Healing Machine for Uma
For the shame of disappointing your parents
It's an early foggy morning. You're driving up the mountain to your last day of astronaut camp. This is what you've been waiting for all these weeks: the day you finally get to go to outer space. Your parents had tried to enroll you in one of those fake space camps with a kid-sized G-force trainer, a mission control room full of buttons that didn't work, and wasted afternoons making bottle rockets. But you'd snuck out one morning and signed up for the real deal, the astronaut training center on the opposite side of the parking lot. Three weeks later, you're finally ready for your one-way trip to the far reaches of the solar system.
At liftoff, strapped into your seat in the space shuttle, you see your weeping parents standing in the crowd of onlookers. You realize how proud they would've been if you'd done something respectable and ordinary with your life; how much you've disappointed them with your one-way ticket into the unknown.
You blast off. From space, the earth below you looks like a little blue marble. You reach out the window and grab it, watching the atmosphere swirl in the palm of your hand. You put the marble in your pocket, glad to have your tiny parents with you, glad that fragile little world is yours.