Astrid the Astronaut's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

Astrid walked through the Mars house after the family left, collecting towels and straightening beds. She moved through each planet building the same way, checking pipes and testing lights. Everything worked. The guests understood now. They saw the posters and felt the difference between Venus and Neptune, between Mercury and Pluto. But when she stepped outside, she saw something that stopped her cold. A guest had left a blanket spread on the grass between Neptune and Pluto, its blue fabric printed with white stars. Astrid stared at it. She hadn't thought about that night in years. The night she and her father laid on a blanket just like this one in their backyard in Ontario, when she was seven. He'd pointed up at the stars and told her how far away they were, how small Earth was compared to everything else. She remembered feeling scared at first, then safe. Her father had squeezed her hand and said the universe was so big that nothing she worried about would ever matter to it, which meant she got to decide what mattered to her. She picked up the blanket and folded it slowly. Space Haven wasn't really about showing people how small they were. It was about what came after that feeling. The freedom of it. She'd built this place thinking she was teaching perspective, forcing people to confront their insignificance. But her father hadn't done that to her. He'd shown her the size of things so she could choose her own scale. She walked to the cedar picnic table behind the sun building and sat down, the blanket in her lap. From her pocket she pulled out the worn photo of her dad, creased and faded. She'd kept it in her flight suit on every mission. She sat there until the stars came out, then placed the photo on the table and weighted it down with a stone. Tomorrow she would change the signs at Space Haven. Not to make people feel small, but to show them they could choose what size to be. The blanket would go in the sun building's common room with a note: "For guests who want to look up." She stood and walked back toward the planet houses, already planning where to add benches and quiet spaces. Places where people could sit with what they'd learned and decide what to do with it.