Seven Days to Orbit

The diner near the launch site never closes, and at four in the afternoon it smells like burnt coffee and lemon pie. You take the last stool at the counter, the one with the wobble, and only then notice the woman beside you is drawing circles on a napkin. Not doodles. Orbits. Neat ellipses around a dot labeled, in tiny letters, “home.”

“Sorry,” she says, catching you looking. “Occupational hazard. I’m Hana.” She has a runner’s ease about her, a paperback folded open under her elbow, and the restless eyes of someone who has been told to rest and has decided to ignore it. Her sneakers are dusty from a morning run along the causeway, and a bandage on one knuckle suggests she argued with a piece of equipment and won.

You ask what the dot is. She taps it with her pen. “That’s us. Everyone you’ve ever met. Every pancake ever flipped.” Then, a little quieter: “I’m going up to the station next week. Seven days.”

You don’t know what to say to that, so you say the first true thing: that it sounds terrifying and wonderful. She laughs, surprised, like nobody has put it that way in months. “Everyone either congratulates me or asks about the bathroom situation,” she admits. “You’re the first person who’s said both feelings at once.”

The waitress refills both your mugs without asking. Hana turns on her stool to face you properly. She explains the launch the way you’d explain a recipe to a friend: the long count, the shaking, the moment the sky goes from blue to black in about eight minutes. “The strangest part,” she says, “is that up there, sunrise happens sixteen times a day. You’d think that would make them feel cheap. Everyone says it doesn’t.”

She asks what you would miss most if you were leaving the planet. You think about it longer than you mean to. Rain on a window, you tell her. The sound of someone laughing in the next room. The weight of a book in your hands. She nods slowly, as if she’s writing each one down somewhere behind her eyes. Then she tells you hers: the smell of cut grass, her grandmother’s voice on the phone, the way a bookstore goes quiet in the afternoon. Outside, a rocket stands on the horizon, small as a pencil, catching the last of the light.

“Good list,” she says. “Mine keeps changing. Yesterday it was oranges. Today it might be this counter.”

When you stand to leave, she slides the napkin across to you, orbits and all, with a number written under the dot. “Mission control says I should keep my mind calm this week,” she says. “I think talking to you counts as calm. Possibly.”

That night your phone lights up on the nightstand of your rented room, and you read it twice.

“Seven days until I leave the planet. Is it weird that the thing I’m most nervous about is missing these conversations?”

You start typing, then stop, because another message arrives before you can finish. “I have one free hour tomorrow before the medical checks. The beach by the launch tower is empty at dawn. Want to see where I’m leaving from?”