Author: Heath

Sense memory is so powerful. It’s always amazing to me how some smell, sound, tactile feeling, taste, or image can instantly transport you to some moment from practically any time in your life.

Today I was taking a walk and something about the temperature, the sun on my skin, the way the breeze blew across me gave me a sudden flash in my brain. I was a child going to College Hills Elementary school. I wasn’t at school, but was taking a walk, perhaps walking home from school on a day that felt just this same way. I was thinking of a book I’d read from the school library, a compilation of Science Fiction short stories. It’s a book I’ve thought of often throughout the years, or more accurately, tried to think of through the years but can’t remember much about it and the vague details I do remember, I have to question their accuracy after all these years. Who knows how corrupted they may have become with each time I’ve tried to recall them over the years since.

I remember it being a larger sized book. Perhaps with purple and black theme to the cover. I remember a story about…someone…a boy? Who finds a robot. A theme that could fit probably thousands of stories if not more. The more specific detail I think I remember is a story of a team who lands on a foreign planet and ends up encountering some creatures that resemble large fleas or ticks perhaps, with spiky crystalline backs.

This book was one of my earliest encounters with Science Fiction and I’ve always wondered what it was. And all of this from the simple feeling of sun and breeze across my skin on a walk.