"Ephemeris" by Kate E. Lore

“We can compute an ephemeris for it,” I suggested.

“What is that?”

“It’s charting the path of a celestial object.”

So I collected paper, pencils, calculators, diagrams, and opened an excel spreadsheet.

We didn’t really need the paper. I thought it would make her feel more involved. 

She has nice handwriting. Just in that little dash-line trail of the projected path, there is careful consideration in her penmanship. The lines are steady, well-formed, like her thoughts must be something solid. Maybe she’s one of those people who thinks in concrete images. Seeing the world through her memories like a movie broken down into its separate scenes. Some people think in words. If you are like me your mind does both. There is a movie, a soundtrack, a voice-over, and closed captions but these separate elements are not always on the same page. In fact, I daresay my planets rarely align. 

I was drawn to her for her simplicity. Beauty is a surface thing. It cannot go deep. 

Or so I thought.

She turned out a sharper line than I expected. She composed my image in a way I’d never seen myself before. It was like looking into a mirror from an angle I’d never had access to.

“You’re more human than you think you are,” she told me. “I don’t want to seem like a douche and tell you you’re not special, but I think you give the rest of humanity a bad rap.

We’re not all simple-minded beasts.”

“Jesus, are you charting my astrological sign?” She hunches up her shoulders and looks away in a comical exaggeration of shame. Because shame is something she doesn’t really feel. Not like I do. I want to ask her if she can tell through the charts that I’m queer, that I want her, that I see her now from this different angle, that she is gorgeous beyond the surface.

The opportunity comes and goes like a meteor across the sky. Too fast to catch in image, or words. A syllable started that goes nowhere. Dried up in my mouth. Like a dash mark, too vague. Line unconnected, never fully formed. 

She slips away, gets caught up in a new orbit, some handsome boy. The math was right, hypothesis confirmed. I follow the chart. A course that was always clear. I see her path projecting out of reach, out of sight into the future.

Kate E Lore is a queer, neurodivergent, she/they, born to a single widowed mother, youngest of four, second to graduate high school, first bachelor's degree, first MFA in the family.

Kate E Lore is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction with many publications including Black Warrior Review, Longridge Review, Bending Genres, and Door is a Jar.

A jack-of-all-trades Kate splits their time between fiction and nonfiction, screenplays, flash prose, full-length novels, painting, and comics.

Kate strives to appreciate the small things in life but has been known to throw down hard at an EDM rave.