Leap Day
by Luc Reid
We had to get, like, I don’t know, a million fucking klicks out past Jupiter’s orbit for Leap. We didn’t get to see anything the whole way, and it took, God, like a month and a half. Rinnie and me were going batshit by then, practically, because while it was a huge-ass ship, we were stowaways, and there were only like three places we could hide: hydroponics, cargo 2, and the morgue.
But after the Leap, we figured they’d have to just let us join the colony. Because what else were they going to do, shoot us out into space? Call our moms and and have them come get us in another fucking solar system?
It wasn’t like Rinnie and me wanted to go into space so much as that I got Rinnie pregnant and we figured we should run away because her dad would fucking kill me when he found out. Not like, he’d be really pissed or something, but actually kill me, like with his hunting knife or just beat me down with a tire iron or something. And Rinnie wouldn’t abort the baby, because she said that would be murder, and seriously, I had dreams sometimes that we aborted the baby and it came back and was this little fucking zombie child with its head all wrong. I was way, way more cool with stowing away on the Leap Ship than killing that baby.
“Hey, I think they’re doing it,” Rinnie said.
“Shut up. You don’t know,” I told her. “How do you know?”
“I feel something, like in my uterus.”
“That’s the baby, stupid,” I said, but then I knew I was wrong, because I started feeling it in my uterus. Or, I don’t know, my liver or something. It was like there was a little tiny drain in there, trying to suck me through. It felt like hell.
“I think I’m going to hurl,” I said.
“Wait–” said Rinnie, and then suddenly the whole universe burst into stars and pieces, and there wasn’t me or Rinnie any more, but we were both just tangled together like one person, tangled together with the baby, and the stars flew through us, and we stretched until time stopped and feeling stopped and we were the whole universe, Rinnie and the baby and me.