Excerpt From a Far Stars Series Prequel

 I love red geraniums, have one blooming in my window right now! And somehow, one found its way onto a rocket ship bound for spaces unknown.

I'm working on a NANOWRIMO project, a prequel to my Far Stars Series.  No real title yet but I'm so far calling it Christmas Red Geraniums in Space. Lol.

 Eastern Germany , 1938

Grandmother told him she knew her death. It was a talent of her family, to know when their last breath would be. Hers would be soon, right before Christmas. She would journey with Christmas Angels and look down on him in the stars. “You too will be in the stars, but long before you are dead. I see you there.” He smiled gently at her flights of fancy.

She did seem feebler as he got ready to leave on his escape journey. She gave a him a few small things. A packet of seeds in waxed paper and oilcloth: Geranium seeds, poppy seeds, comfrey, linden, apple.  An old homemade rosary, even though he had ceased believing in such things years ago. 

As she kissed him goodbye, he cried, knowing he would never see her again, and probably never see her little cottage with the garden and the geese, her two sweet dogs Kuchen and Wolfie.

“I see you with star children. You will go so far. Don’t forget the cat.”  She patted his cheeks like he was a small boy.

Wil did not know what that meant, but it was a lovely thought. That someday he would live in safety, have children. Star children. Maybe they would be named after stars. And a cat, like old Mitzi, who followed him out the back door in the night, and watched him head east through the fields. No Hitler, no Goering, no secret facility in the north, no bombs and deaths of innocents at his hand.