My last chance at life
Sure, I’m only 15, mister.
But if I don’t get off this planet, I’m going to kill someone for sure.
The only two who’ll miss me are Raisin and Mariah.
They believe my going into space will kill me.
I tell them there are plenty of worse way to die, slower, more painful ways, like living here.
My dad loves dirt the way a pig does.
He breathes it, east it, and even sleeps in it.
I’m so sick of dirty and gravity, I don’t care if I ever see either of them again.
Sometimes, I lie in my bunk in the kitchen and stare out the window at the sky.
Dad tells me to quit daydreaming.
He doesn’t trust anything that isn’t attached to something else.
He’s always talking about roots, about his father and his father’s father and so on, and how they worked this land until it is something worth owning.
We just don’t own all the land Dad’s ancestors worked to give to Dad.
He likes to gamble, and when he was a kid, he gambled nearly all of the land away, managing to cling only to the rump of what had once been a great plantation.
This small slice is a portion of the larger property the elders thought so little of they didn’t bothered to clear it.
Dad clung to it, cleared it, built a wall around it and worked it hard, just to prove he hadn’t lost his roots.
He believes he has received a second chance in life
Mom married Dad from a prominent family when she still believed he was prominent, too, and the set back ruined her.
When Dad lost the last valuable portion, mom’s spirit died. She begged her father and brothers to take us in.
But you don’t do such things on Delta Seven (Rockland’s Landing as locals call it).
We’re a religious community, a colony founded on strong beliefs about god and the proper order of family.
Wives stay by their husbands through good and bad.
And since her family believes that, too, they wouldn’t help her escape the obligation.
Maybe it is because they have wives of their own to consider and don’t want to set a bad example that might come to haunt their houses along with ours.
They didn’t even apologize when Mom died.
This is a poor world, mister.
We don’t get many space ships here except to take goods to market for us.
We don’t have immigration because we’re afraid a bad seen might take root here and ruin our good crop.
So this may be my last chance to get out from this life.
So I’m begging you, mister.
Take me along.