Noonherd
Issue 2: Vanishing, January 2024
the first thing she notices about her spaceship are the moon gates. her spaceship, she says firmly, because so little is hers. the windows remind her of portholes—a word from a different time. on a full moon night, she aligns it to one of the windows, two perfect circles trying to eclipse one another. two constants in a space where nothing exists.
the second thing she discovers is the empty floors. there are white lines painted in neat rectangles on some of the grey, white pillars creating guidelines for a vanishing point. she cranes her neck up to see and thinks it is insane that the top looks like it could dock fifty spaceships when the bottom is so cosy it feels cramped. there is a badminton court. there are five badminton courts. she wants to play with someone and doesn’t know if she ever can.
the third thing is the swimming pool tiles. it takes her a while to look down and see them because she keeps floating forward, onward. when they finally fix the gravity, she is unceremoniously thrown down onto the floor and feels the imprint of tessellation on her cheek. she crawls on her hands and knees like a baby before she figures out how to walk. still, it feels wrong. there are stories about how the corridors once had water as air, flooding the tiles with life—how the apartments were stores, how the stores blurred into each other, how plastic water guns were happiness. there is a proper swimming pool somewhere else—it seems irrelevant. after all, the only thing they do on the ship is float through space.
the fourth thing is the gravestones. rows and rows of metal boxes on the first floor, maze- and cave-like for all that there is no ceiling. maybe death is supposed to make the living feel like that: sealed and torn open at the same time. in the old days they used to leave flowers, but now she gathers up scrap pieces of paper and carefully stuffs them one by one into the slits like how she found them. some of the gravestones have stickers, numbers, scribblings she doesn’t understand. those are her favourite. they tell her to quit it after they catch her taking their mathematical papers or something. maybe they shouldn’t leave it so easy to steal, she retorts, and gets a slap for her time. maybe, she amends later, nursing an icepack, they shouldn’t be so mean. she’s just trying to help the old folks settle on.
the fifth thing is how the spaceship feels way beyond its time, a relic from a past before the past. she’s seen pictures of the old world, back when food didn’t just come in packets and people wore things other than spacesuits. the other spaceships don’t look like hers. they look rectangular, like tetris blocks that don’t even have colours. still, she thinks her spaceship is the best one, despite its hollowed-out halls and empty people. there’s enough life to indicate that something older and gentler than she will ever comprehend existed, and that is comfort enough for her. she doesn’t know how the outside of her spaceship looks like but based on her guesstimations she thinks it looks like a slide. a slide that tumbles you into golden warmth.
Noonherd is a young, queer brown poet based in Singapore. She is in her second year at the National University of Singapore, studying at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her works have been published in various online magazines such as PLAYSET! and Antifragile Zine. Find more of her works and connect with her at instagram.com/noonherd.
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