Some Details
Kinga is 6 when she arrives in Newark, New Jersey. She pukes during the arduous trans-atlantic flight, and the motion sickness makes her forget her teddy bear on the plane. Her mother sits panicked next to her during their first-ever flight; and her father arrives to pick them up at the airport. He is drunk. Everything else is unfamiliar. Neither of them tell her they have left their home permanently.
Kinga, now 7, starts kindergarten. She’s older than the other kids, the American kids. She knows how to count and how to read but not in English. She won’t know for several more years that being older than your peers comes not just with downsides (her boobs will come in first, and she will go on a cyclical hate-love-hate journey with them) but its perks as well (her brain will develop sooner than her classmates giving her an unfair academic advantage).
Kinga, 8. No longer shy. She finds a rock on the playground and names him Philip. Soon she finds him more family members, an entire rock family that spans multiple generations. She carries them around in a small, plastic aquarium. English glides off her tongue, almost natively.
Kinga is 9. Her mother calls her into her bedroom to show her the half-empty closet. She groans, dreading the endless hours at the laundromat, but her mother isn’t trying to tell her that they are out of clean clothes but that her father has left. Relief overcomes her.
Kings is still 9. She develops a stutter in her native Polish.
Kinga is 11. Her uncle, back in Poland, back in her childhood home, has a child himself and names her Kinga. It’s a common name.
Kinga is 12. Her mother marries a man who is so new to this country that he shows up to their first date in boxers thinking they are shorts. She learns that her mother’s second marriage comes with a new last name for just one but not both of them. She will no longer share a last name with any of the adults around her.
Kinga is 13. She has her first beer and her first period, in that order. The beer looks like piss and the blood looks like chocolate pudding smeared in her underwear.
14. Two arrests, nothing serious. On weekends, she parties with men twice her age until the sun comes up. She rounds up her age by a few years if they ask. Most don’t ask.
15. Her mother sends her back to live with her grandparents in Poland for the summer. It’s meant to be a punishment. She enjoys the feeling of the crisp air after a rain, picking soft peaches straight off their trees, and drinking tea with her grandmother on the balcony.
16. Pregnancy. Not her’s, but her mother’s. She watches her mother’s body expand to accommodate another life.
17. She can’t stand the baby’s cries at home and spends most of her days and nights outside the house.
18. She’s the first person in her family to go to college.
20. Kinga falls in love, unfortunately it’s with a woman. They make plans to grow old together. They make it eight months.
23. She gets a job. Her salary is more than both of her parents make, combined.
27. She goes on a date with an earth scientist. She recounts the conversation to her friend, “We joked about getting high on reality, how absolutely insane it is to be alive, to exist on this planet.” She learns that the earth is 4.7 billion years old but oxygen has only existed for the past 3 billion. The earth scientist says this fact gives her comfort when thinking about the climate crisis. Kinga isn’t convinced.
29. The earth scientist proposes; Kinga says yes; neither of their families attend the wedding.
32. They move to New Mexico when her wife secures a coveted professorship, and her lips sting from the lack of moisture in the air.
35. They adopt two pitbulls, six months apart. One has to be put down. They talk about what will happen to the earth when there are no more humans left, if it will just be another rock. They talk about whether dogs will outlive them. They talk and talk and never stop.
40. There is no more rain. It just stops coming.
45. The soil is barren. The earthworms and the mites and nematodes are long gone, and now so are archaea, bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, and protozoa.
47. It probably makes sense to leave to live in less hostile terrain, but no place calls to them. The city provides hydration pills, one each per person per day, and that is enough to put off the decision to leave.
50. Kinga gets her wife a telescope as an attempt to shift focus away from death when looking down and toward life when looking up. Together they find Jupiter.
62. She doesn’t remember the last time it rained. Has it been decades? Her lips no longer sting.
72. She has outlived her mother. She celebrates by naming a star. No children; the star will be her only legacy.
76. She starts forgetting things. Some details at first, eventually the stars.
77. Polish is the first language to go. English holds on a little longer.
78. As life leaves her body, it happens in slow motion, and it is serene. Her last thought lingers on the worms that no longer exist to decompose what remains of her, and the stars that will patiently wait a few billion more years to subsume her bones.
- Some Details - April 23, 2026
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
