Artwork: Andrew Rovenko, *The Tide*, 2022

She was trying to find a way home.

It should have been simple, except home was far, far away from here. An inner-city suburb of Melbourne, where her papa said they were lucky to have landed. Kira wasn’t sure what he meant, except they’d arrived in a plane when she was barely able to walk, her mama holding her, the feel of her arms an echo of memory that ached.

“Why can’t we go back?” Kira asked.

Papa was quiet, looking out the window at the distant moon. “Some places can no longer be home.”

It wasn’t an answer she accepted. Some places were always home, regardless where you found yourself.

How could Kira explain the dislocation? The sounds of a new language that kept her on the edges of playgrounds, then at school. She was quick and agile of mind, but there was always the taint of fear: of being noticed, picked on, or isolated.

And then her mama got sick, fading to become so thin Kira trembled to touch her, wondering if she’d still feel flesh, not air.

“Will she get better?” Kira asked, after seeing her mama in the hospital.

Papa held her hand as they walked to the train station. “The doctors believe she will.” She didn’t ask if they could be trusted to know, the sadness and strain in her Papa’s face scared her.

When she couldn’t sleep at night, Kira listened to the stars sing. That’s what she imagined, that the stars hummed, vibrated and zinged with energy. Seated before the window, the sky was vast as the ocean. It was the one thing she loved living here, the wide-open sky above their small house, and the garden her mama said reminded her of home. That other home where Kira had been born, where her parents and grandparents and their parents had been born. A city called Odessa. “The name always makes me think of the word odyssey,” Papa said, pointing to it on the globe in her room. That word meant a long voyage. Strange to think of a place that reminded you of leaving, not staying.

Papa would hold her some nights, the nightlight the only light in the room, as they searched the sky for the stars to anchor her. “See those three in a line? That’s Orion’s Belt.”

“A belt?” Kira asked, wondering how stars could be a belt.

Tracing with her hand in his, he pointed to the constellation of Orion the Hunter. And that’s how she began travelling the night sky, a star map now pinned to her wall, wondering if she could ever find her way back to where her life began and where her mama had been healthy, where there were still those people she called family.

“Do you think there will be war?” She’d overheard her mama ask Papa one evening. They were cast in the light of the open fireplace, snug and close and Kira’s heart hurt in a good way seeing them. She didn’t understand war, only that it was a threat if they’d travelled so far to get away from it.

“There will be conflict. It’s one reason why we’re here, Mepi. For all of us to be safe eventually.” And then they were speaking of their families journeying here as well, as if they could somehow transplant generations into new soil.

Most night’s Kira and her Papa watched movies, the older the better, with a bowl of popcorn and her floppy Ragdoll cat, Totoro, curled between them on the sofa. And it was while they watched The Right Stuff about the space race to fly to the moon, Kira announced, “I want to do that.”

“Do what?” Papa asked.

“Fly to the moon of course!”

For the first time in so long, her Papa smiled. “Okay.”

What Kira could never imagine was what happened next. One day after school, Kira came home with her Papa except he’d picked her up in the car, which was odd, and they drove down to the beach. Kira loved the sea and she was ready to race out to the water, when her Papa said, “Wait a minute.” He reached behind for a bulky bag, and handed it to her.

“You might want to put this on first to go exploring.”

Kira opened the bag and gasped. Inside was a helmet like she’d seen in the film, except this was light and made from papier mâché, painted a soft grey, along with light-grey coveralls, not quite a space suit, but close.

“For me?” Kira whispered.

“For you, my space wanderer.” Kira squealed as she shoved her legs into the coveralls, squirming her way to fit her arms and body in, then zipping it up. With her high-top sneakers, she felt a sudden lightness like she could jump in the air and touch the stars.

Running to the water, the helmet secured on her head, she peered at the sky, awash with pinks and orange along the horizon, her Papa nearby with his camera.

Leaping from one rock to the next, arms aloft, she couldn’t help grinning, again titling her head to the sky. Papa had said that mama was coming home soon. Kira wondered if she could one day fly them all to that city they’d once called home. Simply lift them to the sky and follow the stars. Or maybe she was the one who would fly away, returning to them, wherever they chose to live.

As the sky deepened and one star blinked to life, her Papa stood beside her, reaching for her hand. “Ready to go home?”

Kira liked the weight of her helmet as it bobbed back and forth. She squeezed her Papa’s hand. “Yes.”

“Tomorrow we can explore that place you noticed with all the abandoned buses.”

Kira had been fascinated how all those empty cars and buses were like a metallic, skeletal landscape, another planet entirely.

“Will you take more photos?”

Papa laughed. “Of my space wanderer? If you don’t mind. I think Mama would love to see your adventures. That okay with you?”

Again, that lightness, as if all she had to do was raise her arms for wings and she’d be aloft. It felt close to happiness.

Kira nodded, the world suddenly bigger, scary, strange and exciting.

And she knew she was ready to explore it.

(Short story inspired by Melbourne-based Andrew Rovenko’s photographic project The Rocketgirl Chronicles, www.rovenko.com)