Ǵenh’s blistered feet held her captive until well after sundown. When the cracked dirt cooled to a bearable simmer, she hobbled into the night to rest in the roots of a desiccated tree stump. This is where she wanted to die, at the foot of the stars.
She had lost interest in the tasteless preserves in the storeroom, and her well had run dry a couple days ago. All her precious plants had withered in the heat. And rain, even the hope for it, had abandoned her months ago. In the early days, she thought about leaving, but she knew there was nowhere else to go — it was the same everywhere. Her heart ached louder than her stomach. She longed for a home she never left but could never go back to.
A shooting star creased the sky but she couldn’t spare the tears she felt in her tightening chest. It was a tantalizing affair to gaze upon the night sky. She envied the creatures who couldn’t comprehend the stars, who couldn’t suffer from their unanswerable invitation. She felt a cutting ache that refused to numb. Her once vibrant planet was doomed to wink out in the night, never seen, never known.
As an inheritor of Life, she felt a guardian to it. Not in the way the elite sought to protect their individual lives in doomed, unready fantasies of spaceships and bunkers, but like a mother, heart clasped but bursting for the life around her, to succeed, to thrive…
