Streets full of people, all alone
Roads full of houses, never home
A church full of singing, out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the Moon.
“Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”
— Jonathan King, Lyricist
Mindy Box pressed her head to the cool glass of her family-room window, listening to Lawrence moan. He suffered more from archaic chemotherapy treatments than the skin cancer that left him with red crusty sores on his scalp and arms. Her three-year-old son’s wheeze competed with the generator’s whir, and someplace far off, not in her immediate division, a siren alerted residents to stay inside due to high levels of carbon dioxide and other toxins. She couldn’t completely blame the Moon for her emotions or her circumstance. She was stuck with the most unpleasant of realities. Her family had been left behind on a dying planet.
Mindy contemplated the Great Separation as she pushed her falling locs away from her slim face. She bent over to pick up books and toys as her family slept nearby in their shared bedroom. She and her husband Lawrence had done their best to create a sense of normalcy for their boys, Tucker, five, and Joseph, three, especially after their best friends relocated with the others to the New World.
To keep them happy, the two often took the boys on local excursions, like floating at the Fly Zone or shooting sky hoops at the ESPN Dome. They frequented libraries where Tucker and Joseph marveled for hours at holographic histories that showed them a world they’d never known.
“No gray stuff in the air, Mommy?” Tucker noticed.
“Why they have no masks,” Joseph challenged, struggling with his short a.
Single-family living was a thing of the past, so they shared a mansion-sized home with several other families, par for the course for PMHEs (Post-Moon Habitation Earthlings) who had been left behind after the Great Separation. Still, Mindy was thankful for her family’s compartment, a one-bedroom suite. She had creatively divided their large bedroom into private areas for her and Lawrence and for each of the boys. They had their own family room, bathroom, and kitchenette, unlike some other tenants in the building.
Mindy walked to the kitchenette and poured a cup of mint tea. Returning to her bedroom area, cup in hand, she quietly moved past her sleeping husband to a nearby window seat.
Peering up at the smiling Moon, Mindy sighed. Tonight, it was full and luminous; to the naked eye, it showed no signs of its inhabitants. The Moon tugged at her emotions, exacerbating her feelings from sad, to depressed. Like now, Mindy felt more melancholy than the day she saw her best friend leave on the shuttle.
She dug around in her housecoat pocket and pulled out a ticket stub, examining it in the moonlight like something had changed.
“What are you doing?” Lawrence asked.
Mindy turned to see a groggy Lawrence, scratching between tufts of hair on his head.
“What are you doing?” Mindy returned. “And why are you up?”
She watched Lawrence crank himself from a fetal huddle to his entire six-foot, one-inch frame with a slight bent at the shoulders. He stretched.
“My bones hurt,” he said, rubbing his hip. “The pain woke me up.”
“Do you want some mint tea?”
“No, thanks.” He moved toward the door, leaning against the frame. “I see you’re checking out that stub again, huh.”
Mindy shrugged, her head bent to hide the shame she felt from being left behind. “This was degrading,” she said, hoisting the lottery ticket stub. “Why weren’t we good enough?”
Lawrence limped over to the window seat. Tenderly, he lowered himself behind Mindy, engulfing her in a bear hug. “We are good enough, just not rich, famous, or political. Even so, we’ll be OK. Besides,” Lawrence said, “I’d prefer our gray-and-yellow reflector coats to those ugly magnet platform boots the Mooners wear.”
Lawrence’s attempt at levity made Mindy smile, but it fell flat the minute his chuckles became violent, hacking coughs. Mindy turned to rub his back as he doubled over sideways, tapping his chest and clearing his throat.
How could she accept fate?
As Mindy continued to massage Lawrence’s back, a sour, stale taste invaded her mouth. “Always almost, but never quite there,” she whispered. She’d been prom queen runner-up and two points short of the 4.0 needed for a full college scholarship. Then, five years ago, Mindy’s New York publisher relocated to the Moon, simultaneously rescinding their offer to publish her debut novel; they even canceled her advance. The latest “ever-the-bridesmaid” saga happened when Olivia’s #648, not her #649, became the winning lottery ticket to the Moon.
•
“Our greatest motivation in life comes from not knowing the future.”
— Futurist Thomas Frey
Just a year ago, she was one lottery ticket away from moving to the Moon with the others: the rich and upper-middle class; the visa carrying, job permitted; the politicians; and the lottery winners.
Mindy forced back tears, remembering the humiliation of having to leave the Chicago Theater with nothing. Not a picked lottery ticket. Not the promise to move to the New World where asthma and cancer did not exist.
Behind pinched eyelids, she recalled the rotund, red-faced man toddling across the theater’s stage. He hoisted a white card with red numbers on one side and a Moon shuttle on the other. After announcing each number, he clapped heartily. From the rash on his face, to his awkward gait, to his labored breathing, Mindy wondered how he qualified to be a Mooner.
Mooners were expected to be reasonably healthy. To qualify for lottery tickets, participants had to bring physician-certified health records. Mindy thanked God when her cousin Moses had signed their paperwork without examining Lawrence or Joseph. The medical clearance allowed her to claim a ticket stub and wait eagerly along with fifteen hundred other wannabes. There were only a thousand spaces. Still, she had worn her lucky yellow sweater and her mom’s gold cross to tilt fate’s hand.
Each time they called a number, Mindy nervously checked her stub until Olivia grabbed her hands to calm her nerves.
“Cool out,” Olivia had said. “We’ll be fine. Hey, I heard you get a choice of painting your home lemon, lime, coconut, or sherbet.”
Mindy laughed, relaxing some. She wanted to believe her friend who she’d known since kindergarten. The two were in sync in most things, even getting pregnant twice simultaneously.
Mindy responded, “Why are all your pastel colors named for food?”
Olivia’s round cheeks rose to a smile. “You get my point.”
“I do,” Mindy said, squeezing her friend’s hand.
An hour later, Mindy looked around the theater, once filled from the ground floor to the balcony with people, now almost vacant, leaving those who remained enervated, scattered. When they called Olivia’s number, 648, Mindy knew 649 couldn’t be far away.
She was wrong, however.
The rotund man with bad skin clapped his hands once like cymbals and announced a call for the final number. As he did, Mindy’s eyes clinched. Her fingers repeatedly twirled the sharp-edged gold cross, hanging from the delicate, filigree chain around her neck, as her own chants of “please let it be me, please let it be me, please let it be me” filled her ears. Simultaneously, a baritone yelp from the other side of the theater confirmed that once again it would not in fact be her. Mindy was so stunned she could not cry or speak untilOlivia wrapped her into a bear hug. “There will be other lotteries.”
Mindy forced a smile, parting Olivia’s bangs and kissing her cheek. “I hope so.”
Finally, the great day came, and I started for Hampton. I had only a small, cheap satchel that contained what few articles of clothing I could get. My mother, at the time, was rather weak and broken in health. I hardly expected to see her again, and thus our parting was all the more sad. She, however, was brave through it all.
— Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Mindy and Lawrence were both professors at Calumet Tech. They taught on alternating days. She taught African-American history on Mondays and Wednesdays while Lawrence had a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, teaching math. Since it was Tuesday, she helped Lawrence lather his body in a steroid-based UV protection cream before he dressed for work. Then, she clothed her boys in tiny gas masks and reflector raincoats to deflect the UV rays, prior to accompanying them to catch their school bus. Shortly after she returned from escorting the boys, Mindy gleefully watched Lawrence leave for the college, for she knew Tuesday was also the designated day for a visit from the butterfly prism that signaled Olivia’s weekly hologram journal.
•
Olivia had been a bus driver on Earth, so she’d been assigned the position of tour guide on the Moon. Her weekly holograms chronicled each outing. Once plucked, the butterfly unfurled into 3-D scenes of Olivia climbing a sky-high lava plain, resembling Alaska’s Mount Saint Elias. In another, Olivia dove and explored deep, colorful lava caves with a group of spelunkers. One week, Mindy watched Olivia scale the inside of the Aristarchus crater, so large it made the Grand Canyon look like a hole. Mindy’s favorite was the time Olivia took her family outside their outpost to see a solar eclipse as the sun draped the Earth with vibrating rings of reddish-orange light. Mindy sighed, wishing she was there.
Living vicariously through Olivia’s exploits, Mindy had come to know what life on the Moon would be like through Olivia’s weekly three-dimensional visits. She often imagined living in the quaint outpost, infused with oxygen and gravity, with pastel-colored homes adorned with rectangular, reflector windows and solar panels. A shopping center, bitcoin bank, book swap, and community garden sat in the middle of one square block. Crystal Lake, a blue crystal collision of hydrogen from solar winds with oxygen-enriched lunar rocks, was not far from the town’s square. Mindy often daydreamed about swimming or picnicking there with her family.
Everything seemed civil and clean. Olivia and her family seemed happy living in their lunar Mayberry RFD, though at times Mindy knew Olivia tried to dull her glow. “This place would be great, but there’s no you.”
Mindy missed her too. She had no beaming pictures of her happy family to share; only stories she made up. “Hey, we got snow last weekend,” she’d lied. “I’ll have to send you a picture of us sledding that tall hill in the Dan Ryan Woods.”
Mooners got daily news and weather reports, so Olivia probably knew that none of it was true. If the climate didn’t kill them, the wild dogs, once domestic but now dangerously feral, would.
The butterfly prism hovered in front of Mindy’s eyes, coaxing her back into the present. When she plucked it, Olivia appeared. Only this time, she wasn’t scaling lava mountains or diving into glitter-filled craters. Instead, her hologram walked over to the couch and embraced Mindy.
“They’re building another outpost, not far from where I live. They’re looking for educators. That’s you and Lawrence,” Olivia had said. Mindy and Olivia shrieked in unison.
“When?” Mindy asked.
“Soon, keep an eye out for an email.”
The chance to move couldn’t have come at a better time. Earth’s resources dwindled daily. Everyone wore oxygenated masks and goggles to navigate the dense smog and toxins. The ozone layer fluctuated from thin to barely existent, making it unsafe some days to venture outside, even in protective wear. Cars were forbidden, leaving buses and bikes as the only traveling option.
•
As Olivia promised, the email arrived, almost as soon as her hologram lapsed. Mindy reviewed the list of qualifications for moving her family from Earth to the Moon. She had the health certifications, outstanding recommendations from her and Lawrence’s deans, and a family size that did not exceed six people. She transmitted their paperwork.
•
A few days later, after her first class, Mindy got a call from Lawrence.
“Honey, did you get the alert?”
“I had my phone off while I was in the classroom,” Mindy said, lifting her arm to tap the cell-phone chip. An interface of numbers and messages appeared. She reviewed her messages. “I see it!”
Lawrence bellowed, “We have tickets! I’m packing now.”
“Yes!”
“Yes!” Lawrence coughed. “Yes.”
“When?”
“At the end of the week. I’ve notified our deans. I also went to the doctor and . . .”
“Wait, what?” Mindy responded. “Honey hold on for a second.” Mindy rushed past her office mate to find a private place to finish her conversation. She nestled on the couch in the empty faculty lounge.
“Why did you do that? I have health certifications from my cousin Moses. We can’t have competing information.”
Lawrence quieted.
“Lawrence, what! Tell me. What!” Mindy catapulted from the couch, pacing back and forth.
Finally, Lawrence spoke. “I wanted records to share with the doctors up there.”
Mindy understood, but her nerves frayed, just thinking about the possible discovery of her ruse. Jail didn’t scare her because there were no more official holding centers. Besides, Earth was its own prison. What dogged Mindy was her inability to get beyond her usual fate. Too anxious to remain on campus, Mindy canceled her classes and headed home.
On the bus ride home, Mindy bumped her head against the windowpane as a boarded-up hospital, demolished homes, fighting wild dogs, dead trees, and brown fields whisked by. Her eyes fluttered shut as her mind wandered to an alternate reality.
•
Mindy was on the Moon, basking in a rainbow of colors, from the periwinkle sky, to the reddish dirt. She and Lawrence planted okra in the community garden. Their boys played nearby. Things were different. Joseph and Tucker ran aimlessly around the playground without Joseph wheezing. Lawrence’s caramel-colored skin was free of cancerous sores. He was playful again, slinging handfuls of dirt at her as she planted. She laughed, dodging his attacks and fired off a few return shots. They finished their chores and walked home to a quaint cottage with a lava-burning hearth in the family room. Once inside, the boys grabbed a board game while Mindy and Lawrence huddled on the couch to read. Life on the Moon was all that she ever wanted . . .
•
“Hey lady,” the bus driver yelled, disintegrating Mindy’s reverie. “Ain’t this your stop?”
Mindy looked out the window to see her neighborhood. A smile crept across her face. This could be the last time I wade through gray dust or dodge sunrays, just to get home.
“Thank you,” Mindy said, raising up and donning her mask before disembarking.
•
Mindy was amazed at how quickly Friday had come. They were fifth in a slow-moving check-in line as the attendants reviewed paperwork and people. Tucker and Joseph ran circles around their parents, who occasionally wrangled them in by their collars. Mindy perspired profusely and prayed as she watched the attendant conduct physical examinations using a paddle-like wand to trace people from head to toe. Some were forced from the line afterwards. When it was their turn, Mindy asked the attendant why some people were sent away.
“Either something was wrong with their paperwork or they didn’t pass the PE,” he stated, scanning Tucker first and then Joseph. “Asthma is one of those conditions that actually goes away on the Moon, so I’m going to pass this little one,” he continued, rubbing Joseph’s head and guiding him to stand near Tucker. Mindy was also approved and directed to join her boys, but an alarm sounded when it was Lawrence’s turn.
“This man has stage-four skin cancer.” The attendant extended a beefy arm in front of Lawrence. “I can’t let him on the shuttle.”
“Wait,” Mindy screamed, clinging to her boys while reaching for Lawrence. “We can’t leave him.” She tried to pull Lawrence over where she and the boys stood, but the man held her back with one massive hand to her chest.
Lawrence pleaded. “You heard the man say there is no asthma on the Moon. Go!”
“There’s no cancer either. They have the cure. He knows.” Mindy nodded toward the attendant.
The attendant broke in. “Are you going? I’ve got a line to get through.”
Mindy hugged both boys fiercely until they both squiggled under the tightness of her embrace. Gingerly, she pushed them closer to the attendant. “Here. Please, take my boys.
My best friend Olivia will be waiting on the other side for them. She’ll know what to do.”
She saw Lawrence’s chin lift though unable to force back his tears. His raspy voice implored, “It’s your turn. Go.”
Ignoring his plea, Mindy continued to walk away from her boys and the shuttle. Reaching Lawrence, she grabbed his hand.
The attendant shrugged his shoulders as he guided the whimpering boys, their arms outstretched, their small mouths moaning for their mother, onto the shuttle. After seating Mindy and Lawrence’s sons, he leaned out the shuttle entrance prior to closing the door. “What do I tell your friend when she asks about you?”
“Tell her, I said, there will be other shuttles.”
Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, freelance journalist, and literary activist. In 2019, her mini-memoir, Devil’s Alley, will appear in Us Against Alzheimer’s—Stories of Family, Love, and Faith anthology. Last year, Bell, along with two other writers, created a collaborative short story hybrid that was published in They Said anthology. In January 2017, her short story “The Last Supper” appeared in Revise the Psalm, an anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. She’s had other fiction and prose appear in various other publications, including Hair Trigger, BAC Street Journal, Expressions of Englewood, and Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review, Guildworks. Currently, Bell is shopping her novel Mud Pies and working on her second novel, Family Legacies.