Does she exist without a name?

> Racing through the void at unimaginable speeds, Memo feels the biting chill of X-rays as ultraviolet light fractures delicate thoughts in the oppressive dark. Upon impact, a terrifying euphoria envelops her: she feels every wound, yet remains securely anchored in her own skin.

Memo had never considered the idea of being on a planet before. Like her fellow Sowilum of the same age, she was steeped in the rich narratives of their origins, tales that spoke of how they were all implanted on the third planet orbiting their Central Star. For fifteen years, these stories had wrapped around her like a thick mist, obscuring any other possibilities and dispelling all mysteries.

The world they had been scattered to over a hundred generations prior was round and vast, spinning as planets do, allowing day to follow night and dreams to ripple through the starry hours of darkness.

It wasn’t that she took this for granted; it was embedded in her very DNA, a living memory of a shared trauma with a (so far) happy conclusion. It was simply so ingrained that she never questioned what it truly meant to be part of a planet.

The fact that she, along with everyone else, belonged to what they called Star-Sown was as fundamental to her as other truths she couldn’t recall learning—like how an oSowilum named Mondo was her father and another named Saoirse was her mother. They had defied convention by uniting across tribal lines because of her, Memo, who had been seeded.

These truths were known to her without formal teaching. Just as she breathed air, craved rain, and loved the thrill of speed, she also quietly dreaded the day that Being might arrive on Sown and scatter them once more to seek new soil, further from their native light.

The Scattering had affected them all. Eons ago, the shock of it had been woven into their genetic understanding of the Universe.

The Sowilum had once nurtured love and harmony on Star-Child, the golden second planet from their Star. They had thrived there for millennia, with no memory of how the first among them came to be.

How extraordinary, Memo mused, a practiced twinge of envy flickering in her mind. To wake and work each day without the thought: could this be the day we’re uprooted, scattered in a panic of photons? It’s inconceivable for anyone to grasp what that kind of innocence would feel like.

Yet, they were resilient.

Though the inherited dread existed within them, it was thin and sparse, overridden by the rhythm of one day following another through the lifetimes. They acknowledged it—reinforced by the elders’ stories—but it didn’t hinder their ability to thrive and remain optimistic.

And that’s how Memo had managed to glide along.

Until now.

Now, the sharp realization of how precious it was to be part of Sown, to live, breathe, and exist on a planet she called home, caught in her throat like a stifled sob. She was nowhere near home, and the profound confusion of her altered circumstances was painful.

Her life had followed a clear pattern.

Memo had been born, nurtured, and comforted on the land where she worried, dreamed, and dashed about while the planet sustaining her orbited the Sowilum’s Central Star. The smooth rotations predictably altered the seasons, entertaining them with vibrant dusk and morning star-rises that painted each dawn in welcoming gold. It was everything; yet, despite its total presence in her psyche, the planet beneath her feet was the one remarkable detail about her existence she had consistently ignored.

She belonged to a significant entity floating in the darkness, a body so enormous she could never hope to see its curvature to the edge one might expect to tumble off into the void. Entirely different from the battered rock she now kneeled on, aching from the unprotected crash onto its surface.

Here, despite the dim surroundings, she could peer a couple of blocks in any direction and see a jagged edge breaking against the nothingness it bordered. Starkly harsh, this small body was the antithesis of smooth or gliding in its jarring stillness.

If this rock was spinning, she couldn’t discern it. It felt tethered to an anchorless point.

Gazing upward, the view drained hope from her tangled thoughts: that fuzzy glimmer far away, clinging like lint on the black fabric of space, was her Star.

Without its warmth and inviting heat, Memo couldn’t articulate how she recognized that tiny light as the Star she was drawn to, but she instinctively understood its significance. Which meant her home, the third planet in a perpetual orbit— the place she had known by name long before she recognized her own— yes, she got it: Star-Sown must be one of the countless specks of light dazzling in a display that sparked immediate homesickness.

How was she breathing? Not on Sown, how was she alive?

And if she truly was here, what fate was her brother facing— that broken pulse she was meant to help restore?

Had the Wanderer’s medicine survived in the van after it overturned, landing upside down in the ditch beside the weaver’s field? Would the cooling bag maintain its chill and protect the vials from the wicked summer heat? Would it all be discovered?

Would she?

It had been scorching that day. This day. Wasn’t it just hours ago? Everything was painful. The ground was black and shredded like coal. Was it only minutes?

Once again, she confirmed her existence, processing a simple thought: if her mind was ablaze—and fire needs air to burn—she must be breathing and thus alive. It made no sense.

“Why doesn’t Uncle call you something else?”

Memo recalled her little sister’s questions from that morning echoing in her mind. The events that had brought her here felt rushed. H-E-R-E. That was the best she could find to label this place. Kinx had wondered why Uncle simply referred to her as “Memo,” a name that carried no particular significance for her. At three-and-a-half years old, Kinx was a perpetual fountain of questions, and that morning was no exception.

“What do you mean?” Memo had asked impatiently during a sharp turn that made them lean into their seats on the way to the airfield. “You mean like your nickname?”

“I’m Kinnebeth,” she replied confidently, bouncing each syllable like a ball. “He says I kinked it up!”

“Uncle renames everyone.”

“Not you!”

Memo nodded and rolled her eyes. “He told you why—when you asked him in the garden.”

“Meh-Me-Meh Meeee.”

Memo groaned. “Right. He explained it to you.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“I’m just me, he said. Right?”

“Uh-uh. You’re ME!” Kinx squealed, laughing.

Memo attempted to join in. “I know you are, but who am I?”

“Me!” More laughter bubbled in the speeding van.

What Uncle had said wasn’t amusing to Memo.

He had pressed his palm against her forehead and declared— for real, he’d said it out loud— that Memo didn’t— not literally— not like the rest of them— she simply didn’t quite exist. She wasn’t fully there.

He had tossed those words like a stone into a fast-flowing stream, leaving no ripple. Though she never admitted it, that statement made Memo feel nauseous, but to her sister, it was a source of amusement and play.

All Kinx had interpreted was something like, you’re not a specific ‘me.’ You’re the memo.

A note no one reads about nothing in particular, Memo thought.

“He didn’t mean what you think,” Kinx replied, sounding unusually wise for her age.

“Whatever.”

“Memo, no.” Kinx splashed water from her cup. “He says you’re no joke. Uncle sees things.”

This was Memo’s cue to laugh, but everything felt too tense for her at that moment.

The route she had to navigate was unfamiliar and needed to happen quickly, so she could deliver the flown-in medicine bag to the hospital before the shift change at mid-rise. That rush required a wide figure-eight loop across the valley, stopping at the airfield, then dropping Kinx off at Uncle’s before speeding hard toward the town center where her mother was in distress, urging Memo to arrive faster than she had departed.

Like yesterday.

That’s why she didn’t have the right responses ready. When Kinx made light of it, pushing the button she knew Memo would typically find hilarious, all she could manage to say was the clinical truth.

“Uncle’s blind. You know that. He can’t see.”

“I’m Kinx! He could see what I am because he can see, see? ‘No more tiptoeing around,’” she mimicked Uncle. “No sir! I came to kink it up! It’s kinxing time!”

“Mom never liked that nickname.”

“Don’t care.” Kinx knew how much their dad loved it. Naz, too.

Their baby sister was born during the quieter days when their mother had trained them all to lower the volume on everything to keep their brother’s heart extra calm. But that’s another story. It worked. For three years after that time in early school when he almost fluttered away, their ultra-zen approach was effective.

Eventually, the tension began to ease, and hints of joy returned. Then Kinnebeth was born.

Like a handful of sparklers, she arrived and reminded them how to laugh, how to let loose, how to bloom free from restraint.

Memo and Naz were born on the same day, exactly one year apart. The world doesn’t fit without both of them alive and well.

What good is an hourglass with just one bulb to hold what was meant to be a transitory substance? That’s why she was speeding when it happened.

If Kinx were H-E-R-E, she’d be one thousand percent freaking out. But don’t go there. Kinx got out first, before the winds turned. She’s NOT here, but safe at Uncle’s.

That’s right, Memo reassures herself. Her head throbbed, and for a moment, the sequence of events tangled and became obscure, as if it had happened to someone else, not her. She couldn’t remember if her little sister had been in the van when the dust devil struck.

Frenzied, swirling dust whipped and twisted by a sudden gust scraping unplanted weaver’s fields—the dust devil danced high from ground to cloudless sky, mesmerizing in the distance half a block past Uncle’s house.

Memo had her foot on the accelerator, her mind focused on her brother, her attention split by incessant buzzing on her wrist, alerts stacking up from her mother. She hadn’t intended to be spun vertical, uprooted like a weed torn from its roots and planted on this jagged, dark surface so far from Sown.

The soil she called home now barely glimmered among nameless stars.

“I’m the message no one will ever receive,” Memo hears herself say this out loud, numbing her despair, questioning why she’s bothering to speak at all. Could there be a place more nowhere than this?

His eyes were blank that day, as they always are—gray beads of isolation set beneath lids and lashes. Yet he did look. If she’s honest, it felt—well, she’d never admit it to Kinx, but he did seem to reflect before her as if he were LOOKING AT her from within her own eyes. Memo saw herself receiving what Uncle spoke, standing eye to eye among the sunflowers, caught in that shared breath.

Time is intentionally narrow.

Strangling. It pinches off, controlling the flow of sand grains eager to fall through it. Some might argue the hourglass competes with itself: fatally stingy above, relentlessly greedy below. Where two glass bulbs meet and open in the center is a functional limitation. Blown too wide, an entire day could slip through in a deluge—allowing no time for tears or laughter. Fashion it too tight and narrow, life stalls, compressing events rather than allowing them to rise, the way things bloom.

In the quiet days, Naz would encourage Memo to focus on the lower, accumulating bulb. Despite their nascent synchronicity, as siblings they were polar opposites in terms of speed and temperance. While she raced through solving geometry, Naz could take all night pondering a right angle or parallel line extending to infinity.

He grew his black hair long. She cropped hers at the nape.

Encouraged to slow down, Memo argued for the pinch, where speed, urgency, and gravity collaborated to bring molecules down to the ground in a measured hurry. In contrast, Naz appreciated how inanimate sand seemed to inhale as grains collectively cascaded to build a peak, then exhaled into collapse, only to realign and repeat the process.

Getting somewhere fast was never Naz’s aim. He lived in the moment, like a hummingbird hovering in steady pursuit of hidden nectar.

To tease her younger brother, Memo used to place her thumb and forefinger on the neck of the inner funnel and make him believe her grip could form a valve capable of stopping time entirely while subtly causing a tilt.

It had been years since her