The Haunted Traveler Vol. 1 Issue 1

33
Valhalla
Patty Papageorgiou
Some of the children don’t believe me. They say my stories
are made up. They say I’m so old, I don’t know what I’m
talking about anymore. But that doesn’t bother me. I tell them
what I know. I tell them what I remember. They can believe
what they like; they’ll make their own minds up eventually.
My bed is soft. My pillow rustles gently under my wrinkled
head. The sky above me is red. Reddish-orange. I could
never decide which. Never got used to it. Sometimes it reminds
me of a sunset, sometimes it’s just plain alien. But that
doesn’t matter. What does is that I am 126 years old and I
am here to look up at it. There was a time when I wouldn’t
believe that. But, here I am.
The children like coming to me for stories rather than visit
the public databanks. Even though they claim I am lying, they
can’t hide the sparkle in their eyes. I can see their wonder and
amazement at hearing about things they’ve never seen and
never will. They don’t say so but I know they prefer to hear it
from me than their teachers.
Creating databanks had been second on the priority list after
oxygenating this atmosphere. Get the planet viable, then
find every morsel of information available on human kind and
back it up safely for the education of future generations.
They had tried Mars first. The plants in the “greenhouses”
had lived long enough to give scientists hope of other
life forms surviving on the planet. They set up experimental