Understory 2019 Main Menu Masthead From the Student Editors and Faculty Creative Works: Poetry Tuesday Afternoon: Nostalgia Meditation Liminality in Six Parts Shell Obsession and Irreverence Summer Sweethearts Solstice and Trepidation Autumn Poems Magpie Hymn This is How You Derail a Train: After Ernest Hemingway’s “Who Killed the Vets?” Doubting the Branch She'd be a Baby in France Goodbye Hometown Hero Myself a Stern Tree A Brief Glimpse of a Brief Season Winter Poems Girl Wound The Things I've Seen Aurora Receiver of Grief My Grandmother's Willow Tree Red Berry Tree Dark Symphony Solitude Spring Poems Portrait of a Daffodil I Walk On After You Definitions Half Empty, Half Full Creative Works: Prose Eavesdropper Cathedrals Mr. Goo-gle 60 Feet Down No Escape: A post-blast Vignette Space Mice War The Cat Shelter Scholarship in English Studies: Literary Studies Platonic Emulation—How the Weight of History has come to Define Poetry Poetry as Illumination Can I Rely on You? Heroes Through the Ages: Defining the British Dream through Heroes in Literature Born from the Dreams of a People, an Empire Awoke Scholarship in English Studies: Rhetoric and Linguistics Synthetic Language Yarn Bombing as Multimodal Rhetoric Effecting Persuasion: How Adapting Rhetoric Informs the Response A Facebook Post: Identity through the Technoscape We Who Demand Better The Rhetoric of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games and Video Game Communities: How Representation and Reception Can Change the Way Players See Their and Others’ Identities Why Have Female-Only Characters in For Honor? Posters: Alaska Englishes Race and Internment: World War II from an Alaskan Perspective Wrapping Up ‘Wrap It Up AK' The Letters of John Muir Rewriting Alaska History with the Word “Genocide"
UA is an AA/EO employer and educational institution and prohibits illegal discrimination against any individual: www.alaska.edu/nondiscrimination

Space Boy

33404
To marvel at the wonders of the universe was something he had always done. To camp on the summits of mountains to see the galaxy unburdened by lights and to feel like he was touching the stars with his hand. “He held the universe in his eyes,” his mother told everyone in the village. She always believed he would someday achieve his dream of being amongst the stars. Listening to the radio for the latest news from the Alliance, watching documentaries on space and the alien races out there, even signing up for a pen-pal program at their school to communicate with someone that lived on a different planet, while the other kids were too afraid. In their little village nestled in the hills of the Euro Empire, the notion of leaving, especially to space, ‘the great unknown’, was blasphemous. They tried to persuade him to stay by arranging a marriage, by guilting him with his mother’s failing health, by telling him about the dangers, but all for naught.

The whole of space with its stars and planets and swirling galaxies was in his heart, and that would not leave him. It bounced in his thoughts throughout the days and nights, and when his mother passed, she begged him to go live his dreams. Pleaded with him to live a life of adventure and to never stop the wanderlust he had developed for the vast beauty that is space. So, he packed his bags and gave their land to their neighbors before leaving. The village thought of him as insane, but he knew his life was in the stars.

__________________________________
[1] Amara Gitomer is a sophomore in the Mathematics Department. Amara’s inspiration for writing comes from her love of reading sci-fi and fantasy novels.
 

This page has paths:

  1. Understory 2019 University of Alaska Anchorage Department of English