a month only to emerge with an entirely different body type? One that includes whole-ass wings that you’re expected to slice off with a knife, even.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Anno agreed.
“You know, we’re planning to visit Leionaia someday,” Jeko said. “When we’ve saved up enough. Like how you moved to New Heffe.”
Anno recognized the name of the Lepidopteran homeworld, a secretive place that didn’t allow many visitors. It would be an expensive place to visit, as it would involve chartering a flight. Ships flew between Crossroads Station and New Heffe regularly. Not so much with Leionaia.
“Well, not right away,” Am-lei amended. “Not until…” The two brides exchanged a look, the kind of look that said they were deciding whether to share a secret or not. Apparently, they decided to share it, because Am-lei continued, saying, “Well, see, we’re planning to have a daughter — a clone daughter, like I am to mom — and I wouldn’t want our daughter to miss out on the visit or be too young to really enjoy it. Since we’re not planning to live there forever or anything. Just visit. Probably. I mean, I guess we won’t really know until we see it, and we both know that we liked growing up here. So, it’s a good place to have our daughter.”
“A clone daughter?” Anno couldn’t help feeling excited by the prospect of a new little Am-lei in the universe. “Have you laid the egg already?”
“Not yet,” Am-lei said. “I think I’ve been too stressed by planning all this–” She gestured with four spindly arms at the wedding guests dancing all around them in the grassy grove of the arboretum. “–for my body to produce an egg.”
“But when everything settles down…” Jeko’s eyes glinted with happiness and anticipation.
“Yeah, soon,” Am-lei agreed.
“And I won’t have to hope she looks like you! Because I know she will!” Jeko coiled her trunk up in a way that showed she was amused by her own joke. Because of course, a clone daughter from an unfertilized egg would be essentially identical to both Am-lei and Lee-a-lei. At least, genetically.
Being raised by a brassy Lepidopteran who felt comfortable with her relationship to her distant culture and a sweet, gentle elephant would probably lead to a different expression of personality than had happened for Am-lei, being raised by a mother who was afraid of her own weird body. Or for Lee-a-lei herself, who had been raised by a well-meaning but very ignorant adoptive human mother.
Am-lei and Jeko got called away by other wedding guests who wanted to talk with and congratulate them shortly thereafter. But Anno found herself thinking deeply about their brief conversation.
She remembered Grandma Amy mentioning, at the New Jupiter cloud port, that Am-lei talked about her all the time. This must have been what Amy meant. Anno hadn’t realized she’d had such a big effect on her friends.
And suddenly, Anno wasn’t afraid to ask Kya to come back to New Heffe with her, Drathur, and the kids. They’d still find ways to help Kya connect with her heritage and people. She wouldn’t have to live on New Heffe forever. But maybe, for a little while, it would give Kya the space she needed from the cult they’d both grown up in to truly find herself.
Anno looked over the rambling draft she’d been writing on her wrist computer, deleted most of it, and sent a simple message saying, “Hey, want to come back to New Heffe with us when we go? We have a guest a room you can stay in, as long as you want.”
The reply from Kya came only moments later: “I’ll start packing right away. When’s the flight?”
Warmth filled Anno from the tip of her swishing tail — and it was suddenly very swishy — all the way to the tips of her pointed ears, which were suddenly standing very tall. She was going to enjoy getting to spend more time with her sister. She couldn’t wait to show her around New Heffe.
Continue on to Chapter 22…