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.
After a week and a half on Crossroads Station, with only half a week left before it would be time to leave, the day of the wedding finally came. Amazingly, none of the three kits backed out on their planned clothing trades, so getting them properly dressed and ready for the day was only the normal amount of aggravating and stressful. Loi, who had so desperately wanted to wear the fancy gray tie, kept whipping it around the room like a banner, claiming it was a sparking eel, causing Mei and Darsy to chase after her giggling and failing to put their shoes on.
Into this chaos intruded a surprising sound — a simple, resounding knock on their rented quarters’ door.
“Huh,” Drathur said, still chasing Darsy around with her second shoe, “I wonder who that could be.”
“It’s not like any of my siblings to come calling… They haven’t all week. Even Kya just messages us and meets us places.” Anno took the shoe from Drathur and said, “You get the door. I’ll get the foot for this shoe.”
“Cloud jellies don’t wear shoes!” Darsy giggle-screamed, still running circles around the room as if she’d never eaten anything but pure sugar in her life, even though her breakfast had been a sensible, protein-heavy plate of scrambled eggs.
“Yes,” Anno agreed. “Cloud jellies would look very silly with a bunch of tiny shoes dangling from their fringe of tentacles, but little girls like you wear shoes. Especially to weddings.”
“Especially to weddings in arboretums with wet grass and dirt everywhere to mess up their paws,” Drathur added, as he opened the door. “Uh, hello,” he said once the door was opened, sounding surprised.
Anno looked up and was surprised as well to see her mother, Clori, standing beside one of the Xeno-Native Enclave’s myrmecoidal matrons. The insectile woman with her gleaming green-and-purple striped carapace dwarfed the little fluffy gray koala-like woman beside her. Clori looked smaller and older than ever to her daughter, and Anno didn’t know what do with the feelings that inspired inside her — did it make her feel old? Highlight the passage of time? Cause her to worry about the inherently temporary and fragile nature of life? Mothers aren’t supposed to get older, just stay the same forever and ever, like it seemed she would when Anno was small.
“Ma,” Anno said, putting down the shoe that she still hadn’t managed to get on Darsy’s foot. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.” In spite of all the messages inviting her extended family to join her nuclear family at playgrounds, restaurants, and activities, Clori hadn’t so much as sent word with any of her other children to Anno since storming off on the first day of their visit. “Is something wrong?” Anno looked up at the myrmecoidal matron’s inscrutable face, heavy with serrated mandibles and giant multi-faceted eyes. Her eyes looked a little like Am-lei’s, but they didn’t sparkle with the same warmth and humor.
As a child, Anno had thought of the myrmecoidal matrons as practically gods — everything about the culture in the enclave encouraged children to feel that way. Seeing one standing beside her mother now — seeing one for the first time in most of a decade — made her wonder if her mother was dying, if the matron was here to break terrible news to her.
What would Anno do if here mother were dying? Would she cancel her flight home and stay here longer? Would she want to soak up every last second possible with her mother before it was too late? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know how she would feel. She wanted this confusing encounter to stop happening, so she could go back to her normal day of preparing to go to her friends’ wedding.
“Of course something is wrong!” Clori answered, her paws with their big black claws fidgeting with the hem of her overly ruffly, weirdly antiquated dress. Anno thought she remembered that same dress from years ago, and Clori was still wearing it. “You’ve left the path! You’ve moved away to a different solar system, and you’ve forgotten everything you were raised to believe in!”
Anno hadn’t realized how much she’d been hoping that her mother was here to apologize or reconnect with her on her own terms until Clori said those words, shattering her hopes. “I haven’t forgotten anything,” Anno said through clenched fangs, her words ice cold. “I just stopped believing in it. In fact, I don’t think I ever really believed in it. You don’t need to give birth to another species in order to care about them.”
Clori tutted, and her cloud-like ears splayed. She looked up at the myrmecoidal matron, as if asking for help, but the insectoid woman simply clacked her mandibles.
“Can we do this outside?” Anno asked, though she wasn’t really asking, as she stepped toward the door, trying to block Clori and the matron from her children’s view. They didn’t need to hear this. They didn’t need to see their mother upset and fighting with a grandmother they barely knew. And they certainly didn’t need to have nightmares about silent, judgmental, giant insects like the matron, the way Anno had through more than half of her childhood. She knew Lut and Iko had had those nightmares too. Not T’reska, of course. She’d idolized the matrons, just like she’d been supposed to.
Clori stomped her foot, trying to stand her ground in the doorway, but Anno stood a head taller than her and loomed over her mother until she backed down. Anno stepped into the corridor outside her rented quarters and closed the door behind her. “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice in a harsh whisper.
“We’ve come to bring you back into the fold,” the matron intoned in a voice made up of clacking pops and whistles, like a tiny batch of fireworks going off. For all of the matron’s physical similarities to Am-lei — both had tri-segmented, exo-skeletal bodies with six legs, multi-faceted eyes, and long antennae drooping from their heads — their demeanors were nothing alike.
“I’ve convinced the matrons to make an exception for you,” Clori said in a rush, reaching up and clasping ahold of her daughter’s paws.
It felt good, for a moment, to have her paws held by her mother’s again — safe and warm — but Anno pulled away, taking her hands back for herself and tucking them under her arms where Clori wouldn’t touch them again.
“What do you mean, ‘an exception’?” Anno knew that nothing good could come of this conversation. Her mother didn’t respect the life she’d built, and nothing involving the matrons and their weird rules was ever good. But somehow, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, from needing to know.
“Usually, we mothers aren’t supposed to have partners or children when we join the program — we’re supposed to be completely devoted to the cause.” The fervency in Clori’s bright eyes was frightening. “But you’re second-generation. Truly xeno-native through and through. You’re part of the family, and we don’t want to lose you.”
“Ignoring me all week and then showing up with a matron is a funny way of showing that you don’t want to lose me.” Anno’s voice twisted with bitterness.
“You’ve made it so hard for us,” Clori said, passing some of Anno’s bitterness right back to her.
And Anno couldn’t deny she deserved some of it — certainly, if Lut had said the same thing to her, he’d have been right. She had abandoned him. But she hadn’t abandoned her mother. Clori had pushed her away, leaving no room for her at home, no space or air for her to breathe. Anno had been suffocating in the Xeno-Native Enclave with the way it had taken all the history of her species — and every species it gobbled up — and erased it away, replacing it with a vapid story of universal unity that made no sense without all the individual cultures that composed the living universe.
Xeno-Nativity wasn’t about bringing everyone together in their differences; it was about making everyone, no matter how different they started out, all end up the same.
But Anno couldn’t find any of those words or thoughts to protect her, not in that moment. All she could feel was the knife twist in her heart of her mother, aged and sad, standing before her and blaming her for the rift between them. The gravity of her mother’s feelings was too large, too strong for Anno to feel her own feelings in the wake of them.
“We know you already have a Heffen family–” Clori waved her paw with the long black claws dismissively at the closed door behind Anno. “–and obviously, you can’t give them up–”
Anno snorted, a sudden, involuntary sound bourn of pain so strong, like an unexpected slap in the face, that it was almost funny. Because it was, almost, bitterly funny that her mother would even dance around suggesting that Anno should abandon her husband and children.
“–but they could come with you. If you had a Xeno-Native child…”
There it was. What Clori wanted. The reason the myrmecoidal matron was here. They were trying to bring her back into the fold, get her to birth children of different species. For goodness knows what reason. Perhaps, Anno leaving her upbringing behind so thoroughly was a threat to the brainwashing they liked to do. The matrons needed her to come back to prove their philosophy was the right one.
It didn’t matter.
Anno would never come back.
In fact, she would never step foot in the Xeno-Native Enclave again. Not if she could possibly help it.
“You people are a virus,” Anno said, not listening to her mother’s continued droning about how wonderful it would be for her to move home and become a baby-making machine, pumping out more little acolytes of every species to worship the bizarre matrons.
Before Anno could step back into her rented quarters and place a door firmly between herself and her unwanted visitors, the towering matron reached down with a talon and placed it on her shoulder.
“You are our child. You will always be our child,” the matron said.
Anno shuddered and twisted away from the matron’s heavy talon. She opened the door, slipped through it, and slammed it shut, banging it more loudly than she’d intended.
Safe inside, away from a mother who wanted nothing of who she actually was, Anno slid down to the floor and cried.
Suddenly, all the boisterous, happy cacophony of noise from the children and Drathur stopped. They all stared at her — the guiding force behind their family — reduced to sobbing on the floor.
It took less than a heartbeat for all three children, in their various states of fancy dress, to rush up to their mother and smother her in hugs and cuddling. This was family. This was what Anno had always wanted and needed. And if her own mother didn’t understand that — didn’t understand her — then she’d just have to get by without her mother.
But even without her mother, Anno still had an amazing family.
The worst part of the whole incident, Anno thought to herself with a secret, burning sense of shame, was that she was almost tempted — not in a realistic, practical way. Just as a feeling, an irrational urge, deep inside a beating heart that desperately wanted her mother’s approval and affection. If having one more child would earn her mother’s love… well, four children isn’t so many more than three.
But it wouldn’t just be having a fourth child. Becoming a Xeno-Native mother meant moving into the enclave for the pregnancy and at least the first year of the child’s life. It meant surrendering legal control over your own child for the rest of that child’s life — she’d seen the contracts the myrmecoidal matrons made prospective mothers sign. They were ironclad, draconian, and basically meant the matrons were the legal guardians of all the enclave children in perpetuity, if push truly came to shove. Legally, the myrmecoidal matrons were Anno’s parents — not Clori, in spite of the fact that she’d gestated, birthed, and raised her.
Anno could hardly believe anyone ever signed that contract. And yet, the enclave existed and continued to grow. The whole thing chilled her to the bone.
But all of that aside, Drathur and Anno already had the family they wanted, all of it, right here, hugging and holding her right now. It was horrible that her mother could act like Loi, Mei, and Darsy were an afterthought, something to be brushed aside as an exception that needn’t stop Anno from having the grandchild Clori really wanted.
Had Clori played similar games with Iko or Lut’s wife? Asking them to have Xeno-Native children in addition to their natural ones? Anno didn’t think so. Somehow, she suspected this dubious honor was probably reserved just for her.
Thinking about the offer as charitably as she could manage, Anno knew that — at least at some level — it meant her mother loved her, missed her, and wanted her to move back to Crossroads Station and ideally the Xeno-Native Enclave.
But… it wasn’t really her that Clori loved. Just the idea of her. A mirage who looked like Anno but shared none of her actual personality. Because having a Xeno-Native child was something Anno would never, ever, ever have done. She didn’t care about the difference in species so much… She could love a child of any species. But she would never surrender herself again to the control and power of the myrmecoidal matrons. She’d grown up in the tiny splinter society of their making, a weird bubble cult inside Crossroads Station, and that had been more than enough for her.
Of all the things Anno held against her mother — the lack of time she’d had for each child because she’d had so many, the lack of attention to their individual needs and their people’s cultures, and even just petty things like siding with T’reska whenever the two of them had fought as children — the biggest divide between them was that Clori truly believed in the myrmecoidal matrons and would let them dictate every part of her life. It wasn’t just that they told her where to live and dictated what kind of children she should have and how… It was everything. It was religion, philosophy, politics.
If the myrmecoidal matrons had told Clori it was time for the Enclave to pack up and move to a different star-system, she’d have asked what kind of luggage to use. If they’d said children needed to be kicked out on their own at the age of fourteen to truly learn independence, she’d have kicked out her whole brood of teenagers tomorrow. If they said cold-blooded species couldn’t be a part of the Enclave anymore, Clori would have offered to take in T’reska’s children but basically just shrugged and accepted it while her most devoted daughter got turned out on her scaly tail.
It was a sickness. An inability to think for herself. And Anno wanted no part of it. Maybe she would have liked a connection with her mother… but not the matrons. And there didn’t seem to be any dividing of the two.
Anno brushed away the tears matting her fur. Her face was damp, and that meant the fiery orange fur would look darker, more auburn. But it would dry. And well, crying at a wedding isn’t so strange.
“We should finish getting ready,” Anno said. Drathur was already taking advantage of the children’s stillness, cuddled around their mother, to finish slipping shoes on their feet and properly tying Loi’s gray tie around her neck, instead of her head where she’d been wearing it like a headband.
As they finished getting ready, a thought haunted Anno: if she was almost tempted by the offer to buy her mother’s love by joining her crazy cult… what chance did Kya stand, living at home with Clori, spending time with T’reska every week, basically, completely surrounded?
Anno worried about her other, younger siblings too — all the teenagers living at home, really. But Kya was the one she’d reconnected with and been bonding with all week. Kya was the one who was about to step out of the nest and find her own path in life… or maybe fail to step out of the nest at all, and get stuck there forever.
Anno needed to talk to Drathur about it first, but she was pretty sure she’d already decided: they needed to get Kya out of here. They needed to offer to bring her home to New Heffe with them, and give her a chance to truly find herself far, far away from the cult of Xeno-Nativity.
If Anno could save Kya, it would open up another path of escape for the other, younger ones. It would show them that it could be done, even with Ma and the matrons clawing to keep them trapped.
Continue on to Chapter 19…