Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

First off, your name. I remember that night clearly. We were tucking you into your big boy bed upstairs after reading from your new book about the joy of going potty. A lavender breeze swirled open the curtains, revealing the constellations and full moon over the fields. Solemnly you announced, “I am poopy from the stars.” A moment later you soiled yourself loudly for emphasis and Papa made a quick escape, because he always says that diapers are Not His Thing.

Papa remembers it differently, however. He says we were all camped out in the living room, snug in our piles of pillows and blankets, binging old science fiction shows on the tiny black and white TV from the shed. We did a lot of binging during the first years of Flu22. Starman and Star Trek and Stargate and Star Family. You were being silly and pulled a diaper on your head and announced, “I am Starpoop!” We giggled for hours and hours, and after you and I fell asleep, Papa registered the Starpoop domain and three variations of it, as well as all the social media accounts too.

Papa’s version is the one we tell everyone because his memory is better. And it’s more fun, isn’t it? My story is bittersweet, because the big boy bed you sleep in was once your dad’s. Even though we sanded down the headboard and painted it blue, you can still see the faint outlines of the dinosaur stickers Daddy plastered there when he was about your age. Isn’t it funny how we teach children about giant extinct predators, but not the ones they will find in classrooms and playgrounds?

You don’t ask about your dad much. I’d like to tell you his stories, but just saying his name makes Papa sad.

Besides, we’re all so busy! Recording, editing, posting, responding. You have a thousand subscribers. You have two thousand followers. Papa mapped out our growth strategy in yellow stickies on the kitchen wall. Before we inherited this farm from his family, he was advertising sales manager at the biggest radio station in Syracuse. The station is syndicated now and controlled by a computer in Los Angeles, but sometimes at night he goes out to the garage and plays old mixtapes and drinks from his stockpile of beer. He looks out at the stars over fields that we do not farm but which grow wild with poppies and herbs. I think he feels old. He turned fifty last month.

Starpoop, just between you and me, you’re the best thing that’s happened to Papa in a long time.

Silly me. That’s happened to both of us, not just him.

Is that a stinky diaper I smell?

• • • •

Starpoop, today you reached 10k followers! It was the reaction video to the Stargate S1E4, with the giant alien bug attached to John Shepherd’s neck, that pushed your numbers so high. I thought it would be too scary for you but you just laughed and laughed. It was one of the easiest videos we’ve ever shot and it went viral within two hours. As Papa says, people need more joy in their lives. If you’d cried in terror, we probably wouldn’t have posted it. Probably.

Most toddler influencers review candy or toys, their parents angling for adorable and cute. In Scotland there’s a kid named Angus with a million subscribers. He destroys his trucks each week. Viewers love his wee rage and lovely brogue. Most reaction channels are adults mocking movies, or doctors raising their eyebrows at quack remedies, or fanboys fawning over their favorite musicians. You are unique in your class of mixing both toddler insights and reactions to science fiction media. Your facial expressions are delightful. Your critical thinking vocabulary grows every day, ranging from “Great!” to “Garbage!” You can deftly deploy a thumbs up and thumbs down.

If only you could use those same skills to tell me when you have to go wee-wee.

Still, I’m thankful. Other kids your age are stuck on Paw Patrol, but you’ve devoured all of classic Star Trek. Last Halloween you wore black sweatpants size 2T and a gold T-shirt. I wore a red dress and thigh-high boots. We were a big hit on Instagram. We got a red heart-shaped emoji from William Shatner’s estate.

Your favorite shows, however, are the least marketable ones. Starman ranks extremely low in search analytics. It’s a quaint 1980s show about an alien from outer space and his half-alien, half-human son as they wander around the United States searching for the kid’s mother. It’s got angst. Sometimes some contrived danger, easily resolved by the last act. The women have big hair and chunky earrings. The Starman acts as if he’s ingested too much space Prozac. We tried to record a few videos of you watching it, but all you do is stare at the story and demand that we loop it again and again and again.

You also love Star Family, starring Yvonne Craig and James Darren flying around the cosmos in a spaceship that looks like an electric tea kettle turned sideways. Yvonne and James have three children, one of which is a robot. Each week the kids get into fresh trouble by falling into wormholes, befriending strange alien creatures, discovering lost space treasures, activating ancient portals or computers better left alone, or destroying (mostly) uninhabited asteroids. All the family wants is to get back home to Earth after falling through a tear in the space-time continuum. You love Star Family! All twelve episodes. It’s so obscure that no one even mentions it online. It’s so old that we only have the VHS tapes, the video barely viewable anymore. Forever is a promise that VHS can’t keep.

• • • •

It’s a good thing we live far from the nearest neighbors and have a long driveway, because we want to protect your privacy and childhood. If we still lived in Owego the neighbors would probably envy our success, and the teachers in daycare would start looking at you with opportunism in their eyes. That segment on national morning TV about your reaction to Star Wars episode one really propelled us upward. Papa timed it perfectly to catch you nodding off and snoring. Social media gold.

Luckily the only people who come down the driveway are the delivery folks with new camera equipment or prescription medicine, the grocery people with our weekly supplies, and the postal service delivering pandemic testing kits. I don’t think you’ve actually ever been to daycare, by the way. I don’t remember any of our neighbors, but I’m sure they’re doing fine out there.

Papa brought me coffee in bed yesterday morning for Mother’s Day. We don’t do big celebrations. We don’t talk about your dad. But we don’t ignore the day completely, like we do some other things.

100,000 subscribers! The platform is sending us a gold plaque.

• • • •

Please stop crying. Papa didn’t mean to yell. It’s just not safe to go to the shed. Your great-grandparents kept years of old paint and cleaning supplies out there, along with rusty nails and rusty scythes and rusty shovels. Trust me, tetanus is no one’s friend.

The only useful thing Papa has ever found out there is the black and white TV. It weighs forty pounds. It has knobs and buttons, and was made to plug into the cigarette lighter of a gasoline-powered vehicle. You’ve never seen a cigarette or a gasoline car. It took Papa a whole weekend to adapt the power supply to our batteries and cobble together an HDMI input that would work with a 1980s VHS player. I guess all those years he spent as a cable TV technician in Utica really paid off.

Yes, I guess we could have used our seventy-inch cinema LCD instead, but the big TV sucks up a lot of power from the solar batteries. Also, it gives me migraines.

Let’s go take a nap in your big boy bed and then you’ll feel better. Yes, I’ll curl up beside you. I like looking at the old outlines of dinosaur stickers. I like imagining that your dad is doing well out there beyond the fields, that he’s not homeless in a park, that his arms have no fresh marks, that his stomach isn’t full of pills. When he brought you to us he looked so gaunt and sad. He had a physical picture of your mother but we lost it in the move. I’m sure I snapped the image on my phone, but when I go through the gallery I don’t see it. I just see you. Your third birthday in our house in Syracuse. Your third birthday in Utica. Your third birthday in Owego. Your third birthday.

Thank you, Papa. I guess I do need a nap, don’t I? And it’s time to take my medicine. Rainbow pills, all for me.

Starpoop, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. I mean obviously not, we’re in upstate New York, but something else seems very wrong. I should say something specifically wrong here in our house because obviously, things have gone very wrong in the world. No one expected Flu22 to be as virulent as it is. No one expected collapsed economies and failed power grids and fractured communities. All of those years I taught media at Ithaca College, I never dreamed the school would shut down and I’d be lecturing over a laptop to blank squares where my students should be.

I haven’t seen the blank squares in a while. I wonder where my laptop is. My laptop. My laptop. My laptop.

Oh, thank you, Starpoop. I needed a sloppy wet kiss just now.

Anyway, the specific local problem I’m worried about today is that I can’t find any pictures of your father. I can see framed photos on the walls of Papa’s parents, round-faced and pleasant Lutherans. Also photos of Papa growing up from chubby toddler to awkward teenager to the handsome man we know today. But the black steamer trunk full of mementos that I’ve been carting around since college is gone. It has leather straps and brass locks and can only be moved by two people. Papa and I searched all the closets. We looked in the attic, the basement, and the garage. We even looked in the shed, though he asked me to stay in the doorway for my own safety. It was pitch black in there except for his flashlight beam. I could smell oils and bleach and something rotting away, the scuffling and shuffling of things being moved, but the trunk wasn’t in there either.

In the good news department, however, you are now #93 in the top 100 toddler channels. Last night Papa uploaded the video of your reaction to classic Star Trek S2E15 and it was the cutest thing in the universe. You demanded your own Tribble. You settled for a loofah sponge and are still lugging it around the house three days later, and judging by the smell I think you must have stuck it down your diaper.

Luckily that video was a hit, because we had gone two whole days without posting and you were trending downwards. Papa has to work very hard to keep up with fresh content and sometimes your reactions are just not what we need them to be. For instance, you had no response at all to ST:TNG S4E5 with Dr. Beverly Crusher saying her most famous line. You just yawned. It was very disappointing. Do you remember that line? I think it’s very important, though it escapes me right now.

Why don’t we sit here and read while we wait for the results of this week’s testing kit. I found this copy of The Odyssey in the closet. It’s about someone who left home and then spent a long time trying to get back again. Here’s your book about dinosaurs going potty. You’re almost three years old and I’m sick of diaper duty. I never had to deal with stinky, yucky, crap-filled diapers before you came to us—

Papa just reminded me that one of the long-term effects of Flu22 is fuzzy memories. He said, “Alora, remember our son?” And he held my hand and we sat on the shaded front porch for a while, listening to the birds and occasional traffic on the distant road. My hand is very soft compared to the calluses on his fingers. All those years installing satellite dishes on shingled roofs in Binghamton really left their marks.

(I think I’m someone else. I don’t think Papa means us harm. I should not go to the shed. I love you more than anything, Starpoop. Is this a simulation? Am I trapped in a dream?)

• • • •

Growth on your channel has stalled. Papa walks around with a deep frown line between his eyes. Our unemployment ran out months ago after the new Flu22 benefits were vetoed by the president. I don’t want you to ever think that we’re monetizing you, or fear that we’re going to establish a trust fund and then squander it. I don’t want you to regret a stolen childhood. But food costs money, honey, and so does that new omnidirectional condenser microphone that Papa says we need to compete with Angus from Scotland.

• • • •

Possibilities, as written in my diary:

1. I am deranged with grief over my adult son’s accidental fentanyl overdose and created this fantasy world as a release, denying my own reality and memories.
2. I am trapped on a holodeck, and also an amnesiac.
3. I am divorced from reality by dementia, Alzheimers, or brain damage from Flu22. Such a tragedy, at my age.
4. I am dying and living out a last fantasy before all my neurons shut down. Or already dead, and in a weird afterlife purgatory where I have to resolve some intrapersonal fault before I can move on to infinite peace.
5. I am a prisoner in a space menagerie, like classic Captain Pike. Again, amnesiac.
6. I am an astronaut who fell through a wormhole like John Creighton and am now being tested by aliens to determine humanity’s inherent worth. Amnesiac, of course.
7. I am living with at least one alien refugee from a dying world who tampers with my memories but still loves me.
8. Am I the alien? Am I a ghost?
9. In Star Family S1E5, mom Yvonne Craig unearths a rainbow-diamond tiara in the space garden she’s been digging. Instantly it propels her down the many pathways of time, all the past and future possibilities, all the ways her life and the lives of loved ones could have unfolded. They didn’t call it the multiverse back then. Very quickly Julie becomes overwhelmed and must be rescued by her husband and children. Later, the space queen who lost it comes to reclaim it. She says the Tiara of Time is too powerful for humans and can cause irrevocable brain damage. Humans can only stick to one temporal path. All others are beyond our reach, relegated to dreams and shadows.

The truth of my life, Starpoop, could be any combination of the above, or maybe none at all. Maybe I can’t conceive of the boundaries of my situation. Maybe all I can do is keep searching for answers, like Captain Pike searching for a way out of his zoo, or a star-born father and his half-alien son searching for the mother gone missing, or the parents and children of Star Family longing for home.

If this is my afterlife purgatory, you’d think we wouldn’t have money woes or have to worry about subscriber counts. You’d imagine we wouldn’t have enormous medical bills and insurance rejections that keep Papa up at night.

If I’m dead, Starpoop, I would like to see your father walk down the road the way I remember him best. Pre-addiction, healthy and good-humored, so smart and kind, such a fan of old science fiction TV that we would watch together on the sofa. I would like to give him a hug. I would like to tell him how much I love him, all wrongs and crimes forgiven. I’d like to hear him say I love you too, Mom.

• • • •

“If there’s nothing wrong with me,” Beverly Crusher said, floating around in my dreams, “then something is wrong with the universe.”

This morning I decided to walk with you to the end of our driveway. The morning was sunny but not too warm, the light shaded by sturdy old trees. Once there, we walked toward town on a route vaguely familiar. One delivery truck passed us by during the next hour, and an army jeep with only one uniformed driver. You and I might have otherwise been the only people left in the world. You skipped in the dust. I tried not to worry. Finally we saw a small gas station, its only two pumps cloaked in garbage bags. The adjacent diner was open, with one rusty blue bicycle parked outside beside a row of solar panels.

Inside the diner, the light was dim and the air smelled like cinnamon. An old woman in jeans and a pink floral shirt was sitting at the counter, her small head bent over a newspaper. The waitress, tall and red-haired, brought me coffee and gave you a dinosaur coloring book with crayons. Her nametag said Flo.

“You look good, Alora,” Flo said. And then to you she said, “Mr. Famous! Getting bigger every day. You look like your dad.”

“I’m Starpoop!” you announced, and in the sunlight through the dusty glass window you strangely seemed taller and older, maybe five or ten or twenty years old. I turned to the pane and saw a glowing rainbow tiara on my head, like a radioactive Homecoming Queen at a cosmic prom. Without warning the entire diner sagged beneath my seat as if disappearing into a sinkhole. My hand went clumsy around the coffee cup. The hot brown liquid sloshed onto the table and it headed for my lap.

“Easy now,” Flo said, quick with a napkin. She steadied the cup. “You’ve been walking a spell, haven’t you?”

“Should I be afraid?” I whispered. I should have been afraid, Starpoop. I should have run screaming from the booth, with you tucked under my arm. But I felt suspended, instead. Caught between possibilities.

“Nothing here can hurt anyone,” Flo promised. “Take a deep breath. Your brain’s just a little unstuck, that’s all.”

I breathed. The sinkhole repaired itself. You drew in your coloring book and ate chicken fingers. Eventually Papa showed up in the truck, worried because we hadn’t told him where we were going, but he sat down and we drank milkshakes and his hand was warm in mine, and a cheerful old song played on the radio, and we were just two middle-aged but youthful lovers and their three-year-old grandson.

Of course then Papa took out his phone and recorded new content. Something different for the channel.

It didn’t go viral. It didn’t trend. Maybe people don’t really want new stuff. Maybe they only want the familiar. The comfortable. The road they know or recognize from other people’s travels. They want to scroll mindlessly through channels and feeds that comfortably resemble or respectfully revisit safer times. Saner times.

Me? Today I prefer the company of books. My copy of The Odyssey has gone missing, however. It got lost under the bed. I ordered a new one for delivery, along with a new book called Unicorns Love To Go Potty.

• • • •

Starpoop, while you were sleeping last night I went to the shed.

I opened the lock with the key that Papa keeps hanging in the pantry and pulled open the rusty sliding door. He was inside the house, editing a video that had incurred a copyright infringement and thus could not generate views or money. Here outside, the fields rustled under a restless breeze and thin bluish clouds slid over the moon. The shawl over my shoulders did nothing against the chill, and inside the shed was even colder.

Paint cans, turpentine, rusty tools. A lampshade yellowed and torn in the beam of my flashlight, cobwebs draped across like lace. A hideously ugly lamp as well. Nothing moved in the shed, nothing rustled or slithered, and nothing smelled any worse than old chemicals and faded bleach. I moved a stool to get to a pile of boxes, and moved the boxes to reach an old metal filing cabinet full of old newspapers. Beside it, in the very deepest corner and carefully covered by a patchwork quilt of faded colors, was a black steamer trunk. The locks were long broken, and the lid lifted easily with a loud creak.

Inside were the pictures and items I’d been searching for. The wedding day portrait of my parents Bill and Carol, both so young, outside a church in Owego. My own wedding veil, carefully folded in a plastic bag on top of my college yearbook from Syracuse. A baby’s birth certificate from a hospital in Binghamton. An envelope of photos of a woman intubated in a hospital bed, her face swollen beyond recognition, surrounded by hospital equipment.

At the bottom of the envelope was a note folded carefully into quarters. The paper itself, white and crisp. In my own handwriting, in vibrant ink, was a list of possible solutions to my current predicament: holodeck, coma, prisoner, alien. It matched the same list I’d written in my diary upstairs. On this list, however, number three was circled and underlined.

“Trust Papa,” I’d added to the bottom. “He loves you very much.”

The sinkhole from the diner began to appear beneath me again, the foundation of the world falling away into darkness and void. If I fell in, I’d never be able to climb out. It was very scary, Starpoop. It was scary in a way you can’t conceive of yet, and I hope you never do. But don’t worry, I didn’t fall. Instead I heard Papa say, “Alora,” and the beam of his kerosene lantern slanted across the shed above my head.

I jerked around with my flashlight aimed at his face. His eyes were tired, his frown wide and pinched. My heart beat unsteadily. We stared at each other in silence until I asked, “Did I die?”

“Do you feel dead?” He came in and sat on the stool, which creaked ominously under his weight. “You found your list.”

“When did I write this?” I asked.

“Two months ago.”

I sat down on the dusty floor of the shed and pressed my cheek against the metal filing cabinet. Papa drank from the bottle of beer he’d brought on his journey from the house. I wiggled my fingers and he handed it over.

He said, “I love you, Alora. Even with a crazy mixed-up brain. And you love me, too.”

“But you shouldn’t have to—”

“Shouldn’t isn’t a word I want to hear,” he said. “We’re in this together. You have clear days and confused days. Long term side-effects of Flu22. You’re still a good grandma. You still find joy in little things. Some day there might be a cure. So what else do we do but keep going?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to be confused.”

“I know.” He came down to the floor to sit with me and tipped his forehead to mine. “I know.”

I decided I would never leave the shed again. Instead, I would live there with my memories, Starpoop, and never again have to see the pitying eyes of a waitress, never again watch another episode of anything containing holograms, aliens, or multiverses. But then I wouldn’t be able to tuck you into bed, Starpoop. I would miss so many moments of you growing up, and those are moments that can’t be recovered. I wouldn’t get to spend my allotted days with Papa, who has already lost so much, too. Somewhere out there is your father, maybe, and if he ever does return, I want to be standing on the porch and not hiding in the shadows.

Still, it took a long time before I could fold the note up, put it back to be found later, and cover the trunk again. Later, when we walked back to the house where you were sleeping, a shooting star lit up the western sky in a silent blazing trail. I’ve never seen something so beautiful, Starpoop. Or maybe I have. Who can say?

• • • •

Thank you, baby! You did such a good job! I’m proud of you. Such a big boy. Now we say bye bye poop and flush the toilet. Now we wash our hands. Now we fist bump. Look, Papa. Guess who used the potty all by himself.

Now sit here, baby boy. Papa says we need to rebrand. Science fiction nostalgia is a limited market, and you have so much potential. Tomorrow we’re launching another channel for you, something we can continue to build and expand, and it’s going to offer more fun and excitement, less paranoia and second-guessing of reality. Princesses and witches, magicians and pirates, decades of content to watch and react to, a brand new world. A dazzling place, full of wonders.

We will call you Mickeypants.

(In the trunk in the shed, tucked under my wedding veil, was a rainbow-diamond tiara. Broken.)