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.
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.
A soft ping from the computer beside Anno — the computer she was supposed to be doing work on — drew Anno from her reverie, and she peered with bewilderment at a message claiming to be from her oldest friend, Am-lei. It was a strange message, containing no information, only a file to be downloaded and run through a 3D printer.
The message’s path signifiers looked legitimate, and as odd as it was for a message to request printer access without first showing what it would print, Anno trusted Am-lei implicitly. They hadn’t seen each other in years — too many years, an entire lifetime for Anno’s young litter of children — but nothing can quite erase the bonds of a childhood spent together.
Am-lei was, as far as Anno was concerned, part of her litter. A true sister. A sister of the heart.
Anno authorized the file, and moments later, the 3D printer on the other side of her office began whirring.
Anno’s children came running — a litter of three, just turned five years old a few weeks ago. Two sisters and a brother. They loved the 3D printer. Sometimes, Anno printed toys for them on it.
“What is it?! What is it?!” the boy-child, Darso, cried.
The girls, Mei and Loi, didn’t bother asking — 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.
“I don’t know,” Anno said to her children. “Something my friend Am-lei sent me.”
“Did she send you a toy?” Darso asked skeptically, but still hopeful under the skepticism.
“It looks like…” Mei trailed off, uncertain of what the object looked like.
“Can I have it?” Loi asked, undaunted by not knowing what the object was. She wanted it anyway. Whatever it was. “It looks shiny.”
“Pearly,” Mei amended.
“Pearlescent!” Darso announced proudly. He still hadn’t seen even a glimpse of the unknown object, but he was proud of knowing such a fancy word.
“Back away kids,” Anno said, getting up from her chair and stepping toward the printer. “Give me some space, and I’ll see what it is.”
Cooperatively, the girls backed away. Darso, however, stepped closer, grabbing Anno’s tail like he sometimes did when they were in a crowded store and he didn’t want to get lost.
Anno tilted her head, triangular ears skewing to the side as she stared at the shiny, pearly, pearlescent object. It looked like a paper cutout. Like one of those fancy pop-up cards. Anno reached down, picked the object up — it was still warm from printing — and gingerly unfolded it.
Two cut-out figures popped up from the thick, plasticky surface of the card — they looked like a dancing butterfly and elephant.
Am-lei and Jeko.
Two of Anno’s oldest friends. Anno and Am-lei had met Jeko when they were only children. The elephantine girl had been desperately lonely, newly moved to Crossroads Station, and fiercely happy to join in on Anno and Am-lei’s little gang. They’d been a threesome from that time on, doing everything together, right up until Anno’s world had fallen apart around her red, triangular ears, and she’d fled Crossroads Station for New Heffe.
Grassy fields. A new homeland for her people.
People who were like her, everywhere. On Crossroads Station, Anno had been surrounded by aliens of all different stripes and colors. Different species. Amphibians, mammals, robots, sentient plants, the whole gamut. At one level, it had been wonderful. At another? Anno was simply tired of nothing ever fitting her quite right, and no one else quite understanding her.
She’d felt a lot less friction in her life since she’d moved to New Heffe, where she was surrounded by other canines, a race who had fled a dying star only to find themselves refugees for decades before finding a new planet to call home.
Anno was too young to remember the original world of Heffe. Crossroads Station should have been her true home. And realistically, she shouldn’t have been — wouldn’t have been — bothered by the profusion of differences, except her personal family had been part of a cult. She didn’t like to think about it anymore. She liked to be here, with her husband and children and community and grasses blowing in the wind.
“What’s that?” The voice came from Anno’s husband, Drathur. “It looks like a wedding announcement.”
Anno stared at the intricate, lacy, hopelessly fancy pop-up card in her red-furred paws and realized he was right. It did look like a wedding announcement. The delicate butterfly dancing with the pleasantly plump elephant, trunk raised in the air like they were turning a pirouette, had the appearance of two brides in the pearly white of the plasticky paper. Under those figures were lines and lines of words — Anno tried to read them, but she only got as far as, “Join Us” mixed in the middle in an italicized font, before her heart jumped.
“It’s not an announcement,” Anno said, her voice echoing with a strange hollowness — a hollowness that she suspected, almost feared, was filled deep inside with wonder. “It’s an invitation.”
“To a wedding on Crossroads Station?” Drathur asked. “You said you’d never step paw in that ‘dingy old tin can’ again.”
That was true. Anno had said that. Many times.
But…
The invitation in her paws was from Am-lei.
Am-lei and Jeko.
One of them was her oldest friend, a butterfly-like alien with an indomitable spirit, and the other was the kindest, sweetest person she’d ever known. And they were getting married. To each other.
Anno’s heart swelled at the idea that Am-lei had found someone, even better that she’d found love with Jeko. She couldn’t possibly have found someone better. Neither of them could.
“Besides, look at the date—“ Drathur pointed with a curved claw at the words on the card. “That’s barely a month away. We’d have to hop on a shuttle almost immediately to get there. Why’d they send the invitation so late?”
Anno wasn’t sure. Maybe they sent it late because they didn’t expect her to come. Her heart surprised her by sinking at the thought. Maybe it was just an announcement. A perfunctory invitation that Am-lei and Jeko expected her to turn down.
As Anno continued to stare at the card, her litter of pups lost interest, wandering away to toys they were actually allowed to play with, unlike the pretty card in their mother’s paws.
Anno traced the curve of the butterfly’s wings with one of her claws, delicately touching the lacy material. “She has wings here. I wonder why she has wings.”
“She’s the one who cut her wings off?” Drathur asked. He’d heard stories about Anno’s life back on Crossroads Station, but he’d never been there. Never met anyone from her past. He’d grown up on a different planet, one that had been settled by humans generations ago.
Like Anno, Drathur had moved to New Heffe as soon as the Heffen refugees across this sector had begun settling there. He’d come from a planet where he’d been one of only a few Heffens, surrounded by the smooth-skinned primates who ran so much of this sector of space. Anno could relate to that feeling of isolation, since she’d been the only Heffen in her immediate family. However, Crossroads Station was filled with Heffen refugees. The wolf-like canines were even more prevalent on Crossroads Station than the smooth-skinned primates who had founded and theoretically ran the station. That was true even now, even after the exodus to New Heffe.
“I went to Am-lei’s Wing Day party the day after she emerged from her chrysalis.” Anno folded the invitation and held it close against her chest. “I missed her so much, so fiercely during the weeks she was metamorphosing. Jeko and I are friends too… but it was always Am-lei who held our little group together. Without her, everything was awkward, and I was… lost.”
The same thing had happened when Am-lei went away to college on Wespirtech, researching physics. Anno hadn’t known what to do with herself on Crossroads Station without her best friend. So she’d given up on Crossroads Station entirely and come here. Met Drathur. Got a job. Had a litter of kits.
Anno had a whole life, and it felt like turning it upside down to even imagine trying to make it back to Crossroads Station for any reason, let alone anything as small, silly, and frivolous as a wedding.
Destination weddings are something you watch holo-vids about — comedies where everything goes disastrously wrong but then turns out for the best in the end. They aren’t things you go to in real life.
But…
It wasn’t just any wedding.
It was Am-lei’s wedding.
And yet, how could she go to it? Anno hadn’t traveled on a spaceship, or anywhere off-world, since she moved here. The idea of traveling alone scared her, not because there was anything inherently scary about space freighters… but just because it was different? It was outside her comfort zone. Her comfort zone was small and here — her home, her town, the wide grassy fields all around.
But if she brought Drathur with her… to have someone at her side…
No, it just wouldn’t work. They couldn’t both abandon a litter of three five-year-olds. Not for a journey that long. There was no one they knew well enough to trust the kids to them for a journey of several weeks. Drathur’s parents still lived on the planet where he’d grown up, and Anno’s mother was, as far as she knew, still on Crossroads Station. They hadn’t stayed in touch, not after everything had fallen apart.
An inkling itched at the back of Anno’s mind, like a tiny tickle behind her pointed ear. Her ear twitched, like she was trying to flick the thought away rather than experience it, but the idea shone through, and she wondered: what if they brought the kids?
What if they brought the kids to Crossroads Station?
“You look deep in thought,” Drathur said.
Anno nodded, but she couldn’t bring herself to put voice to any of the words bouncing around her head. If she went back to Crossroads Station, would she have to see her mother or siblings? Did she want to? Would they be at the wedding? Or had this invitation been just for her — Am-lei’s oldest friend?
Did their friendship still mean as much to Am-lei as it meant to Anno?
Anno didn’t even like to think about how much Am-lei and Jeko had meant to her. Those days as kids when they’d made up whole worlds and alternate realities together — imagining that they were pirates or royalty or grand explorers — had been the heart of Anno’s life, and so much of her life now was all about trying to give the same sort of childhood to her litter of kids. She wanted Mei, Loi, and Darso to be as happy as she had been. She wanted them to carry that happiness with them, forward through their lives, like a shield that could protect them from everything bad that might someday happen. Every heartbreak. Every loss. She wanted them to have a core inside themselves of happiness to call on.
“You really want to go,” Drathur said, taking one of Anno’s paws in his own.
Anno looked away, afraid to acknowledge feelings that were too big. Feelings that could crack open her current world and show it for what it was — a shell she’d built around the heart that had frozen in place long ago.
The idea of going to Am-lei and Jeko’s wedding — the imagined image of herself there, watching them say their vows to each other — made Anno almost too happy to risk thinking about it.
And yet…
A choice had to be made. So she dragged a few, sideways words out of herself: “It might be good for the kids to visit Crossroads Station — see somewhere so different, be exposed to all those different peoples and cultures.”
Drathur nodded. “I can look into it. Find out how much it would cost.”
Now Anno nodded, eagerly, much too eagerly. “It’s always better to have more information.”
Continue on to Chapter 2…