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.
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.
Anno sat on the bed, closed her eyes, and tried to find a place of rest and peace inside herself, but she could hear the sounds of other passengers echoing through the ship’s metal halls, making her pointed ears twitch and turn, reacting to every clank and blurred conversation. Even with the room to herself, she didn’t feel alone.
All in all, it was going to make for a cramped trip, squeezing two adults and three cubs into a pair of very small, adjoined rooms for a week with such limited common space. Anno missed the grassy fields that surrounded her house on New Heffe already.
A week to get to Crossroads Station. Two weeks on the station. And then a week to get back. It was a lot of travel, but it would be an enriching experience for the kids. Anno had already seen their eyes open to the size of their universe simply taking the gravity jumper into orbit. How much more would their minds be opened by all the aliens and cultures represented on Crossroads Station?
And of course, as angry as Anno was with her mother over her entire childhood and how she’d grown up in a cult… She couldn’t help a warm feeling inside when she imagined introducing her kits to their grandmother. Clori may have made a choice — and stuck to it — that Anno deeply disagreed with in choosing to participate in the xeno-nativity cult of the myrmecoidal matrons, but she was still a sweet, loving woman who would be kind to her grandchildren and thrilled beyond the reach of the gas giants to meet them.
And much as she hated to admit it, Anno desperately wanted Clori to be proud of her. She didn’t want to want it… but she did. Deep inside.
Besides, beneath all of that complicated family stuff, at the heart of the trip, there was still Am-lei. Anno’s oldest friend. Jeko and Am-lei, passing through a turning point in their lives, an important one… and they wanted Anno to be there for it. She couldn’t miss that. Even if she suspected — no, knew — that it meant more to her to be invited than it had meant to them to invite her. She could live with that imbalance. This might be her last trip to her childhood home ever; it might be the last time she saw her childhood friends ever. Her life had landed somewhere else from theirs, and mostly, she was okay with that.
But…
She wanted a chance to say goodbye.
A proper goodbye.
It was time to heal the ragged edge of the first quarter of her life, so she could settle fully and completely into this glorious middle. A middle she’d built out of all the things she wanted — a world full of her own people, a world full of grass and trees, and a family that was small and tightly knit. Close and fiercely loving.
Anno had loved her siblings growing up… but there had simply been so many of them, with new ones coming every year, and all of them so different. They’d eaten different things, slept in different kinds of furniture, wanted their family quarters kept at different temperatures, and that was all simply physical needs based on their differing species, not even getting into their different personality types. It had been chaos. For a while, Anno had believed it was a beautiful chaos.
But… as she’d grown into her teen years, she’d simply felt used and forgotten. She helped with her younger siblings so much, being the oldest one, and her mother had relied on her so much… and when it came down to it, she simply hadn’t felt appreciated enough. She wasn’t sure it was possible for a teenager turned into an apprentice mother to her own dozen, younger siblings to feel appreciated enough. It wasn’t what a teen was supposed to be doing, learning how to care for a dozen younger siblings of different species.
Thinking about her siblings made Anno’s heart race and her breathing turn shallow, a panicky feeling that she usually pushed aside by actively turning her mind away from those memories. But right now, they grew closer with every lightyear the space freighter flew toward Crossroads Station.
Now, she was going to have to confront her family, who she hadn’t seen or spoken to for years. She was going to come face to face with the Xeno-Native Enclave where she’d grown up. And she realized, she was afraid that the Xeno-Native Enclave wasn’t really the villain in the story of her childhood — maybe the problem wasn’t that her siblings had been so many different species. Maybe it was just… there’d been too many of them. A choice Clori had made and kept making.
And yet? How do you hate your mother for choosing to have a sibling who you love? How do you reconcile the love you feel for your siblings with the hate and resentment you feel toward them for stealing away your mother’s time?
It was all too tangled and complex. This was why Anno had run away to an entirely different world and built a family for herself that was already done growing.
Sure, the kits — Mei, Loi, and Darso — would grow bigger. But there wouldn’t be any more of them. Anno and Drathur had already both gotten themselves sterilized. One litter for them was enough. Some days, it seemed like more than enough.
Plenty. It was plenty.
Anno wondered how many of her siblings still lived in the Xeno-Native Enclave with her mother. She wondered if any of them had children of their own. And she despised herself for thrilling at the idea of seeing her own kits play with children of her siblings — nieces, nephews, or niblings to her. Cousins for her kits. She didn’t want to care about something like that. What if her siblings had children but didn’t want their children to meet hers? What if they were all angry at her for the way she’d ghosted them? What if Clori, her own mother, didn’t want to see her at all?
Anno shuddered. This was hard. It was so hard, and she didn’t want to be doing it. But it was probably good for her. And Am-lei had given her the excuse she needed to face her deepest wounds from childhood, the biggest horrors from her past. The things that haunted her.
With a strange mix of disgust and fascination, Anno wondered if any of her siblings had joined the Xeno-Native Enclave themselves. It made it hard to picture her little red-furred, pointy-eared kits playing with cousins when she had absolutely no clue what species those cousins might be — not only were there a dozen choices to choose from among her siblings, but if any of them had become xeno-native mothers, their own children could be yet another species beyond the ones in her family so far.
Xeno-Nativity was a dizzying cult.
“What are you thinking about?” Drathur asked, waking Anno up. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep until she heard his voice. She hadn’t heard him coming in.
“I think I was sleeping…” Anno said.
“That makes sense.” Drathur sat down beside her on the bed. Anno could hear their kits playing in their adjoining room. “I could see how much the gravity jumper stressed you out. It’s exhausting to be scared like that.”
Anno nodded mutely. Drathur wasn’t the kind of spouse who could read her every thought, just by looking at her face and the tilt of her ears, but he did pay attention. And he knew her really well.
“Before I fell asleep — or maybe while I was asleep — I was wondering whether any of my siblings have children.”
Drathur nodded. He knew what she wasn’t saying. Anno had worried about her younger siblings getting drawn into the xeno-native cult to him before. She felt guilty about leaving the youngest ones behind; they’d still been children when she acquired just enough of a veneer of adulthood to strike out on her own, leaving them behind. Sometimes she wondered if she should have stayed for them. She pictured her youngest sibling — Jurnan with his long neck, knobby ossicones on his funny head, and splotchy orange fur — and she felt a pang not dissimilar to how she’d feel if she were to abandon her own children now. He’d been twelve years younger than her, only a little kid when she left, and she’d spent so much time caring for him. He’d almost seemed more like her own son than their mother’s. More her baby than her brother.
Anno had loved Jurnan from the first moment she’d seen him; he was the first other person in her family to have orange fur, like hers. Even if it was splotchy instead of uniform, and even if his face and ears were all rounded and goofy instead of sharp and pointy, she’d seen something similar in him. Something that made him feel like he belonged to her, in a way the others didn’t.
Or maybe it was just her age when he was born — she’d been older, more able to see how a baby would become a person; more able to see the potential in his formless, infant smiles. Less oblivious to the ways he was missing out on his own species’ cultures and traditions by being raised in the Xeno-Native Enclave.
“It wasn’t your job to take care of them,” Drathur said. He’d said it many times before. It helped. A little. That’s why he kept saying it and would keep saying it, for as long as Anno needed him to.
“I know,” Anno muttered. But even if it hadn’t been her job to stay and take care of them — even if the consequences of doing so would have been to give up her own life — leaving them behind would still have had consequences. And she’d never had to look at those consequences in the face before. Soon she might. And she wasn’t sure she was ready for them. She didn’t think she’d ever be.
Continue on to Chapter 5…