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THE EMPTY WOODEN CRATE Lena found in the hold was reassuring. What the hell anyone needed to ship in honest-to-God tree wood packing these days, she had no idea, but as she squashed herself into the farthest corner of the crate, arms tightly wrapped round knees, rocking slowly, it gave her comfort to know that crates had travelled that way on ships for millennia.
What was she supposed to do now? When she’d fallen out with the only friend she really had out here. Estranged from the whole reason she’d come. She’d alienated herself from the ship. The irony as she turned that phrase over in her mind was not lost on her. She was angry and frustrated and she could feel that the ship was too. The only safe place now from all the ragged edges of all that emotion was here, wrapped up in her crate. Shit, shit, shit.
She never swore. She could hear her mother’s voice in her head saying: That was what you got for hanging round with sailors too long. Lena looked down at her navy uniform in disgust. She started to scratch at that too. Here they all were trapped in the vacuum of space in the body of an alien, she was the only one that could speak to it, and the only things they could be sure of not morphing into something else, were the things they’d brought with them from Earth. Though she’d turned the crate’s open mouth to face the wall and pulled the wooden drawbridge up, she knew the massive hold held the bulk of the massive jolly boat, the shuttle craft that the sailors had brought onboard, as well as the equally massive but less elegantly shaped drop ship the marines had brought with them. Stanley, their sergeant, liked to do drop ship drills which seemed to involve lots of marching on and off the tail of the ship sneaking or shouting. And singing. They seemed to sing a lot of songs from the old Disney Movies she watched with her mum back on Earth. All those princesses sat round waiting to be rescued by weirdos on horses. Lena preferred Alice in Wonderland to all those crappy fairy tales. Alice, didn’t wait for a saviour—there wasn’t one coming. Ever. They just weathered the storm, hunkered down, and learned to adapt, quick. When all the grown-ups were running round panicking like headless chickens, the children in those stories accepted the weirdness of the new world and found a surprising twist that saved everyone. She wracked her brains to think of some. Now here she was, on her own actual adventure and she was hiding in a box. Though, wait, didn’t that happen in those films too. Didn’t all those girls have their own crying-in-a-box moment? When they were paralyzed by fear and overwhelmed by loneliness. It didn’t say that in the fairy tales—the hero’s journey was lonely and heavy and since Lena was the only one that could be the hero, it was all on her.
The crate shifted. Lena’s heart leapt into her mouth. There was a knock on the wood. She couldn’t curl herself up any tighter.
“Hey henny, you in there? Thank God, we’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
