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I’m still groggy from the suspended animation as my starcraft “Phanes” outjumps from Owen Space without issue.

The A.I. maneuvers the “Phanes” into park orbit around a blue marble of a planet in the Sol system.

“Landing zone acquired,” comes the A.I. “The Tualatin Basin. It’s sunrise there.”

“Indeed,” is all I muster as the Dread of this place begins flowing through me.

As the landing sequence begins, our touchdown point shows large on the NAV panel immediately in front of me: the target? A wide forest etched by the green waters of a snaking river that holds, for me, a memory most tentative of desire and passion from a long ago time before I became a Star Pilot; when love was new as the first time your mouth engulfs the majesty of a French cruller and the sweet parcel stays on your lips like the warm taste of your lover lingers, for a moment most forbidden.

DonutLand.

The “Phanes” shakes as the craft enters the atmosphere, buffeting me in the COMM chair as if the personification of a love once known in a simpler time when pastry dough rose hard, and caramelized fruit filling flowed almost as a river over various bodies, geologic or otherwise. The craft groans under the strain of reentry echoing the ghost calls of the Ancient Mastodons who once roamed the now-overgrown conifer and deciduous forest, a call that harkens to our inner most Maslow, the hierarchy always present as is the primordial need to eat or procreate, or both, simultaneously…but I digress.

DonutLand.

The A.I. concludes the landing, and, like the dough for a Long John, I rise from the COMM chair as my armored D.N.A. cycles on.

“Clear,” I say.

Whisper like, the “Phanes’s” hatch opens. I close my eyes taking in the cold morning air, and imagine the phantom forms of the Ancient Mastodon, the beasts that call this home so long ago when the world was Innocent, like she and I were back then. Intermixed with a hint of dough is the smell of the thick forest.

It’s Fall here now in this place.

Yet, it’s the “in-between” time when the days are warm and the long nights cool, but not cold and when, if you arise early as is the wont of any bakier of Yeast-based circles of Yummy Desire, the stars are bright and fresh in a pre-dawn sky that only carries a hint of the coming day in the glow of the east as Time relentlessly arrows ahead like a fat Cupid.

Back in a dream, she and I would look heavenward in those days in the early morning, and spy the white hot Sirius and the cluster of blue Pleiades or the Majesty below Orion’s Belt and she would smile a warm smile and we would imbibe in pastries and take comfort when our unadorned skin under warm blankets would later brush, like hot gooey glaze on a just-out-of-the-oven pastry. Or her warm aroma, a smell akin to baking dough and, perhaps, pastry crust I.S.O. pumpkin longings, and my longings of taking communion from her in the long of equal day.

And I was happy.

The leaves rain from the deciduous trees of this place, laying a carpet of yellow and red leaves that crunch under the weight of my boot. The wreckage of my life spills over like the swollen and pregnant Tualatin River in Winter, and I know that I’m progressing to my destiny.

For a moment.