Author: marylowd

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.

“Rationally, Anno knew the gravity jumper was one of the safest forms of travel.”

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.

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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, you can start with Chapter 1 , return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.

“It had been strange losing her friend for a month, only to have her friend return in an entirely different form.”

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”

You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station — Chapter 1

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.

“…they went straight to the printer and poked their long, red-furred muzzles into it, trying to spy the object before it was done forming.”

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.
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