Collected Behaviour
by Becky Petterson
Sally brought a seashell for her first show and tell. It was small and curved towards itself like a cupped hand. The outside was dark and knuckled, but the inside was bone smooth and gathered light in its palm. It looked like wild magic in the artificial brightness of the classroom.
The purple walls of our dome pulsed as Sally talked. Outside, a skein of Phoenixes unfurled towards the planet. Their shadows swept over the poppy sun as they circled above, their feathers gray as Medieval smoke signals, half forgotten letters trembling in the firmament. The Phoenixes weren't dangerous to us, though they flew close to the dome in choreographed circles. They frightened us at first, their burning season reminiscent of what we'd left behind. We don’t know why they are here, just that they were here first. We think their ashes, over centuries, made the purple crystals we vitrified to make the walls of our dome.
Sally was the only child from the shuttle in our class. The others were old enough for work training, or young enough to be in the kinder group. Some were mean in the small and unexpected ways of children–in the easy way they shunned her, in the undermining of her mind and her stories. She seemed confident that day, as the brittle light-white lengths of her fingers splayed flat to share her earthly treasure.
The shell looked like photographs of the universe I had seen—shimmers of light coalescing, breathing over the unseen. My dad said that an atom was the same regardless of where it was in space. I wondered if the shell reflected the universe the same way the sky once reflected the ocean on earth. If somehow by understanding one, we could understand the other. What could extinction teach us about survival?
Sally remembered the ocean, the great breathing expanse of it, had pushed her feet into wet sand and flung a kite high above her head. Sally said she used to collect shells and had another one too, shaped like the moon and bright as teeth, which carried the noise of the ocean in it. “Big deal,” one of the bigger boys scoffed, “we can hear the ocean anytime we want on our tablets.” He was right, but only partially. The digital version of something was just an echo—the reverberation felt like it was everywhere all at once, but our bodies didn't store it the same way. Our teacher admonished him, but later asked Sally not to bring items from earth anymore. Our kindness was thinner than our curiosity, and children became envious so easily.
When the shell went missing, Sally cried tears so big that she seemed to shrink, and it reminded me of the illustrations in Alice in Wonderland that my dad read aloud from his tablet. She cried because the shell's loss was a stand-in for all the others.
Sally was already asleep and flying through space before most of us kids were born. The things she remembered didn't exist for us in the same way. Our experiences of earth came through rectangles that fit into our palms, unfiltered but curated. Until the shuttle landed, everyone I knew experienced earth as a place they were grateful to leave. She remembered only the beginning of the end, when the fires were so bad the air became a physical object. Her memories were our myths, unreachable as the thin white string of a kite lost in the sky. She wasn't there when the light changed, when the earth slowed and the crops failed and people were hungry and angry and scared. When the fire-scorched earth stayed scorched. Hers was a flight of hope, ours was one of desperation. Only a short decade separated the two.
When our teacher turned off the lights, the shell stayed missing. She left the classroom door unlocked that night, an invitation. The abalone shell was on Sally’s desk the next morning, cracked. She closed her eyes and pressed her lips into a punctuation mark but didn't cry, just stared straight ahead and cradled the object in her arms as if a wail was something we could see.
They slept the whole time they were on the shuttle, two decades, and then they woke up unchanged but for place. They thought they'd be colonizing the planet. They trained for it. They packed for it. They said goodbye and went to sleep and when they woke up we were here already, a colony nearly a decade in the making because our technology surpassed theirs. We passed them in space, my dad said, but all we could do was keep going.
I was born in space but was named for an ocean-made object—Pearl; maybe that’s why the shells fascinated me. My mother was a language specialist who studied dolphins. She had spent her entire life by the sea until we launched.
There is a picture of my mother holding me, gazing at me with so much love that sometimes I think my body still remembers the way it felt to be held and loved like that. She took the pills when I was two. Cancer, my dad said. We could send man to another planet but we couldn’t solve the mysteries of the body. She didn’t want to suffer, to cause suffering, he said. It was the only fair way. But it didn’t feel fair to me; it felt like my punishment for existing.
Sometimes, the ache for what I would never have would turn its mouth to swallow me. The Phoenixes were a murmuration concentrated on our presence, with their daily sacred synchronizations, their feathers dark as charcoal until they flamed their way through death back into life again. Sometimes it felt like she was speaking through them, a seance with flaming herons, reminding me I was special, I was treasured.
We’d all left something behind, or someone. People and places we loved, though for most of us what we loved was gone long before we were, at least that’s what my dad said. We’d spent our lives on earth acquiring objects, allowing them to assign meanings to us—our collections of self. Then we left them all behind, or they were taken from us, dissolved or jettisoned through the fires and hunger and fear. We thought we'd remember, that we’d carried our rites inside us.
Sally and the other members of the shuttle carried physical pieces of their earthly selves: Sally’s shells, books, a hand sewn quilt, a dirty cat collar with a copper bell, a guitar and spare strings, a blue enamel locket containing three soft curls of hair. They all carried bibles. Their objects were reminders of the tautology of our existence, of what we left, what we forgot, and what we had stolen in the process of arriving.
They built their church slowly, using pieces of their spacecraft, as their original plans dictated. Our leaders decided the building was too divisive, so they worked outside the dome. The panels were converted to walls, beds unbolted and arranged as pews, the nose of the cone finally erected like a needle towards the unfamiliar constellations threaded above. They carried within them the very myths we left behind. My father said for those of us who stayed on earth, God ceased to be a factor. Still, their morning songs swelled and burst around us, the birth of stars in our ears, and the Phoenixes twirled closer, weaving a tapestry of curiosity, ember-bright.
After the graffiti and the vandalism the colony held meetings, first just the leadership and then opened community wide. Some suggested two colonies. The call: “There's not enough space or resources here,” “they should build their own dome,” “this was our home first,” “our children were born here,” “we built this land.” The response: “This land was ordained for us,” “it's divinely ours,” “our children were born for this,” “you took this land.” The echoes came from across time and space, the shadows of differences bigger than the differences themselves, our behaviors collected and carried from earth. “They should've been redirected to the space station and redistributed among the colonies,” some argued, a moot point blooming and dying in bitterness. “They should re-enter cryosleep until some undetermined time when their presence would be more tolerable.”
The truth was they were separate from the collective grief that burned through us. In this strangeness we shaped ourselves around fear and had forgotten our gentleness. The truth was, without our objects, we had only the dome, built from the ashes of creatures who soared from myth, after all what is more mythological than unexplained science. Without our objects, only the impossible angles of light inside the dome reminded us of our place in time. Without our objects, we searched for places to tuck the few memories we hoarded but found none, so we secreted them under our skin instead, talismans to protect us from the infinite ineffable. The truth was, they rose first, because someone had to be first, and despite the vulnerability of metal shaped by flesh, both sets of wings soared across space. The truth, according to collective behavior, was that the first bird to fly got all the arrows.
While the colony argued, the colonists from the shuttle moved out of the dome and lived in their church and in tents. When the new dome was finished, the colonies decided to separate completely, no communication. Sally gave me the abalone shell, pressed it into my hand. “I don't want you to go,” I said and she smiled and said she’d pray for me, for us. “We know home is more than a place,” she said.
My son likes to hold the shell now, his two dimpled hands barely as big as it is. He travels the crack with his finger, moving across the jagged divide with its loving, imperfect join. “It's from a place called earth,” I tell him, “from a body of water as big as our planet,” and his eyes are two bright stars shining in the darkness. “My friend brought it here on a spaceship.”
“Where is your friend?” he asks and I tell him she's in the dome next door, the murky outline of which we can see through the purple glimmer of our walls. “When can we visit?” I tell him someday, I hope, though I wonder how long the two domes will stand when each is just waiting for the other to fall.
Sometimes I look into the cracked shell and see the ocean, the memory of earth as the end of land. Other times I see the terrible eye of Sally’s God. Sometimes I look at it and see my friend. I remember the two of us playing quietly on the floor, taking turns listening to the ocean contained in the moon shell. It was as close as I got to prayer, that sound was something holy and precious to me, the sound of the earth we left behind, the sound of my mother's body moving around me. Home, I think.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Becky Petterson holds a Bachelor of Science in Communication from Southern Oregon University. She won Apple in the Dark’s 2025 flash fiction competition, was runner-up for the 2025 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for Fractured Lit’s Gods and Monsters Challenge. Her work appeared in Mslexia, the Pile Press Journal, Peach Fuzz, Lemonwood Quarterly, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and is forthcoming in Hoot.
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