Aluminum Anniversary

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. While technically true, in practice you don’t spend a lot time in the vacuum of space, so everyone can hear you scream in the spaceport burrow where we’re all sardined.

I gently reached down to pull the tiny building brick from the soft part of my instep. The scream reverberated in my ears, but the kids’ room remained dark. I let out a breath. Their “promise” to clean up the all-room had amounted to about as much as those thin walls.

“Mama, you alright?” Sheridon’s anxious voice called out from the closed doorway. Shit.

“Shhhh. Be quiet and sleep if we want to see the rings tomorrow!” Fonzee wouldn’t have cared if I were seriously hurt as long as she could still board a shuttle. It stung a little each time, even though I knew not to take it personally .

Sliding the door open, I whispered “Time for quiet, dears. And what are we supposed to do between walls?”

“Pretend you can’t hear anything at all!” they parroted back the childish sing-song from the program we’d watched before bed.

I missed the sturdiness of our old farmhouse. Missed the secrets we were allowed to keep. Missed being a satellite of five among a solar system of many. I missed a lot of things from Earth.

Mary was still sleeping, her tiny form in the lower alcove half hidden by the blown-up bears and cats she’d been allowed to keep on the shuttle. My hand brushed her sweaty hair off her delicate brown forehead.

“You guys want to put something on in your berths?” The twins usually turned down a story, preferring to whisper through the old-fashioned can-and-string contraption they’d rigged from the left side of the middle berth, up over the ceiling, and back down to the right side of the top berth. They had found some old scans of 1980s kid magazines and were working their way through the simplistic science projects. Or they were trying to, some of the supplies were hard to come by, some I’d never heard of.

The low buzz of the N’s vidport in 208 started up. I’d hoped for a reprieve. We’d chatted over tonight’s plans. Only a matter of time until the neighbor in 206 would turn up his whale sounds, compete for volume supremacy until the whole floor lost sound privileges for the evening.

The candle-light setting in the all-room wasn’t too bad. My great-grandmother’s veil—handmade in a time when hands were used for such things—hung over the back wall, used by each eldest daughter since. I’d be sad when we passed it to Fonzee. I’d decided long ago she’d get it when she turned 25, whether she married or not. Why should such history be tied to a relationship with someone else?

Ten years seemed like such a long time when I wore this. The 20 pearls on the edging had come from actual creatures, each one seeming so pink in this white room. My eyes joyously taking in shades other than the ten or so colors the burrow was made of, the light bouncing in a new way off this natural material.

Once, we visited the aquarium in Baltimore, belly bulging, a twin at each hand. They struggled to reach the harbor edge, this strange open place of water. As they sat just looking at the nothingness of it all, used to trees and buildings—just something taking up all available space—I looked down at the murky depth to see a box full of ear-shaped rocks.

An old person next to me, seeing a moment of silence I might otherwise have enjoyed, explained the Aquarium had been trying to rebuild the oyster population. I had asked if they would have pearls, and they explained you’d need to open them up to find out.

Such a strange thing: to have this beautiful thing building from your irritations; hidden within until someone pried your lips open to steal it away.

Ten years split nearly evenly between Earth alone, Earth with children, and then this stark floating tub. Each progression a step away from those two smiling faces draped in this veil.

In the vacuum of space, so they say, nobody can hear a scream. Most of the screaming takes place inside our heads anyway. There are so few secrets we can keep.

Marten should have been home before the kids were in bed, another night of emergencies. There were more “emergencies” in this month than there had been in the previous six. It hadn’t been this bad since we originally arrived. My writing was non-existent now that the time alone she had promised when we agreed to come here had dried up.

When we’d first arrived, the vacuum of space comments were little jokes to remind me to tidy before she came home. Not that I sat staring at the vidport all day, but being stuck in a couple hundred feet with three kids, one still in diapers with nowhere to go was an energy drain.

I had plans of setting up a small play group with other parents, but they all lived in the sub levels. In addition to sharing childcare with my own spouse, I’d expected all those advertisements talking about the community aspects of this tiny place, instead it felt like living under a microscope. Tiny in all the wrong ways.

Each conversation shut down when they learned we had that extra bedroom. The space given to us no longer considered a fair price to pay once they had lived a few months with children sleeping in the all-room. I don’t think I blame them, but it is lonely. I could touch elbows to each wall in that space, couldn’t lie down in the other direction. Berths big enough only for those under ten. The trade off didn’t seem worth it from this side either.

Kids down, lights up, I focused on the other sensual changes I could make. The music we’d come to think of as romantic had changed a lot since we waved goodbye to our home planet. Now when we considered getting intimate—anything more than brushing hands on the couch—we’d put on sounds to block out the noise we already worked so hard to minimize. City sounds, with the mechanical metro voices, more of the whale sounds, I opened up the app to mix a new soundscape for the evening, adding our own song, a group we had heard in college, heavily influenced by the pre-electronic age.

Footsteps in the hall and the neighbor’s volumes audibly lowered.

I’m not deaf or stupid. Whispers travel through walls. In the vacuum of space your screams may not echo, but quiet coos do, amplified by the silence of curious neighbors.

What do we do through walls?

Tonight there were no soft voices in the hall, the keypad tinged and the door opened, Marten spilled through with her heavy packs of top-secret vidviewers and office supplies. Footage was too valuable to be taken up by additional gear, so she carted it down the halls each night. Working from “home” was the reason we had that second bedroom.

“Food?”

“At the table.” I pulled out a dining chair, hoping she would notice the decor, or maybe have remembered the day on her own. She grabbed her plate and utensils, went to couch.

“You watch the latest Ten in the Wagon?” She sat, kicking off her shoes, turning off the soundscape and switching off the lights.

“Not yet,” I lied. We sat on the couch close enough I could smell the strange perfume of that other woman. Wondering how long it would take for the ride back to earth with three older children, knowing the first with toddlers was something I would never repeat. I sat down, put my hand over hers. She moved it nearly immediately to reach for her fork.

They say, in the vacuum of space, nobody can hear a scream, but mine would reverberate through this structure and no one would escape it.