Bringing Home Major Tom

By Leigh Kimmel

Stacey didn't believe in wishes. Walking home one evening, she saw a bright star shining over the abandoned Starlite Motel and made a wish. Purely as a lark, of course -- she never expected anything to come of it. Now she's dealing with a man who claims to be from another world where history ran differently. He wants to go back home -- but Stacey has no idea how to go about it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223693833

Book preview

Evening cast long shadows across the old Starlite Motel. In the distance a stereo pounded out Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home). Dang it, but I haven't heard that song in years.

Stacey squinted, blurring away the decades of neglect, the plywood covering the windows and half the doors. It might be harder to imagine away the chainlink fence around the building, or the stink rising from the scummy puddles in the bottom of the cracked swimming pool, but she could enjoy the soaring pillars like airplane tailfins, the streamlined bands of the roofline which once would've been lit with neon to match the sign in front. Googie, they called that style of architecture, the relics of a time when people still believed in a wide-open future full of rockets to the Moon and Mars, of cities in orbit and ordinary families raising their children as space-dwellers.

Stacey's gaze went to the slender crescent Moon hanging just over the tops of the long-dead trees around the perimeter of the pool deck. Nowadays those dreams of rockets were just as dead. Sometimes she found it hard to remember how her child self had dreamed of going to the Moon, back when the end of Apollo still seemed a temporary hiatus, not an abandonment.

Now she'd settle for a relationship that didn't go south after three dates. Assuming things even got to date #1, that was. No bummer quite like meeting a nice guy, getting to know him just enough to be interested, and discovering he was happily married.

Stacey looked over at the rusty sign proclaiming: Free TV in every room. Above the eight-pointed starburst at the top hung a bright dot of whiteness in the sky—the first star of the evening. She recalled wishing on stars when she was a child, being disappointed when her wishes never came true. Probably because her stars had in fact been Venus or Jupiter, or some satellite in an orbit high enough it moved slowly. This one twinkled like an actual star, so why not indulge that old childhood fancy? It wasn't going to cost her anything.

The verse came to her lips: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might...

She realized she had no idea what to wish for. The childhood longing for rockets and space trips seemed absurd. But hadn't she said she'd settle for a relationship that wouldn't go sour? Go for it: be united with my soulmate this night.

The wind rose, making the tree branches rattle. Startled, Stacey looked around, but