“Come on, there’s only a couple minutes left,” His mother patted the roof tiles next to her. She chuckled as he hobbled his way towards her on hands and knees, his many jackets severely limiting his movement. “Warm enough yet?” She said.
“Mhm. Aunt Merry’s scarf is just what else I needed!” He enthusiastically replied, adjusting the white and blue hand-crocheted fabric to encompass his ears as well as his nose and mouth.
His mother wrapped one arm around him and squeezed him in a side hug, “Then you should tell her that when she comes over this Thanksgiving. I’m sure she’d be so happy to see you in it, especially since you look so handsome with it.”
“Mom!” Callan rebelled, pushing out of the embrace with a bashful grimace, “I’m not handsome, stop saying that! I’m just a kid! Kids can’t be handsome,” He confidently affirmed, crossing his arms.
“Oh, very well. I guess I’ll just have to call you adorable, cutesy, and a munchkin then instead.”
Callan made a face beneath his wrappings, but just then the alarm on their watches went off. His eyes went to the sky, searching for the little white dot on the horizon that he’d seen at least a hundred times by now, or perhaps more by his reckoning. It was hard to find sometimes if the moon was too bright, and some nights the clouds got in the way, but tonight was clear and dark.
Finally, a blip of light caught his eye, and he pointed it out to his mother, “There! Found it!”
“You going to wave to him?” She asked.
“He can’t see me from up there,” Callan answered distantly. “Mom?”
“Mhm?”
“Do you think he’s going to go back again once his flight is done?”
“Well, we’re not sure yet. He might.” His mother answered softly.
Callan slumped a little against her, and she squeezed him tight. “I know. You miss him. I do too.” She kissed the top of his scarf-wrapped head. “It’ll only be a few more months now though. We should start thinking about his welcome home party. So, what do you think? A giant chocolate cake with a moon made of icing on top, or a huge cookie with ice cream and sprinkles on top?”
Callan’s eyes went wide, “How big would the cookie be?”
“Bigger than you are tall, of course.”
“Whoah…” He mumbled, considering the momentous choice before him. “Could we put silver sparklers on top like candles? Oh! And one for each of the stars in Draco?”
“Interesting proposal,” She said, impressed. “Let’s see if we can find any.” She retrieved her phone from her pocket and started searching for ‘party sparklers’. Callan crawled up her arm to look at the screen.
“So which one? A cake, or a cookie?” She asked.
“A cookie sure would be super… but dad likes chocolate cake more than cookies.”
Black Zone Reports are firsthand accounts of those that witnessed the crisis of September 13th, 2035. They typically take place within the early days before and after the impacts that shook the western hemisphere, sometimes referred to by journalists and historians as “The Day Of A Thousand Terrors/Tragedies”, the “Sleepless Year”, or simply, “9/13”. They focus on the infamous Black Zones, areas with a twenty-mile or more radius that were contaminated by the foreign particles which rained down from above after the massive Olympus International Space Station was taken out of orbit by what has been said to be a swarm of stray asteroids.