The Planet I Forgot
A child abandons her invented world, but discovers it again decades later
“Time for dinner!” Dad called from the kitchen.
Tabitha was lying on her belly with her legs dangling upward like reversed marionettes. Her sketch book was open before her and she was concentrating on her picture.
“Come on, my little artist,” her dad coaxed from the doorway. “Come eat with us.”
“Almost done,” Tabitha responded without looking at him. Her tone indicated that further prodding would be futile. Her dad slipped away noiselessly, and she continued.
The planet’s surface was full of extremes. All the mountains were towering and all the valleys were flat. Some of the rivers flowed impossibly upward, while others flowed into a lake that was perfectly round.
The inhabitants of the planet were quite similar to humans, except that they had three legs and two arms on one side. Their primitive houses resembled gumdrops with large openings and no windows. One of them was walking a dog labeled “Lucy.” Everyone smiled.
Another planet loomed far away, although apparently in the same solar system. Although the surface was flat, square buildings, expansive roads, vehicles with spikes on them, and a few airplanes with rockets attached to the wings littered the landscape.
The inhabitants of this planet were few, but they were either clad in armor or were robots. Their appendages were rectangular, and there were antennae coming from their heads. One carried a gun.
“Tabitha!” Mom yelled from the kitchen. She knew her time was up. She closed the sketchbook, placed it on her bedside table, and ran down the hall.
The earthquake began as a steady, low rumble. It felt like a heavy truck was driving by or the neighbors were playing a song with heavy bass. But then the floor vibrated, and the walls trembled. The crash of glass striking the floor woke Tabitha. Her bedside clock read 2:42 a.m. She felt her father lift her up effortlessly. She screamed as her father forced his way through the hallway and out of the house.
The house collapsed at 2:43 a.m.
Twenty-two years later, Tabitha and her partner Dorothy stared at a pile of cardboard boxes. Tabitha’s parents were moving to a townhouse and needed to downsize. She had offered to help them move and get rid of some things. Secretly, she was hoping to get some furniture for her and Dorothy’s apartment.
“What’s this?” Dorothy asked. “This box says ‘rubble’ on it.”
“Open it,” Tabitha suggested. She was evaluating a lampshade and scratching at a spot.
“This is adorable!” Dorothy had opened the box and was holding a small journal with sequins on the cover. She had manipulated the sequins to form a white heart with a red background.
“Oh, wow,” Tabitha began. “That’s my old journal. What else is in there?” Tabitha reached into the box.
She removed her old sketchbook and shuddered. She hadn’t seen it since the quake. Since they had moved in with Grandma and had to wear her cousin’s clothes for weeks. Tabitha leafed through the pages of bunny and flower pictures, smiling thoughtfully.
Then she turned the page and shrieked.
The planets. They moved. Everything moved. The mountain-lake planet now had square buildings around the lake and in the mountains. The three-legged inhabitants slumped weakly in small cages in an overcrowded corner of the forest. Patrol planes soared around the planet; one dropped a bomb.
A larger vessel mined the mountaintops aggressively. A long conveyor belt hauled raw material to a refinery of square buildings. Robots loaded large packages into cargo planes which flew back to the robot-building planet.
Extensive infrastructure overcrowded the robot-building planet. There were square buildings constructed on top of the square buildings. Vehicles pressed each other on roadways that stretched from one side of the planet to the other. Small flyers dominated the sky, but there were constant explosions, indicating that two of them had collided.
Tabitha watched over it all in horror. She focused intensely on a small dog in the forest. It looked lost and was running toward a robot camp.
“Give me a pencil,” Tabitha demanded sternly. “Now.”
Dorothy pulled one out of her handbag and handed it to Tabitha silently. She assumed Tabitha had read something personal and wanted to give her some space.
Tabitha attacked the page violently. She drew a fence between the forest and the robot camp to keep the dog from falling into their possession. She cleaned up the mess the bomb had made with dramatic strokes from her eraser. She decimated the mining operation and re-established the mountains to their original glory. Then, one by one, she removed the beachside robot mansions that had littered the perimeter of the lake.
As she was removing the last of the invader’s buildings, her finger stopped moving. It seemed to be stuck to the paper. She tried to lift it up, but couldn’t. Her fingertip went numb, and then her finger. Tabitha looked on in horror as her hand melted into the paper. She gasped and tried to call out, but it was too late.
The sketchbook smacked on the cement floor of the garage. The sound startled Dorothy. She whirled around, knelt, and picked it up.
“Tabitha?” she whispered tentatively. “Where’d you go?”
Tabitha screamed loudly, but the robots had secured her between them with menacing chains. They pushed her violently through a cell door and she fell to the floor. Three-legged people approached her cautiously and helped her up. Her shock was unbearable, and she immediately fell to the floor again, sobbing uncontrollably.
There was a collective gasp and a shuffle of feet. The three-legged people were moving to the perimeter of the cell and whispering. Tabitha looked up at them and then in the direction that they were staring.
She saw her pencil on the floor next to her. Her weapon. Their weapon.
Find more fast fiction by Alex Porter on Sci Fi Shorts.
