Swallowed

Swallowed

By Meg Smitherman

Prologue

PROLOGUE

I have dreamed of the Planet my whole life. It’s a recurring heaven that shines brighter than anything on Earth, anything I have ever seen in the waking world. It is verdant slopes of blooms and soft green grass, the widest and bluest sky you could imagine, thick and quiet forests so dark with shadow and moss.

I can’t remember a time when the Planet didn’t fascinate me. This Earth-like miracle, a blue-green pearl in the deepest reaches of our galaxy. Unthinkably distant, but still within reach.

The Planet is proof that Heaven exists, and we’ve been there. My mother walked its plains, traversed its forests, and gazed up at its twin moons at dusk. She told me stories all the time — about its beauty, the way it spoke to her heart, how she thinks of it fondly, even now. But she never told me the stories that mattered. Never the ones she told on the news, or in the hearings, or in old interviews for Time .

When I was younger, I used to ask her what really happened out there, before I was born. Was she a hero who survived a cursed mission? A villain, doomed by popular narrative? But no matter what I asked, she would only frown and turn away. When I remember it now, it’s like she was afraid I’d see the truth in her eyes, whatever that was.

Eventually, I learned to stop asking her.

I’ve seen all the interviews; I’ve read all the articles. Some of them paint her as the lucky sole survivor. Some of them are damning. But they all ask the question: Why did only she make it back when the rest were left for dead? And she never truly answered. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she was just as confused as everyone else.

When my mother finally died, the end of a slow creep toward eternity that seemed so wrong for someone still so young, I said goodbye to a woman I had never known.

But I know the Planet. I’ve seen it in my dreams.

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