Author: marylowd

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.

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The space freighter was mostly a cargo ship, but it also had one long hallway of rooms for passengers with common areas on either end.  One of the common areas was a galley, open at all times with all the food paid for as part of their tickets onboard, and the other common area had a few rickety old holo-board games, a very small exercise area, and a wide window for watching the stars.  Anno’s family explored every inch of the common areas, immediately after dropping their luggage off in their own rooms.  Once she’d seen all there was to see aboard the space freighter, Anno went back to her own room to sit on the bed that would be hers for the next week, leaving the kits to play, under Drathur’s watchful eye in the exercise area.

Continue reading “You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station — Chapter 4”

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.

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The next few days were a bizarre blur of shopping, packing, planning, and answering questions from kits who really didn’t understand what it would mean to leave their planet and fly across the vastness of space to an entirely different solar system.

Mei wanted to know if they’d be put in a cryo-sleep and wake up in an entirely different century, because one of her favorite holo-vids featured a fictional, cartoony family of humans from the distant past who had slept away the years in that way and woken up to the modern world, all wide-eyed and amazed by everything they saw.  Anno suspected Mei loved the vid so much because the cartoon characters’ amazement and wonder were relatable to a five-year-old for whom the whole universe was still new and remarkable.

Continue reading “You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station — Chapter 3”

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.

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Drathur researched the price of space freighter tickets to Crossroads Station, the price of lodging in quarters on the station, and all the other incidentals one would need to research for such a trip.  He was better at that kind of research than Anno, and besides, she couldn’t seem to concentrate with thoughts of her childhood friends and the possibility of seeing her family again whisking through her head like a tornado.  Instead, she put her work aside and played with the three kits for the rest of the afternoon, talking to them about what Crossroads Station was like when she was growing up and gently feeling out if they’d even be manageable on such a trip.

Continue reading “You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station — Chapter 2”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station.  If you’d prefer to read in e-book or paperback form, learn more here.  Or if you want, skip ahead to the next chapter.

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The grasses swayed, blue and green, like an ocean rippling in the wind, right outside Anno’s window.  She leaned her narrow muzzle against a paw and stared at the natural wonder that was simply plants growing on the surface of a planet.  So simple and yet, where she had grown up, so rare.  Every day here, living on New Heffe, she reveled in it.  She was surrounded by it.  Fields that stretched outward, seemingly endlessly, like the night sky that had enfolded her childhood home of Crossroads Station.
Continue reading “You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station — Chapter 1”