Dumplings
The guys floated around the obnoxiously round table. The ladies had gone to the gym. It was girls’/boys’ night. It was the one day of the month that helped them remember what home was like.
Home. Man, what they wouldn’t give for it.
Cards were dealt and held on to. When you’ve got no gravity, peeking in go-fish is easier. Only one of them knew how to play poker, and boys’ night was for relaxing, not stressing over a stupid card game.
There were four guys. Tillman, Kai, Lecter, and Glasser. Lecter was the leader. He knew what to do and when, and bossy was a good color on him. Glasser was the smooth guy. The crew always had him talk to ground control because the earthers looked forward to communications from him. Kai was the smartest one, and Tillman was the baby.
“Hey Kai,” Glasser asked, showing off his trademarked half smile, “Got any fours?”
“You dirty son of a bitch!”
“Decency, men,” Lecter laughed.
“Would you look at that? A full set,” Glasser bragged.
“Okay Tillman,” Kai said, “Avenge me.”
“Oh. Um, okay. Glasser, do you have any nines?”
“Yes sir,” Glasser saluted.
Tillman took the cards without an expression. Something was bothering him.
“You okay?” Lecter asked, clapping his hand onto Tillman’s shoulders.
“I guess...just a sprout of homesickness.”
“Ah. Yeah, we all go through it. Just have to think of this as your home, with us as your family,”
“Scary thought,” He grinned, sadly.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t want Kai’s genes either.”
“Hey!”
They played a few more games, made a few more jokes. Eventually, they ended up just sitting there, talking.
The station wasn’t cozy, but it was hard not to feel comfortable around that table. Lecter often complained that a round table was stupid.
“I mean, three international space stations later, and they still waste space with round tables.” He often said.
Tillman was the latest man aboard, and he was the youngest. Top of his NASA classes, he held his own from the brotherly heckling. He liked the guys alright, but he started to think he wasn’t cut out for space. The others seemed to cope fine with being so far away, but not him. He missed everything. It was the full, dull kind of ache that hurt too much but too softly to be satisfying. It was like running into that cornerless table.
“What do you guys miss most?” He asked.
“Well, that was random,” Glasser said.
Kai took a sip of his water, “Where’d that come from?”
“Just thinking about it,”
“I miss my family,” Lecter said, “I never got to see the kids much since the divorce, but I miss ’em like I saw ’em every day. I miss Sandy, too. She told me she didn’t mind me leaving, but I know she did. We didn’t have any kids of our own before I left, and it...it kind of beats me up that’s she’s alone,”
Everyone was in stunned silence. Lecter wasn’t much of a personal or emotional guy. He was technical and funny and charming, but he wasn’t one for personal discussion.
He knew that Tillman needed to hear that he wasn’t the only one who missed earth, though.
“What about you, Glasser?”
“Well, I miss my dog the most. She’s the ugliest looking pug, but sweet. She sleeps right on my extra pillow every night. I got in a car crash a while ago. No one was hurt, but it shook me up. My family suggested getting a dog, but I didn’t want one. So, we compromised, and I got a dog,”
Everyone chuckled.
“But yeah, she got me through the bad stuff. I’m okay now, no more nightmares or anything, but I still miss her. She’s so ugly, but the cute kind.”
“They say pets take on the physical looks of the owner,” Kai said.
“What’s her name?” Tillman asked, ignoring Kai.
“Henrietta,”
“Cute,” Lecter said, “My niece’s name is Henrietta.”
“Alright Kai,” Glasser said, “Your turn.”
“Nah man, this is stupid. You guys can be touchy-feely, but I’m happy to get away,”
Tillman raised an eyebrow, “Why?”
“C’mone, I don’t need to talk about it to make myself feel better,”
Lecter nodded, “Sure sure sure, but I think it’ll make us feel better, you know? We’re spilling our guts, here. You’ll have enough blackmail on us if we talk. Besides…”
“It’d be nice to know you better,” Tillman chimed in.
“Exactly.”
“Alright, fine. I live with my sister. Our parents didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and we made a deal to get out as soon as we could to save them the cash. She’s pretty much all I had,”
Had.
“She was put in a coma in an armed robbery right before I left. They didn’t want me to come, thought I was too emotional. But I didn’t want to sit around and wait for her to wake up. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was just getting salad for dinner. The cops said she tried to get him with a carton of milk,” Kai smiled sadly, “Which was just like her,”
“She was never selfish, always put me first. And I was supposed to be the big brother. I just...I needed to get off that rock. I don’t even know if our parents were notified. I never checked.”
Everyone was quiet again, thinking over Kai’s story.
“How old was she?”
“Nineteen,”
They all turned to the Earth they missed or hated so badly. It was beautiful in all its irregular swirls, asymmetry, cruelty, and mercilessness.
“Hey boys,” Peters poked her head in the room, “Mind if we crash boys’ night? Yavis went to bed early, and McDaniel and I are looking for entertainment,”
One aspect of the new age station was shared rooms. The mechanics did the living quarters last, and didn’t have the room for seperate rooms. Kai has to beat Glasser and Lecter at rock-paper-scissors for the lone room, which Glasser and Lester were fine with when a new guy was announced.
Now, they floated in the sleeping bags stitched to the wall.
“Hey,” Kai called out in the dark.
Silence, then, “Yeah?”
“What do you miss? We never got to you,”
“Oh, um...dumplings.”
“Really? That’s it?”
“Pretty much,”
“Wow,” Kai said, “Priorities. Goodnight,”
Tillman could tell that Kai wanted more than that. He wanted to know about whatever tragedy or embarrassing story that Tillman was sitting on, but he’d never tell.
He would never tell him that he missed dumplings because his mom made them. He’d never tell that it was the only thing the two of them could do without warranting the wrath of his drunkard father.
His mom taught him to cook everything she did, and he knew the recipes by heart. He’d recite them in his head when he couldn’t sleep.
Dumplings were hard for her to make, but she did once a month for him. It was Tillman’s favorite food. They would gossip or sing or just chat while the flour got under their nails and on their noses.
“So, Will, what’s the news on Miss Olivia?”
“She keeps looking at me from across the room. I don’t know why,”
“How do you know she’s looking at you?”
“...I don’t know,”
“Aha. It’s because you’re looking at her!”
“Am not!”
“Are to!”
They went back and forth until his dad yelled from the bedroom that this is not what a hangover needs at ten in the morning. Will looked at the stove, and saw it was two in the afternoon.
“Is she cute?”
“I guess,”
He’d ask his mom questions about words he didn’t know or about politics or places they both wanted to go.
“We should go to China! Eat some real dumplings,”
“What, these aren’t real enough?”
One afternoon, he came home, and she wasn’t there. He looked for her all day, not daring to ask his dad. Two days later, they found her body. She’d been hit by a hit-and-run at a stop sign. The car had been flung off the side of a hill, and there were no broken guardrails to show that anything had ever happened.
Wil left home a week and a half later, and his dad never looked for him.
He could still smell the meat cooking on the pan. He liked them steamed better, but she liked them fried. She always offered to steam some, but he knew it was easier for her to fry. He heard that his dad had died four years before he was sling-shot into space.
The house was still there, but the kitchen didn’t exist anymore, not without her. He still made dumplings once a month, always fried. He could feel her with him sometimes. He hoped that his memories were still right, but they probably weren’t. He knew that the brain alters memories whenever he called on them, and he called often.
As he looked at the window, he asked himself, What’s worse, to ache for a place that doesn’t exist anymore? Or for one that never did?
They might have been able to be happy, get away from his dad, but he’d never know. Logically, he knew that they also had fights in that kitchen. They said awful things and stormed out more times than most families.
He missed his mom, but he’d never tell them this. He wanted to go home to someone who wasn’t there anymore, and the only thing he could do now was become someone she would be proud of. She had raised him religious, and he liked to think that, up here, he was closer to her.
What he knew for sure was that he didn't want to go back to an Earth without her.
