Note that the overall numbers might include some authors twice in some circumstances. This can happen if an author withdraws before any of the first readers read it, they are allowed to submit another story in its place. Also, if a submission becomes a rewrite request, if the author submits the rewrite while the window is still open then the rewrite would become a second submission to the window. Or a combination of these could make several submissions for a single author.
The overall submission count is lower than the previous window by about a hundred, but there was still plenty of great stories to choose from, enough that we had to send rejection letters for many stories we would have been happy to publish.
This year we recruited a new first reader team because our first reader team carrying over from year to year had grown smaller over a couple years as some first readers got busy with other life things and couldn’t come back. The team with a bunch of new members worked their way through the queue with amazing speed while giving each story the same full opportunity as every other story–many hands make light work. This helped keep the window flowing as the editors never had to wait for a submission to have two votes on it (as you can tell by this announcement coming out almost 6 weeks earlier than last year’s announcement despite the window running about the same time of the year!). Our first readers are an amazing crew and we appreciate their immense help! Check out our staff page for a partial list of our first readers if you want to learn more about them!
If you have any comments or questions feel free to comment here or to send us a message through our contact form.
Changes Since the Last Window
We did have a few relevant changes to the submission system software since the last submission window.
In previous years, we did occasionally request rewrites from authors if we thought a story was almost an acceptance and we had something specific and concrete that we could request that (if the author was interested) could move it to become an acceptance. This was always handled outside of the submission system, where one of the editors would mark it as a Rejection but would edit the rejection letter to request chances and invite the author to send in changes. Changes in these cases were generally handled by having the author email one or more of the editors directly, and wasn’t handled by the submission system at all, which made it harder to keep track of, harder to collaborate on (need to forward it to other editors for them to see rather than being in a central location).
After the window last year, just before posting the summary, the submission system has been set up now so that a submission can be marked with the terminal status of Rewrite Request. When a Rewrite Request response is sent, it automatically also includes a special one-time resubmit link. The author can use this at any time. They can use it during the same window, which will bypass the usual one-submission-per-window limit. They can use it when there is no submission window. The link expires after a year (just for data cleanup purposes) but we can regenerate a link after that year on request. When a submission comes back into the system it will be treated somewhat differently, such as notifying both the Editor-In-Chief and the requesting editor. It will also bypass the usual requirement for two first readers to vote on it before it’s resolved, because it has already been seen by editors and was of interest enough to cause a Rewrite Request result. In addition, the submission system links to both the current text and the original text so the editors can compare what has changed if they like.
We also added the ability to handle solicitations to authors through the system. We occasionally solicited authors before, but it was always handled entirely out of the system which again made it harder to coordinate and keep track of it. This works very similarly to the Rewrite Request, producing a one-time link. The main difference is that a solicitation can be generated out of nowhere instead of requiring an existing submission record to start from.
And, since last year we added to the submission form an option for the author to enter Content Notes for the first reader team. We’d tried this in a previous year but had gotten some feedback on the way it was implemented that prompted us to pause the idea and come back to it later when we had time to take the feedback into account. Content Notes are never required but are appreciated! Our first reader team appreciates having a heads up on things like whether the story has the death of a pet, or spousal abuse, or things like that: that way a first reader can either brace themselves for it, or can choose to skip over it if they choose to and let another first reader who is more ready for that to handle it. When our first readers are often reading dozens of stories a week (sometimes even more!) that it can be very taxing to walk into stories with some topics without having a head’s up first and these content notes are very helpful. Authors, though not required to do this, seemed to use it very conscientiously, as stories that our first readers thought should have a warning usually had a relevant warning. So we appreciate authors participating in this when they are able!
The Lineup
The Witches Who Drowned by R.J. Becks
On the Effects and Efficiency of Birdsong: A Meta-Analysis by F.T. Berner
The Unfactory by Derrick Boden
The Glorious Pursuit of Nominal by Lisa Brideau
Irina, Unafraid by Anna Clark
The Statue Hunt by E. Carey Crowder
The Matador and the Labyrinth by C.C. Finlay
Please Properly Cage Your Words by Beth Goder
The Rat King Who Wasn’t by Stephen Granade
In His Image by R. Haven
The Interview by Tim Hickson
Paths, Littlings, and Holy Things by Somto Ihezue
The Year the Sheep God Shattered by Marissa Lingen
Resurrection Scars by Sheila Massie
Application For Continuance: vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod) by Ethan Charles Reed
The sun’s almost down over the boardwalk, that time of day when everything’s dark but the sky’s still lit up, when townies drive past the lake on their way to Gary and say gosh it’s pretty out here by the battervilles, I don’t know what all the fuss is about.
The air’s thick with marina noise and mosquitoes eating up my shirtless chest. I’m pouring my jug of fresh-caught batter into the shuddering funnel of the change machine, even though I know in my heart there’s not enough to buy Ecker the smallest size of honey-glazed crispies. The line for the chicko joint is starting to wind down the boardwalk. Everyone’s yelling, a bunch of sunburned lake-slick battermags pissed I’m taking too long during the dinner rush. But I can’t let it go, not tonight. Ecker is leaving tomorrow to go back to vocational school, and he’s standing at the order window with his hands in his pockets like he’s embarrassed.
“How much left?” I shout. The metal of the machine groans, empty, impatient.
Ecker checks the little grease-smeared screen that’s converting my batter catch into chicko credits. “Thirty-two to go.”
“How much now?” I smack the bottom of my jug. A pathetic thunk of batter hits the funnel.
“Thirty-one.”
“Fuck outta here,” someone calls out from the back of the line. “That thing’s empty.”
“It’s not empty!”
“Did you scrape down the spout?” Ecker’s voice is a wince. He knows how weird the question is when four months ago he was right here with me, hoisting the jug and chanting big money big money while we watched the decimals turn over.
“Yeah, I fuckin’ scraped it down already.” I wipe my forehead against the crook of my elbow.
“Come on,” Ecker says. “Just let me get this with my stipend credits.”
Ecker with townie money, real money. There was a time he would’ve jumped over the counter, grabbed a chicko bucket and dashed. I remember one night specifically he ripped off his shirt before he did it, just to make everyone laugh, or because we were high. He was screaming like the seals in Penguin Slide and his torso was caked with black batter and ferrofluid and I don’t know if that’s the moment I knew I loved him but I think of it a lot, especially at night when there’s no one in the prefab but me and Skeeball, curled up with his little gecko fingers over my collarbone.
“I told you I got it. Just wait a minute, let me think.”
There’s a layer of batter stuck to my arm hairs. Some behind my ears, the oily black sludge of it gone tacky. It’s been a while since I scraped the cracked ridges of my sandals. The crowd hates that one. A wall of boos and groans as the dried-up sprinkling earns me one tenth of a cent.
“Next in line!” The guy at the chicko window’s had enough. He hovers his finger over the button that’ll recall the batter deposit and cancel my order.
“Look I’m so close, please, can you just round up.” I’m tapping the number on the conversion screen with both hands like a crazy person and there’s sweat dripping down my temple and everyone is yelling and I’ve seen the guy round up for everyone in this town including me but for some reason today he won’t because, I find myself screaming, he’s on a power trip in his stupid light-up hat.
He smacks the return button. The change machine vomits back exactly 5.73 credits worth of batter at my feet. The crowd cheers.
***
“It’ll just take a sec,” I tell Ecker. “I’ll take the boat out shallow, get some batter, and come right back.”
The boardwalk’s blinking with lights, boat crews pulling in and unloading their catch, divers stained with ferrofluid, some of them still scraping the batter off their magsuits. They call out to Ecker as we pass: hey big man, how’s school, how’s Illinois, you gonna come fix my septic tank, I got a hell of a block for ya. He responds with banter and a smile. He knows they’re only ribbing him because they’re proud. A battermag that tested good enough to pass the basic modules and go vocational, to a real brick-and-mortar school over the state line.
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t let me come out with you this morning.” Ecker almost trips over the tiny light-up bugs some kids are racing over the planks. “I could’ve helped.”
“What, with those soft little hands you got now?”
The joke drops awkward between us. It’s been like that all weekend. Our whole lives we’ve been giving each other shit, but Ecker came back from school with some kind of armor up. I keep catching him with a weird look on his face, like now, when he’s watching the little group of bug-racing kids. Marina brats, bare feet full of splinters, just like we used to be.
“Alright,” I tell him, voice softer than I mean. “You wanted to come out? We’re going out.”
I gather up Dough-girl from their usual spot, hanging out in front of the kluski joint with a bunch of other teens. The picnic tables are a wreck—red baskets with dumplings and butter pooled in the wax paper, kids crammed along the benches with their module helmets on, tapping their left ears to skim-skim-skim through the lessons. Five years ago it would’ve been me and Ecker here tracing bored lines in the ketchup, blue light flashing over the balled-up napkins. Dough-girl’s in the middle, chewing on a fry through the bottom of their visor.
“Hey.” I knock on Dough-girl’s helmet. “You know you’re supposed to listen to those.”
Dough-girl looks up. I can see Ecker and me reflected in the helmet’s visor, a funhouse mirror of boardwalk neon and the pizza shack behind us.
“You sound like my dad.” Dough-girl’s voice is garbled by the math lesson squeaking from the tinny speakers. “What’s the point?”
“I dunno, learn shit or something.”
“So what, like I’m gonna test out?”
“Christ, Dough-girl, you ever tried to get on a bus? Go on, go to the depot and ask to pay for a ticket with your batterville credits. Might as well be a carmdot punch card.”
Dough-girl rants back but it’s muffled by some kind of science unit about capillaries. I can feel Ecker shift his feet beside me, the discomfort wafting off him.
“Whatever,” I say. “Do what you want. We’re going out again. Fuckin’ chicko guy wouldn’t round up.”
Dough-girl pulls off their helmet. “But it’s dark and we’re out of b-powder. It wasn’t even glowing last time under the blacklight. It’s too cut down.”
“Fine, we’ll get some more. Where’s Brill?”
“Probably sleeping in the boat, right?” Ecker says. He meets my eyes for the first time all night, and it’s then that I realize his hair is curling around his ears even though he doesn’t like it to get so long, that in the four months he was gone he never got it trimmed, that the haircut I’m seeing is the one I gave him in his boxers on the concrete of my front steps.
***
All the unloading stragglers shake their heads when they see us approach their boats, pleading, hopeful, primed to beg. The only one who doesn’t shout us away is Izzie, the last of the olds from back in the day when the cleanup boom first happened, when this town was nothing but deep woods and dead fish rotting on the shore, their bellies swollen with plastic.
Izzie just stands there on the boat deck with the bag of yellow powder, sucking her teeth. A softie. When me and Ecker were little she used to let us crush up the vitamin pills for her. We’d get to swipe a fingerful of batter from her catch tub as a reward.
“I’ll pay you back,” I say.
“You owe us like a pound of b already.”
“Hey!” Dough-girl points over at Izzie’s partner by the net. He’s sifting out white plastic pellets from the lake weeds and trash. “They caught pearl.”
Only a fistful, but it’s enough for two months’ rent. I’ve always been told that the battervilles started as a settlement; a bunch of tents and prefabs full of people who got demerited out of the big warehouse jobs. Back then Lake Michigan was dying, but not yet dead. The government paid good money to clean up microplastics from the lake, turn it into batter you could collect and slop into a cooler. I saw one of those old commercials once: a tattooed guy and an old lady smiling in this cute painted rowboat, dumping in their dainty bottles of ferrofluid and swishing the water with those tiny magnetic wands that could only catch the world’s saddest clump of batter. It didn’t take long for people to start getting smart, strapping head to toe in duct tape and all the magnets they could find, but it was pearl that made the town boom. Some kind of lawsuit found out that a specific company had spent decades dumping little plastic pellets into lakebound drains, and made them pay big money for every little pearl you could catch. I don’t remember much from my modules, just a picture of a fish, figure A or B or something, spliced open. The white pellets were packed in along the twisty pink of the intestines like the fish had been born with them there, a weird little row of gut teeth.
“You think that’s a trove?” Izzie waves off the handful of pearl like it pains her. “You should’ve seen us thirty years ago. We used to come back with buckets full of the stuff. That’s why they brought in the change machines. We were pulling it out of the water so fast they had to automate.”
“Yeah and you guys sucked it all up,” Dough-girl says. “Now all that’s left is batter you can’t buy shit with.”
“What, you want us to leave it there to end up in the fish bellies? You don’t want the lake to come back?”
“Lake’s never gonna come back,” I say. “It’s a fuckin’ batter bowl. All we can do now is make the money we can. See, you owe us the b-powder at least, come on.”
“Fine, but I swear t—”
“Where’d you find the pearl?” Ecker’s voice cuts through.
His hands are in his pockets again but he sounds like the kid I used to know, the one that won our shitty motorboat in a diving bet and stood with his arms crossed in the doorway of my prefab when my mom finally showed up to claim it five years after she disappeared.
No one bothers fishing for pearl anymore. You might find one or two free floaters, but the only clumps left are in pockets on the lakebed, trapped in the weeds and algae muck. It’s more of a legend at this point, and I don’t know why Ecker cares. He’s only here for the weekend until he goes back to his plumbing program with the nice little dorms he sent me a picture of: tables where you can eat outside in a subdivision with green astroturf instead of dead baked grass.
“We were up by Michigan City then we cut west. Don’t waste your time, kids. It was a fluke.”
“Michigan City. Got it.” Ecker turns to me. “You ready?”
I don’t like the look in his eye.
Growing up, me and Ecker always dreamed of hitting it big. Even pearl credits don’t mean shit outside the battervilles, but we didn’t care. We’d be kings of the boardwalk, buy a big prefab tricked out with a tactile lounge for Penguin Slide and a backyard full of ATVs. Even if we never got the big house, I always thought we’d end up living together. Fantasized about making him dinner, with like 30% meat burgers or something nice, and he’d look over at me and smile like when we were little, floating on our backs in the lake and laughing because we were so close to sinking. I’m not stupid. I’ve always known the rest of the fantasy would never happen. Ecker likes smart guys, the ones that make him talk nervous, biting into all his consonants. Not me, the dumb easy one that smears him with a lazy smile like cornoil butter on bread.
Ecker didn’t tell me he got into vocational school until two days before he was supposed to leave. All the crews got together to throw him a party and he avoided me the whole time, already packing his fists into his pockets like a stranger. But at two a.m. when everyone was drunk and setting off fireworks in the backyard he pushed me into the murphy laundry of Izzie’s prefab and held my face in his hands and kissed me like we’d never been two separate pieces, only one whole.
***
We’re speeding out on the black, just the four of us. All the boats have already come in. Ecker shouts over the wind and motor to tease me about my steering, the way I still whip the rudder with a little flourish of my hand like I’m on some kind of stage. It feels like it used to, before we even took on Dough-girl and Brill, when we were just a crew of two, laying down in the boat between dives and talking about the dumbest stuff.
Just past Michigan City we drop anchor in one spot, then another. Me and Ecker dive together. The bottom of the lake is barren, a tangle of weeds and sunken boats and not a single pearl. When I was little it sucked the air out of my lungs to be down on the lakebed, the feeling that you’re not touching the weeds and grimed up junk so much as it’s got you in its own fingers. People say it’s the kind of darkness that crushes you, but it doesn’t bother me. Not anymore.
At our fifth or sixth spot we give Brill and Dough-girl a turn to dive. Me and Ecker sit in the midnight quiet, sniffling lakewater snot and listening to the chop against the boat.
“We’re not gonna find shit out here, Eck.”
“Maybe not the way you shake the weeds.”
“Oh and your little barrel roll is gonna do the trick.” I tease him back, imitating the twist that he does with his eyes closed, graceful as a dancer, though I’d never admit that I don’t think it’s funny at all but beautiful.
“Even if we found pearl it’d be wasted on you anyway,” he laughs. “I know you’d just blow it on your damn lizard.”
“Skeeball’s a fuckin’ gecko, first of all, and the specialty waxworms help with his digestion issues.”
“Right, right, the digestion issues.”
Ecker looks at me the way he used to. Like the time I got the idea in my head that we were gonna save up all of our kluski wrappers to wallpaper my bedroom with the little thumbs-up noodle mascot. Like it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard and he loves me for it and every goddamn time it makes my head go fuzzy.
Ecker rubs the water from his face with both hands, and when he’s done he stares at the bottom of the boat, the smile gone from his eyes.
“On the bus ride in I saw one of those big prefabs for sale, you know the ones we used to talk about, with the heated floors and the tactile hookup.”
“Yeah?”
“I was just thinking, like, if we could just find a little pearl, then maybe I don’t have to go back to school.”
“What, you don’t like it there?”
“No, I mean, it’s fine. It’s a bunch of townie kids that flunked their modules, couldn’t get into college even though their parents paid for all the tutoring add-ons. I’m the only battermag there. Sometimes I just want to be back home. With the people that know me. You know?”
Ecker stretches his feet out the way he’s done a hundred times in this boat, but this time he nestles his foot between mine, the way I imagine people do when they’re curled up in bed together, twined into the close spaces, breathing each other’s air. It makes me shiver to imagine that small amount of body heat spread out heavy on top of me and at the same time I can’t stop thinking of Ecker at the bottom of the lake, twirling with his fists crossed over his chest. Smiling, under the weight of all that black water.
Dough-girl and Brill surface with a splash, cussing into the night.
“There’s no pearl down here,” they say. “This is stupid. Let’s get some batter and go home.”
Ecker sits up, his foot no longer touching mine. I feel the ghost of it on my skin, like a handful of empty water.
***
The magsuit’s heavy and sticks to the edge of the boat, cause we only had enough money to anti-mag the bottom and sides. Some parts of the fabric are still damp from this morning, itchy cold against my skin. I tap the velcro pockets along my arms, belly, shins, smushing in the fraying duct-taped corners to make sure the magnets hold. Dough-girl ties me to the floater tube that’ll keep me just a few yards below surface, so the weight of the suit doesn’t pull me to the lakebed. I tell them to give me more slack. I like to move around.
When we’re ready to go, Ecker pours Izzie’s little ziploc bag of b-powder into the old milk jug stained grayish with ferrofluid, then Brill clicks on the industrial blacklight. It lights up her gapped teeth, makes the ferro glow like the prairie moon.
“Fifteen count, alright?” Eck hands me the glowing jug. “On yours.”
“Got it,” I say. “One.”
He shoves me into the water.
Two, three. I squeeze out the ferrofluid, give its oil molecules a chance to find their tiny plastic cousins swirling around the water.
Seven, eight. The magic starts. A slash of hi-vis yellow in the dark.
Microplastic binds to oil, then magnetite, then boom. Lightning in a bottle. It all shrinks together into little glowing clumps of muck like something that’s alive. I hold out my magnetic arm, watch the batter fireflies gather along my elbow and stomach and all the way down to my toes.
Thirteen. There’s a tickle of weeds. My foot hits mushy bottom. Shit. I reach for the rope to the flotation tube and where it should be there’s only water. Shit, shit.
Nineteen. Forty. I lose count.
The suit’s so heavy it presses me to the lakebed. When I thrash I just churn up the mud, deeper and deeper. I clench my jaw to keep from sucking water but I can’t hold it anymore, I can’t, cause it feels like we’re somewhere between a hundred and thousand.
A tug.
A yank in my guts.
Air.
Ecker, treading next to me in the water. His face under the blacklight, all twisted up and heaving, then suddenly he’s looking behind me, and I see it behind him, too.
Hundreds of them, glowing UV-bright. Riding on the surface of the waves like it’s not made of water but pearl.
***
We scoop up the pellets, pack them in the mesh net at the back of the boat. There are so many fistfuls we lose count. Brill cracks open a beer and passes it around to celebrate, and I have to stop Dough-girl from chucking their module helmet into the lake saying now none of it matters.
Ecker skins off my magsuit, wraps me in a towel while he scrapes the last bit of batter from the inside of my elbow. He tells me he’s not going to take his bus tomorrow. He looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. I try not to cry.
We crank the boat up to high speed and soon enough I can see the batterville lights again, the little stretch of boardwalk where Eck and I grew up and will die together if I let him. Feels like I should be flying, but I’m just shivering.
In the net behind me is our future together in the big prefab, all the weed and Penguin Slide we could ever want. Ecker pressed up behind me in the morning, kissing my neck. Six ATVs in the backyard and fireworks and the both of us shirtless, smiles receding as the ash cools on the cement. In ten years we’ll be like the handful of others who struck it big with pearl, the ones buying out rounds at the boardwalk bar, wrinkled and wasted, telling stories everyone’s already heard. He’ll grow tired of my easy jokes, my yellowing teeth. He’ll wish he never came home.
Ecker smiles at me over his shoulder, and in the dark I hope the one I give back to him looks real.
I wait until he’s turned around again, until I can only see the windblown rooster of his hair. The net latch’s not hard to open. I do it with one hand.
I’ll take it, this little moment. When the pearls are leaking out onto the waves around us and no one can see them, not even me.
Author’s Note: This story has a few real-life roots. The first is a documentary I watched about a company that’s been dumping millions of plastic byproduct pellets into Lavaca Bay in Texas. The imagery was so alien—this egg-like debris washed up in the weeds along the water’s edge, with people gathering them in nets and grimy handfuls like the day’s catch. I started thinking about monetized recycling efforts, and the story grew from there. While researching, I came across a very cool method of ferrofluid-based microplastic extraction proposed by a young Irish inventor named Fionn Ferreira. In the video I watched, it was just a little beaker and a clump of black goo, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what that would look like on a larger scale. Oh and lastly: B vitamins really do glow under black light. What a world.
Steph Kwiatkowski is a writer and preschool teacher from suburban Illinois. She is a graduate of Clarion West 2022 and her stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Nightmare, and Uncanny.
I’ve attached scans of the student letters per my conversation with Anthony Noble at the White House Teacher’s Dinner. To be honest, we’re all enormously starstruck by the Secretary’s offer. We’ve guarded our Pilgrim Letters jealously through the years—our own little time capsule—but it’s not every day your elementary school gets to participate in cultural diplomacy.
Note that the earliest letters date back to 1967, a mere five years after Beacon Day. While they were assigned only as creative writing exercises—the technology to reply to the first Beacon transmissions didn’t even exist when Ms. Barbara Kirby came up with the idea—I’m sure the children who wrote these letters all those years ago would be ecstatic to learn that their words would one day reach the stars.
With sincere gratitude,
Brianna Wen
Principal, Mt. Monroe Elementary
***
“If you could write a letter to the Pilgrims on their ship, what would it say?” Barbara Kirby’s third grade class, 1967.
Dear Pilgrims, my name is Patricia but people call me Patty. Miss K says you’re going to be flying in outer space for a very long time! You will fly for your whole life and my whole life and my baby brother’s whole life and Toothpick’s whole life (he is my puppy). But maybe my daughter will meet you if she gets VERY old. Please make friends with her when you get to Earth. She will live in Michigan like I do and she’ll cook you onion soup.
— Patty Ward
Hello aliens, I am scared of you so please turn around. I know you made a mistake because when you left home we didn’t have radios yet so you listened and listened and you thought Earth was a big empty, but now you know we lived here first. So you should go home. Maybe you can figure out how to turn around if you really really try.
— Linda Jimenez
Dear aliens, my dad says Johnson’s going to bungle everything ! ! Yesterday people sat in the Capitol and said they would not move until the government invented blasters to fight you. Please write back soon because Miss K says right now it takes 12 years to get your messages and everybody’s really confused over here. (P.S. have you heard the Beatles on the radio yet?)
— Kenneth MacInnes
***
Donald Levias’s third grade class, 1974.
Dear The Pilgrims my uncle says you’re fake because it doesn’t make sense how you picked our planet out of all the other planets because how come aliens just happen to breathe oxygen same as us and why do you have radios and math and stuff same as us. And so he thinks the government made you up like the moon landing. But Mr. Levias says you picked Earth because you breathe the same air as humans or else you wouldn’t have picked Earth so we would’ve never met you. But my uncle says that’s a circle argument. And then my mom said you’re real but actually you just want to grind us up and feed us to your chickens. The end.
— Armin Cox
Hello, my neighbor went to Michigan State to learn about lasers so she could help talk back to you guys. She says it’s a big funky puzzle we are all solving together and that it means we’re learning to talk to outer space really fast. Do you like puzzles? I like playing games on road trips. I drew hangman so you can play it on your road trip to Earth.
— Steve Rascon
Dear Pilgrims, you shouldn’t come here! There isn’t enough room! People are still angry at you and the computer that gives you orders! It’s hard to be angry because you won’t be here for more than one hundred years! But people will try to stay angry!!!!
— Angie Zielinski
Dear Pilgrims, the four Beacons you have sent so far didn’t say anything about your biology. I read that some scientists think you have a hard crab shell but others think that your brain would never be able to get big enough to invent interstellar space flight that way. You need to provide more information.
— Jessamine St. John Hall
Hi aliens, I live at 25881 Warren Lane and I have a lazy old dog named Toothpick. I like to swim and play the recorder. I have a big sister named Patricia but people call her Patty. She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore because you didn’t answer her letter. She used to really like aliens but now she thinks it’s stupid to write letters to somebody we will never get to meet. Even though she has a pen pal in California.
— Donovan Ward
***
Patty Ward’s third grade class, 1986.
Dear Pilgrims, Miss Patty says we don’t have to write letters because it’s a sad tradition. You are far away and you are not getting to Earth until our class is dead already. But my mom says the 3rd graders used to write letters, so I will still do it and Miss Patty will put it in the folder.
They tried to put a teacher in space last week to teach kids how we’re sending our own Beacons back to you. But the ship exploded and we watched on TV and I cried and Miss Patty cried and everybody cried. It feels like we are stuck on Earth. But I want to tell you it used to take a whole year to walk to China. And people still wrote letters and traded rubies and tea and silky clothes. So it’s okay that our first answer message won’t hit you guys for ten years. We will be patient. And we will think up new things to tell you in the meantime. And the road will get shorter and shorter. And then you will be here.
— Poppy Jimenez
***
Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2000.
Dear Amnid Thorn, my favorite are social studies lessons about you and your supercomputer. What is it like to be in charge of all the Pilgrims??! What is it like doing what the computer says all the time? What is it like to be born in space and die in space and never see the Earth and still have to make sure everybody does their jobs anyway? I would freak!!!! (P.S.! My mom said to tell you Deut. 34:4-5)
— Teresa Nowak
Dear Pilgrims, a scientist came to talk to us about how all the plants on your ship keep you alive her name is Jessamine St. John Hall and she used to go here so Ms. Patty even let us write letters to you guys because the scientist said it was her best school memory she made everybody so excited and she told everybody’s parents to call their senators about making room for you guys since ninety years is not a long time.
— Ryan Moreau
Hello Pilgrims, I want to say SORRY. Ms. Patty read us a poem about the FOIBLES of MAN. She says our brains don’t work right when a problem is too big or too far away. So even though everybody WANTS to make plans for when you get here, because you will need houses or maybe you will need to go to prison, nobody KNOWS HOW to make a plan stick so far ahead. It’s like GLOBAL WARMING. Ms. Patty looked SAD.
— Dylan Pham
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Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2013.
Dear Pilgrims, do aliens fall in love? I know you can’t marry whoever you want because the computer has to say yes, BUT I found a book in my mom’s car where a lady in Texas was trying to stop her evil husband from taking over her ranch but then a Pilgrim met her in disguise when she was out riding her horse and when they started kissing all the rain turned into space diamonds that let them read each other’s minds. Do you think that will happen a lot when you get here?
— Pacifica Carmine
Dear Amnid Thorn, I’m sorry you’re not the leader anymore. I would have said sorry sooner except it took us eight years to get the news. I am glad the Pilgrims are still coming here. The new Beacon did not say what you’re doing now after everybody did a mutiny to you but I hope you’re not in jail and you are building a deck to chillax on like my grandpa did after he retired. I love you.
— Shaina Feldman
Dear Pilgrim peeps, can you tell me who is right my mom or my dad? My mom says you are not real and the government made you up to make us pay more taxes. My dad says nobody can keep a secret that big for 50 years SO you are real BUT your new president will start a war with Earth or maybe crash the whole ship, AND you did 9/11. Who is right?
— Arjun Bakshi
Dear Pilgrims, I remember what it felt like to write you a letterto pretend to write to talk to you like an imaginary friend. That was a long Sometimes I worry. If you were to face disaster, we wouldn’t know for many years. Perhaps a regime change was inevitable on a voyage of your length, but I hear about what’s happening there (what happened there is what I mean), and I watch our ineptitude unfold here, and I worry that you’ll never
— unattributed
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Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2024.
Dear Pilgrims, a famous biologist (Dr. St. John Hall) Zoomed with our class about how humans are sending instructions to help the plants in your ship make better air. This is the first time we ever gave you advice. Do you think we’re bossy? I have another good advice: don’t go out in space because your eyes will explode.
— Nyla Ehlmann
Hi Pilgrims, do you guys feel okay without the computer making you follow the rules anymore? Do you get enough food? We zoomed with a scientist who says you guys had bad times after the Mutiny, and it could have got worse and worse and worse. But what’s important is everybody works together and does lots of brainstorming. So the ship can get changed around. So there’s lots of food and air so you can make your own choices even if they are mistakes sometimes. I will study biology when I grow up, too. Or maybe firefighting.
— Jayden Goddard
Hello Pilgrims, my name is Olivia but everybody calls me Liv. I love video games and my favorite books are about a Pilgrim teenager who solves mysteries on your ship. I am really really excited to meet you!!! I will be 76 years old when you get here. I will show you all over Michigan but especially Mackinac Island where you can ride the horses. Please please please visit me. Welcome to your new home! ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
— Liv Liu
Dear Pilgrims, my dad does not like you. He thinks you are going to trick us and trap us, but he says it’s so far away nobody can do anything about it. Maybe if you tell me a little bit about yourself I can explain to him? I can explain you just wanted to travel somewhere new like when we moved from South Bend. If you visit me in 2090 I will go fishing with you. Because that is how my dad makes friends.
— Matt Wojcik
Dear Pilgrims,
I’m ashamed of our social rhythms: we back-bite and haggle and fail to think in the long term.
I thought you might be the same, but instead you incorporated your revolution and hobbled on. Your last Beacon said your sociologists even planned for it. I find myself disturbed and comforted in equal measure.
Can we learn to think that way? Should we?
I knew I wouldn’t get to meet you; some friends stay imaginary. But I thought maybe I’d make it closer than this. I start treatment in the spring, which is as good a reason to retire as any.
I didn’t have a daughter who could make you onion soup. Instead, I’ve taught a thousand bold and brilliant children, some of whom would very much like to meet you. Their long-term thinking is both better and worse than mine. An hour’s wait bothers them, while a hundred years does not.
They’ve written you some beautiful letters. I’m trying to learn from them: the road will get shorter and shorter, and then you’ll be here.
Author’s Note: Plenty of fiction has been set aboard generation ships; I wondered what that timescale would feel like from the outside. Would the experience rhyme in some ways? Would we even be capable of effective planning that far ahead? As for the voices I chose to tell this story with: Kids handle certain things better than adults do. That’s just facts.
Sarah Pauling spent several years sending other people to distant places for a living as a study abroad advisor in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She’s now in Seattle, graciously sharing her home with two cats and a husband. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, her stories have appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and Clarkesworld. She can occasionally be found at @_paulings on Twitter, nattering on about writing, tabletop gaming, comics, and books.
