Anna Vanderhoof turned her head on the pillow and saw herself standing by the bed.
            Not herself as she was now, old and frail and bedridden, but a ghost of her younger self. The flaming red hair and color-filled cheeks, sparkling green eyes and strong straight posture of her thirties.
            “Nana? Nana, can you hear me?”
            Anna blinked, squinted her eyes, and realized she wasn’t looking at an image of her former glory but at her granddaughter, Rebecca.
            “I’m still here,” Anna said, her voice a hollow croak that terrified and repulsed her.
            Rebecca knelt down next to the bed, placing a hand over one of Anna’s. “So are we, Nana. We’re all here.”
            Anna turned her head again, surprised by the exhaustion such a simple movement inspired. Scanning the room, she saw that she was surrounded by her family. Except for Rebecca, they seemed to be keeping their distance, as if wanting a buffer zone between themselves and mortality, but they were here, just as Rebecca said. All of them. Her two children, Edwin and Simone, both well into their fifties now, Simone’s husband by her side. Edwin’s wife had passed on several years ago. The half dozen grandchildren and their respective spouses, and even a gaggle of great-grandchildren of which Anna had to admit she only remembered a few names.
            The Vanderhoofs were a large family but not a particularly tight-knit one. The only events that brought the entire clan together were weddings…and funerals.
            “I’m not dead,” Anna thought, followed by, “Yet!”
            To get all dramatic, the end was near; she didn’t need Dr. Danvers to tell her that. She could feel it. Her body was winding down, and she was just so tired all the time. Truth be told, she was ready. Ready to close her eyes and not open them again. She wasn’t afraid.
            Okay, so that was a lie. She was afraid, but it was all mixed up with a certain nervous excitement. It reminded her of being seven years old and her parents explaining to her that they were leaving their home. Not just their house or their town, but the entire planet. They told her they were going on a spaceship and that they would live there for the rest of their lives. It was so big that Anna hadn’t really been able to comprehend it fully.
            “It’s going to be an adventure,” her father had said, his usual tactic to convince her to do something she was iffy about.
            The day they boarded shuttle that would take them to the USS Magellan Anna had not truly grasped the ramifications of the journey they were undertaking, but she had felt this same mixture of fear and anticipation. Stepping into the mysteries of the unknown.
            Anna realized that she had become lost in her own thoughts again, returning to the present only when she felt the mattress shift as a five-year-old girl with blonde pigtails climbed up on the bed.
            “Briana, get down from there,” Rebecca said, reaching for the girl.
            Drawing from a nearly depleted well of energy, Anna swatted at her granddaughter’s hands. “Leave her be.”
            Briana was the youngest of her great-grands and the one that Anna spent the most time with. The girl’s mother, Rebecca, was assigned as a nurse and the family had quarters adjacent to the ship’s medical unit, where Anna had lived for the past three years. Ever since the stroke that had made it difficult for her to get around on her own.
            Briana snuggled up next to her great-grandmother, as she liked to do. “Tell me one of your stories.”
            Gregory, Rebecca’s husband, said, “Honey, I’m sure she doesn’t feel like telling a story right now.”
            Anna laughed. The sound was weak but it was the first authentic laugh she’d had in…well, longer than she could remember. “If not now, when?” she said. “This may be my last chance to tell a story.”
            Simone took a seat in in a metal folding chair next to the bed. “Tell us one about Earth,” she said, and suddenly she seemed a little girl again, sitting cross-legged on the floor and looking up eagerly, ready to be spellbound as her mother unfolded one of her tales.
            In fact, every face in the room held a similar expression. Rapt was the word for it. All the attention focused in on her like a laser filled Anna with a renewed vigor. She didn’t have much in the way of possessions or wealth to pass down to her loved ones, but she had her stories. She’d told them hundreds of times, and her family never seemed to tire of them.
            Especially the stories of Earth. The tales of life on the little blue planet enthralled her children and grandchildren and now her great-grandchildren. To them, Earth was a myth; they had no personal experience of the planet.
Nor had anyone else on the ship. At 87, Anna was the oldest person onboard, and the last living person with actual firsthand memories of Earth. And those memories were about to die with her.
            Only they wouldn’t. Her children and their children knew the stories by heart, and Anna had recorded them all for her personal log which upon her death would be added to the ship’s archive system. But reading the words on a flat screen, or hearing them passed down secondhand would never be the same as getting it directly from the source.
            “Nana, will you tell us about the snow again?” Briana asked.
            A soft murmur wafted through the room and everyone drew closer. Despite her exhaustion, Anna smiled and pushed herself up slightly on the bed. She hadn’t felt this much familial affection in years. A shame it took her impending death to bring it on.
            “Well,” she said, and everyone leaned in as her voice was weak, “on Earth we had what were called seasons. Four of them throughout the year. Each lasted approximately three months, and contained its own unique weather patterns. The season we called winter was when it was coldest. In many parts of the world, it would get well below freezing and stay that way until spring.”
            She saw several people around the bed wrap their arms around themselves, and next to her little Briana actually shivered as if she were feeling the bite of a winter wind. Of course, no one in Anna’s family had ever experienced true cold, as the ship’s temperature was always regulated at a steady 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
            “And sometimes, when it got very cold, snow would fall from the sky.”
            “Like the water that you said sometimes would fall from the sky?” asked her grandson Terrance.
            “Rain, and it’s similar but different. When the temperature dropped too low, the rain would freeze and turn into these little fluffy ice crystals that would cover the ground in a blanket of white.”
            Rebecca smiled, her eyes taking a faraway cast. “Sounds beautiful.”
            “I saw pictures once,” Edwin said. “In an old book in the non-digital library. They were in black-and-white, but it was still breathtaking.”
            Closing her eyes, Anna mined her memories, pulling up an image of the winter wonderland the backyard of her parents’ home on Earth would become after a heavy snow. Her body may be failing her, but her mind was as sharp as ever, and she could visualize the world of her childhood in precise detail. “Breathtaking, yes. Winter was my favorite time of year because of the snow. I’d go sledding, build snowmen with my parents, sometimes lie down on the ground, kicking out my legs and arms, to make snow angels. The world seemed a magical place all covered in downy white.”
            “Must have been hard to say goodbye to all that,” Rebecca said.
            “It was snowing the day we left.”
            This got everyone’s attention. “You never told us that,” Simone said.
            “It was the middle of January. There was a war going on, but like most seven-year-olds I was oblivious to it. While we waited for the car that would take us to the shuttle, I was playing in the backyard. The snow had drifted in places so that my legs sank to my knees, coming down so heavily that it was almost like a billowing curtain, and I tilted my head back and opened my mouth to catch the flakes on my tongue.
            “When my Dad came to get me, I didn’t want to go. I was having too much fun, and I just couldn’t conceive of living the rest of my life without snow. He knelt down in front of me, getting his pants wet but not caring, and told me not to be scared, that I had to be brave. He said it would be an adventure then he took my hand and we walked away from the life I’d known.”
            Silence filled the room then, a reverent hush like one might find in a place of worship. Briana was the first to break it. “Do you ever miss Earth?”
            Anna considered before answering. “Not usually. The life I’ve had on the Magellan has been a good one, and I’ve never wanted for anything. However, if there was one thing I’d have to say I do miss, it would be snow. What I wouldn’t give to walk through a field of white again, watching the flakes fluttering down all around me.”
            Briana gasped suddenly and wriggled away from her great-grandmother and off the bed. Without a word to anyone, she ran from the room, nearly colliding with Dr. Danvers who was coming through the door.
            Rebecca called after her daughter, but the girl was already gone. “I don’t know what has gotten into her. I should bring her back and make her come apologize.”
            “Don’t be silly,” Anna said, raising her hand in a dismissive wave then letting it fall heavily back to the coverlet like a dead bird. “Probably best one so young not be here for the end.”
            No one responded to that. Anna figured they really didn’t want to talk about why they were all here, but it also couldn’t be denied.
            Dr. Danvers stood next to her bed, smiling down at her. “Ms. Vanderhoof, is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”
            Those words, spoken with such gentle concern, hit Anna like an anvil to the chest. They really brought home the reality that she wasn’t much longer for this life. Doctors usually told you what they were going to do, what you required, always looking for a solution. When they started asking you what you needed to be more comfortable, that meant they’d given up hope that anything more could be done.
Not trusting herself to speak, she just shook her head. Perhaps to make himself feel useful, Danvers fluffed her pillow and straightened the coverlet then existed the room again, leaving her alone with her family.
            Anna found herself trembling, like she would as a little girl after coming in from the snow. Tears prickled at her eyes but she blinked them away. She’d had a long and full life, and she wasn’t in any real pain. This wasn’t the time to be scared, she had to be brave.
            She licked her dry lips, swallowed hard, and was preparing to start her goodbyes when Briana came back into the room, her hands behind her back. She wore a sheepish grin that reminded Anna so much of Simone at that age.
            “Where did you run off to, young lady?” Rebecca asked.
            “I had to get something for Nana.”
            “What do you have for me, sweetie?” Anna said.
            Briana walked over to the bed and pulled from behind her back a small glass ball on a black base. Liquid sloshed inside, and in the dim light of the room Anna thought she saw something floating around through the glass.
            “I brought you some snow, Nana,” the girl said, placing the ball on the bed.
Anna lifted the object with trembling hands and pulled it close to her. A snow globe. But not just any snow globe, the snow globe. She still remembered her father bought it for her at the shuttle station gift shop the day they left for the Magellan. She’d treasured it, even more so after her father died in her early twenties. She eventually passed the keepsake to Simone, who in turn passed it Rebecca. Rebecca had apparently continued the tradition by passing it to Briana.
Who was now giving it back to Anna. The circle closing.
            Anna stared into the snow globe, at the winter scene caught inside. A small wood-frame house with a few white-capped pine trees out front, as well as a tiny snowman with carrot nose and a striped scarf. The miniature house didn’t really look anything like where she’d lived with her parents on Earth, but the resemblance was close enough that as a girl it had thrilled her. Those first few years aboard the ship, when the pangs of homesickness had been those most cutting, she had spent hours lying on her bed and staring into the snow globe, trying to will herself into the tiny submerged world.
            Holding the snow globe now, she gave it a shake, stirring up the little plastic flakes that swam around in the water before settling back down at the bottom. A poor imitation of a snowstorm perhaps, but it was better than nothing.
            She fluttered her eyelids, trying to blink away more tears, but the moisture persisted. She reached up a hand to wipe her cheeks but paused, staring at her hand as if she’d never seen it before. And in fact, she felt like she hadn’t, as if it were a stranger’s hand she was looking at. Gone were the liver spots and varicose veins and wrinkled folds of skin. The hand before her know was unlined, unblemished, the hand of a much younger woman. Perhaps that of a girl. This could be Briana’s hand.
            As baffling as this was, Anna found herself distracted by dust filtering down into her eyelashes. Dust that melted and ran like tears down her cheeks. Tilting her head back, she gazed up at the ceiling…or where the ceiling had been. Now she only saw a swirling mass of gray clouds and tiny chips of white sifting down, catching in her hair and dropping onto her face, numbing her skin with cold.
            “Snow,” she said softly, her voice sounding firm and sure. “It’s snowing in my room.”
            That was, of course, impossible. She knew that and yet her senses told her that it was real. She could even see her breath fogging out in front of her in vaporous clouds like cartoon word balloons.
            “Is anyone else seeing this?” she asked, lowering her eyes back to her family.
            Who were gone. Not just them, but the entire room. She found herself standing in an open outdoor space, the ground at her feet covered with snow. She walked slowly through it, at times the drifts so deep that her legs sank down to her knees with each step. The landscape was familiar, though the perspective skewed. It was as if she’d shrunk.
            I’m a little girl again, she thought. It’s impossible, all of this is impossible, but I’m a little girl, and this is where we lived back on Earth.
            Even as she thought this last, she turned and saw the house, the wide back deck and the weather vane on top. And from around the corner of the house came her father, bundled up in that wool trench coat that he no longer needed once they went to live on the ship.
            “Anna, it’s time to go,” he said, holding out a hand.
            Part of her wanted to run to him and throw his arms around his legs, but another part shied away. “I don’t wanna go.”
            He stopped before her and knelt down in the snow, getting his pants wet but he seemed not to care. “I know you don’t want to go, but you have to. It’s time, you can’t stay here any longer.”
            She looked around at the familiar surroundings and felt tears sliding down the sides of her face. “But I don’t know what it’s going to be like.”
            Her father placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be scared. You need to be brave. It’s going to be an adventure.”
            Then he took Anna’s hand and they walked away from the life she’d known.

MG Allan spent his childhood making up stories in his head, and now he spends his adult life writing them down.