First Woman
by Sarah Daly
The existential angst of not being able to find a job was squashing her brain. Like flattening it to a pancake. Her brain would become so flat that there would be no room for the 12,000-word research paper about beetle worms’ spots. There would be no room for the two-hour lecture about the habits of glowworms in volcanoes. There would be no room for the three-year experiment comparing the variegations of gnats’ wings. Her brain would become so flat that there would be big gaps in her head. Her head would sound hollow when she slumped over her desk and impatient students knocked on it. Helium from the gnats’ nests would creep into her ears and fill those hollow spaces. Her head would get so light that her feet would lift off the ground. She would begin to float over her crazy city and look down on everyone. She would float over lakes and rivers and streams and cities and mountains and oceans, lots and lots of oceans. She would get so sick of water that she would dream she was a cactus. She would float higher and higher until the clouds were cushioning her and wrapping themselves around her like ermine robes. She would wave at passengers on airplanes who fainted when they saw her. She would knock birds off their courses, who plummeted to untimely deaths. She would float until the air was purplish and speckled with stars. She would float until she passed the satellites and saw nothing but swathes of light on a blueish background. She would float until her feet touched a white, dusty surface and she landed. Then the helium would leak from her head and her brain would expand back and she would live a very happy existence on the moon.
Sarah Daly is an American writer whose fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in fifty-five literary journals including New Feathers, Moss Puppy Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, and The Avalon Literary Review, and Autumn Sky Daily. You can find her work at https://sarahdalywrites.wordpress.com/
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “First Woman”? I wrote the first draft of “First Woman” in 2019 while waiting for some chemical analyses to finish in the lab. Airplanes were flying over the building, which sparked a sudden inspiration to give my rather mundane experience a sci-fi twist: a scientific woman circumventing man-made structures and being the first woman to walk on the moon. Often in science, we forget the remarkable things we are doing and are bogged down by day-to-day details.
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