When You Were My World

By Zoe Cannon

You found me drifting in space, dying. You opened your heart and your walls to me, and became my ship. For years we traveled together, exploring the universe, our minds and bodies joined. There were no boundaries between us. There were no secrets.

 

Until I made a single bad decision, and lost you forever.

 

This short story is 9100 words long. It is also available in the short story collection Love Is Strange.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoe Cannon
• Release date: Jan 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201197360

Book preview

When You Were My World

Zoe Cannon

© 2022 Zoe Cannon

http://www.zoecannon.com

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

When You Were My World

I was the one who convinced you to stop for the stranded ship, and I will always carry the guilt for that. When you murmured silently to me through the walls that we weren’t alone, and placed the image of the ship in my mind, I shared the trepidation I felt thrumming through your body. Human ships didn’t know what to make of you when they saw you, and militaries from several worlds—not to mention the pirates who lurked between—had tried to make you their own.

But something about that image made me send out a soft sense of hesitation, a request for you not to run until I had a chance to figure out what had caught my attention. It only took me a few seconds to see it. The ship wasn’t right for any military I knew. Although it had been quite some time since others of my species had concerned me, I still knew a civilian ship when I saw one. Not enough room for weapons, and not enough distinctiveness in its design. Military ships all have some feature that makes them stand out, because everyone needs to be able to tell friends apart from enemies at a glance. Every so often, some planet gets the idea to rely on generic ships and false signals, and invariably they learn it makes for a messy way to fight a war.

Most everyone had learned that lesson by now, and dispensed with subtlety in their designs. But this ship wasn’t trying to communicate anything with its form, except that whoever had designed it had been born without an aesthetic sense. The front half was blocky, the back thin and sleek. The engines hung below like an alien growth that had been grafted on.

And the ship was small, too small to be out this far between suns. And it wasn’t moving.

I murmured my concern to you in my thoughts, and received confusion in answer. You didn’t know humans as well as I did, but if I said the ship was odd, you believed me. Still, you wondered, why was it our concern?

But I had been stranded once, and would have died if you hadn’t stopped for me. Gently but insistently, I reminded you of that. I sent you you the image of the inside of my escape pod, the feeling of my lungs straining for air.

In answer, you curled a wall around my arm, and sent a warm thrum through me.