I’ve decided to end my Substack for now. When I first took a pause, it was because I was at the end of my MFA program and having completed my thesis, I was feeling burnt out from writing and school. Luckily, this only lasted a few weeks. I have resumed work on the novel I began writing in my program (not my thesis), and I have started a new job. For the last three years, I have been able to make my own schedule and devote any time I want to writing, but now I will need to be more structured, and take advantage of any time I have available to me to write. I have decided that I would like to concentrate on my novel for now. This has been a fun exercise, and I’m grateful for everyone who supported me by reading and commenting on my flash fiction. Maybe, once I get used to the routine, I will return to writing my weekly flash fiction, but until then, I will say goodbye. But I would like to leave you with this last flash piece. It is a story I read at the very last Writer’s Bloc (this is a monthly reading series I hosted in Mankato) and perfectly encapsulates my experience in the MNSU MFA program.
The Moon Colony
I came to the moon colony later in life. Most everyone else was in their twenties. The first time I hung out with Kat and Maivboon, Kat said, “I’m probably the oldest. I’m really old.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“I’m twenty-five,” Kat said.
And then I said the most old person thing I ever said. I said, “Oh, honey.”
At thirty-six, I was the oldest of the new recruits on the moon colony. I had worked a corporate job for years, but I was tired of writing copy for gadgets to make your house cleaner or your kitchen smarter or to distract you from your own fanciful thoughts. It seemed to me that everyone who wanted an automatic single-serve coffee maker that pollutes the earth with their individually packaged pods, probably already had one. And if I stayed in the job any longer, I was going to begin to think I wanted one even though to get my requisite daily amount of coffee, I would fill at least a dozen landfills with little plastic pods.
So, I decided to spend three years on the moon colony. “To hell with money!” I said, and then cried a little bit. I was going to miss the gravity and the feel of grass between my fingers in summer, and the way the sun sometimes plays peekaboo behind the clouds, but most of all, I was going to miss the money. The simple joy of possessing a thing as soon as I thought to want it.
But there wasn’t much to buy on the moon colony, so there’s that. And I was going to get something better than money. I was going to learn how to construct a story so that one sentence unfurls from the next until you get to the end and the molecules that compose your body all rearrange themselves just slightly. This is why everyone came to the moon colony, except for the poets who learned how to make language so beautiful tears spring from your eyes and how to live the rest of their lives without ever wanting money.
My first year at the moon colony, all of Earth broke out in a terrible disease, and everyone on the moon colony had to stay inside in case one of us had been affected. This was a lonely time on the moon colony, but we tried to keep each other company online. We liked to play a game where some people were murders and other people tried to discover who the murders were. It all took place on a spaceship, and it made us appreciate that we were safe on the moon colony and not in a spaceship with murders.
One of my favorite things we did on the moon colony was when we read for each other the beautiful sentences we’d been writing. Even when the disease was at its most frightening, people still came together online to read their sentences and listen to other people read theirs. And on these nights, my molecules would shift a little bit inside me, so that after three years at the moon colony, I was a completely different person than the person I was when I left Earth, and that is worth all the things I could ever want to buy.
¿Y sabes que si te vas, la moon colony nunca volverá a ser la misma? Muchos abrazos de la Colombia!