Issue 1 Draft 3

Shine Out
By Yilong Peng
M2, Harvard Medical School
Illustrations by Sophie Yu
Phoebe often saw my
patients, and I hers, even
though our respective
contracts technically forbade it.
Even though each of the mining
companies we worked for only
staffed around a hundred workers
per shiftship, there were times we
needed a consult, another pair
of hands for a procedure, or just
someone to bitch to at the end
of the day. No matter how small
the community, some professions
you just need two of: locksmiths,
barbers, physicians. We covered
for each other whenever one of
us was indisposed or just wanted
a change of scenery. Phoebe liked
to practice with a view of Earth
outside her wall port; sometimes
I could predict when my pager
would ping based on where we
were in our orbit cycle. I liked her
patients well enough; they weren’t
much different from mine. Some
of them — usually the men —
started to reserve concerns for
when I came around; after the
fiftieth inquiry, I typed up a report
for both of our ships explaining
that I couldn’t prescribe Viagra
because: 1) neither companies’
medication policy covered it and
2) it was contraindicated against
the microgravity and would lead
to them passing out. Besides, it
wasn’t in the best interest of any
company to encourage those
kinds of extraterrestrial extracurriculars,
what with all the
health risks if anything were to go
wrong.
We had our agreements and
disagreements, Phoebe and I. She
hated that I let the patients, both
mine and hers, call me Damien.
She insisted on being Dr. Pavor,
convinced that misogyny had
tracked her all the way to Mars
and damned if she was going to let
anyone dismiss her efforts as the
first female physician in space by
calling her by anything less than
her full title. Her patient notes
read like overly-clipped fingernails.
She was on birth control
like most of the other women,
but still got these horrible cramps
every month when they cycled
the magnetic shields that put her
in a bunk and had me working
doubles, bouncing between
our shiftships in the ping-pong
shaped transporters usually
reserved for miners and their ore
shipments. We came to practice
medicine similarly. During one
of our performance reviews, I
was commended for my ‘rational,
professional approach’ while she
was condemned as ‘distant, at
times unempathetic.’ “Fuck ‘em,
right?” she had laughed it off with
me over a bottle of Merlot — the
company I worked for grew its
own grapes — before crumpling
and tossing both of our reviews
into the trash. Later, when she
thought I wasn’t looking, she
fished them out and placed them
side by side, scrutinizing from
one to the other like a radiologist
comparing x-rays. It was the
second time I ever saw her cry,
her face blotched like the rocks.
No matter how small
the community, some
professions you just
need two of:
locksmiths, barbers,
physicians.
I was covering for her
today, her viewport granting me
a lovely starscape of Moon. The
first patient was running late. We
were in month four; the shiftship
crews operated on six-month
cycles, just long enough to get you
missing people when they left, all
synchronized around the same
time. Twice a year, all the longterm
personnel would descend
to the planetary greenhouses and
watch those ships disappear like
thespians behind a black curtain,
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