Listen to a podcast of Catherine Sharpe’s “Another Lesbian Space Fantasy.”
As we rocket out of Earth’s gravitational well, I can feel the g-force pull my face against itself, then down, like a bulldog. I am a victim of 2, 3, 4, then 5 g’s–the force is like shitting a cinderblock, or having a baby, or clamping down on the edge of a huge orgasm.
Then I am gloriously free.
I can hardly believe my luck, my lightness, my weight as nothingness. I am not running away, I am not running at all. I am floating.
At first, I was reluctant to accept. There are so many equally deserving middle-aged newly divorced lesbian mothers. But I will do my best to create human context for what we all share–thrill at the vastness of space, wanderlust, a giddy hope for engineering in bleak, inhospitable environments.
Space is cold. Oxygen is just a formula.
”Oh, Yuri,” I say to my commander/fellow scientist. “Oh! She’s beautiful. What a sphere. Don’t you love her?” We both look at the Earth; Yuri grunts. He is not a romantic. He has done this before and I am no novelty for Yuri.
Before I left, I set the DVR to record my “nightly” appearance on CNN’s Frontiers! show. As part of the HarperCollins book deal, I’d read one of my stories from Bedtime In Space.
”Now sleep tight, Phoebe!” I plan to say at the end of each story, looking right into the vidcam.
”Go catch the moon, Mommy!” my little bird would say.
I’m no scientist, but I know enough to be careful around delicate instruments calibrated for weightlessness. The slightest nudge at the wrong time can render years of calculations useless. Earthside, I wake up anyway at 11:43, at 12:24, at 2:18, as if I had samples to take, or measurements to record, or a bitter conversation to conclude. Why not use that time for the benefit of mankind?
As the First Middle-Aged Divorced Lesbian Mom in Space, I agreed to conduct certain experiments for the sake of social science. First, I would expose the pale white band of ring finger flesh to the unmitigated rays of the sun and record the Equalizing Tanning Time in Space. How would it compare to the amount of time it takes to look unmarried in Denver, in New York, in Brussels? Second, I would refrain from using the anti-aging serum on those “tiny lines.” Weightlessness improves tone and texture–so I hope to prove.
Lastly, every day for nine days I’d agreed to write a line of poetry that exquisitely renders my pain and awe and which, when decoded, would provide accurate vector formulas for safe re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The air inside the space station smells like a lit match dropped inside a rinsed beer can.
***
I am totally nude inside my spacesuit.
During my final orbit, I finish the Space Walk for Sexual Ambiguity where the shuttle couples with the space station. I admire the shuttle’s fragility, the small divots and pockmarks in the hard-baked ceramic and metal heat-deflecting tiles, the slight bulge of rivets, even the chipped paint, for heaven’s sake. Chipped paint in space! What could be more human, more flawed in this immensity?
”You! Tick small stips,” Yuri coaches. His voice seems far away although it is in my ear. His com unit’s unclipped, drifting away from his mouth. He is having one of his bad orbits–just sucking tube after tube of Chicken Cacciatore, cocooned in his sleepnet.
I look away from the Earth, toward the stars, like hard truths, precise and clear. Think how a sunrise means nothing from this perspective–untethered to mundane sleep-wake cycles. Finally, I get the context right.
She wasn’t the world–she was just another orbit.
Unable to hear in the vacuum, I must imagine the magnetic click of my boots detaching then reattaching. I calibrate the tug it takes to detach just slightly. Magnets that imitate the incredible pull from the real center of the earth, from my daughter. This is the force of the earth in miniature, like a sip from a full bottle of wine, or like a kiss before sleeping, or like the ultrasound of a tiny beating heart, a sound you can only see.
My steps are tiny, of course, tiny and deliberate.
About the author:
Catherine Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in the 1990′s before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction. Her first collection Ambition Towards Love hasn’t yet been published, but read some of the interlocking essays and fictions in Opium Magazine, Errant Parent, The Battered Suitcase, and A cappella Zoo.
