I have cotton ball brain. Marshmallow mind. Everything fuzzy and gelatinous. That’s how I know I’ve been extracted. Usually the kids outgrow us, slowly, just stop asking us to play, which is fine, natural, part of the job, and a debrief in itself, but sometimes, like with Fern, we’re yanked out. Head-scrambled, heart-achey and no good to anyone.

Fern. Feels good to say her name. It’s still up there somewhere, amidst the fuzz and the foam. Funny how they can be in our head like that, when we start off in theirs.

I’ve never been extracted before so I don’t know how it works, but usually, when things run their natural course, it’s 48-hours from one kid to the next if compatibility is strong enough. I’m with it enough to know I’m not ready to be placed with another kid. There’s never any guarantee we’ll get one with the same personality or interests, or even age, which itself is a cause of brain funk, or what we call the regression. Like paper-shredding or tin-crushing all our memories.

I tell them I need some time to reflect on what happened, like putting myself on the naughty step, and I’m preparing to declare a contamination risk to the next kid, that bits of Fern will float in and putrefy what’s meant to be pure. Saying that is like pressing a big red alert button. You only get to do it once or twice before they suspect wolf-crying. But I don’t have to, they want to process me, and find out what happened. Good luck with that, I think. I don’t even know. 

I remember weeds and plants with stems like Velcro. I remember a shed that felt like a container for all kinds of danger, rust and damp and chemicals. I remember being at the bottom of the garden.

It was our first day together, and her first day of a new primary school. She came home angry, needing an outlet. We launched a rocket in the garden using a bottle, baking soda and vinegar. It was pretty nifty except for the part where you had to trudge and rummage through the overgrown jungle where the lawn ended and the unknown began, to retrieve the rocket for its next space mission. I didn’t think Fern should be back there by herself. And she didn’t think she was.

I met Fern when she loved space the most. She called me Luna because the Moon was the Earth’s constant companion. Looked me deep in the face when she told me, like I didn’t know what a metaphor was. She was filled to the brim with Moon facts that spilled out when she got excited. That’s how I learned that the Moon was once part of the Earth, the way I was once part of her.

When do I go back to Fern? I ask. The processor looks at me like I should know better.

Fern knew well enough not to invite me to school, and I knew well enough not to go. Other kids had weird intuition about this stuff, and could be downright mean if you were detected on the premises. We fell into an easy routine with each other. Her spending all the chatter she’d saved up, reeling off Moon facts as we did her homework or drew solar systems or played made-up games. We’d use whole rolls of tin foil and Fern’s Dad’s helmet from his old motorcycle days to make moonwalker outfits and jump from cushion to cushion, scattered across the kitchen floor, pretending they were mountains amidst the Moon’s surface. Safety from the seas of lava. Or sometimes just laid on our backs and looked at the constellation on her ceiling, fistfuls of glowing stars that she said lost their fluorescence with each passing year. I learned how olden days people saw a bigger, closer Moon. How Moon dust smells of gunpowder. How it has a crust, like key lime pie, her favourite, that’s all crumbled and jumbled from bumps along the way. Mostly asteroids, she said.

Kids could be like meteors that slam into you, leaving craters that last forever, long after they’ve bounced off in their adult directions.

 I tell the processor that me and Fern were in the honeymoon phase, but they don’t laugh at my sort-of joke.

We were rarely interrupted in our games and shenanigans, which was maybe why we gelled so quickly. Adult intrusions sometimes speed up extraction, especially if they’re asked to interact with us, because they never get it right and always seem to disturb our credibility.

Fern’s Dad worked abroad a lot. He brought back little gifts for Fern from airports and gift shops, like wooden spoons from South Africa, worry dolls from Guatemala, and a Moomin mug from Finland. She showed me a game where she placed the fingernail-sized dolls, dressed in their coloured-cotton thread, in the basin of the spoon and flung them across the skies with a flick of her finger, hopefully into the welcoming mouth of the mug. Mostly lost forever. I got the impression these weren’t all-time-favourite gifts.

Her Mum was mostly fussed with Fern’s older brother Daniel, who was a kid actor and went on tons of auditions, except in that awkward adolescent phase, no longer cute and not quite handsome, so bookings were slim, which meant more auditions, which his Mum would always drive him to. I thought Fern would’ve made a great actor too, seeing as how well she could believe in stuff that wasn’t real.

Looks like a major adult intrusion occurred the night of the extraction? The processor says.

The solar eclipse party. I feel strange inside, like I’ve done something bad, but I don’t know what.

Fern was obsessed with the eclipse and wanted to do something big to celebrate. She just meant go outside with the lawn chairs and some blankets and binoculars and watch what happens when the sky went black, or totality, as she liked to say dramatically. But her Mum got it into her head that they should throw a party. Fern’s Dad was going away to China soon on a big trip, and Daniel had booked a TV job, so it was like a goodbye, congratulations and eclipse party all in one. Fern blew a casket. Full-on meltdown. The likes of which only happened when her Mum forgot to wash the right underwear for school or got orange juice with the bits in it. I told her it would be ok, we could just do our own thing still. And the whole family was fizzing like a bottle rocket, which was rare to see. Daniel even said he’d get Moon rocks for the occasion and winked at Fern, who winked at me in turn.

Fern came around and eventually got kind of excited too. Started brushing up on her eclipse facts. Talked non-stop about umbras, penumbras, paths of totality and diamond rings that had nothing to do with getting married. When she learned it was mostly her parents’ university friends, some neighbours and Daniel’s mishmash from film and TV sets that were coming, she planned to make some pocket money by betting they couldn’t spell syzygy, which she said was when the Sun and Moon and Earth were aligned straight. It made no sense to me given it sounds more like zig-zaggy. But I liked the idea. We were saving up to go on a trip.

Fern dressed in a purple velvet jumpsuit, with embroidered silver stars, that zipped up at the front, and brushed her hair twenty-seven times, for each day it takes the Moon to orbit the Earth. We listened to David Bowie’s Starman three times in a row, and did the steps we’d choreographed together facing her mirrored wardrobe. We felt giddy and gravity-free.

Mostly the party was kind of boring. Bonnie Tyler and The Waterboys played on repeat. Fern helped her Mum serve eclipse-themed drinks and snacks. I hung around waiting for Fern to break free so we could go into the back garden and dig up bits of soil to find signs of life on our space mission.

One of Daniel’s friends, tall and skinny, too much acne to be an actor, said he’d thought he’d seen signs of life further down the garden. And Fern was like, sounds good. It seemed like he was into the game. He said behind the shed was the best place to see the stars because of how dark it was.

The shed. The weeds. The plants that stick to you like Velcro.

The processor says carry on, but it takes me a while to get going again.

I heard the sound of the zip first, then little whimpers, like when Mars the cat wanted to be let in, or out. It wasn’t a noise I’d heard her make before. Maybe something similar when sick, or bad-dreaming, but this had pain in it.

I scrunched up my eyes tight, the way Fern did when she was figuring out Maths or doing telekinesis. Because Fern and I had perfect syzygy, I reckoned I could get her to think what I was thinking. I imagined mountains on the Moon, strongholds from that piping hot pool of lava. I said to Fern, don’t get burnt, don’t let it suck you in. Keep moving, jumping, flying. I sang all the lyrics to Starman, the way I’d heard some parents sing lullabies to nightmare-having children. Did all the la la las. Tried to build a dam around the thoughts that knew better, the ones that knew this kind of hurt can orbit around you forever. Tried to think of good times, good times, good times. Space missions, warm water Skittles experiments, dance parties after light outs, marshmallow eating competitions, trips to the Science museum to see life-sized rockets, trips to Scotland where the stars multiplied in the sky. Did all the la la las again until it was over and we were back on our own. 

I said, Fern, we’re ok, Fern.

It takes me a moment to remember where I am.

How is Fern? I ask.

That’s against protocol, the processor says. They write something down. They tell me I’m a candidate for rebooting.

I’d heard of reboots happening. Mostly to elders, who had been around the Sun multiple times, because it’s harder to regress with each kid. Or when there’s fusion and the delusion sets in on both sides. When the kid believes you’re real and you do too, or something like that. They start to act on your impulses, when you’re meant to act on theirs. All I knew was it meant a fast track to getting rebooted.

Where is Fern? I ask, getting panicked now.

The processor tells me it isn’t my fault. These things happen.

I ask them why I was extracted. Why couldn’t I stay with Fern until she needed me again? I ask the processor if they can break protocol just this once and tell me how Fern is doing.

It’s always just once, the processor says, but not no.

Fern has got a telescope. She’s taken to gazing at the stars from her bedroom window. She has a list of things to see: dippers, dragonflies, galaxies, nebulae, that kind of thing. Her eyes have to adjust to the dark in order to see anything at all. The processor says this means no looking at the Moon.

I consider that maybe she’s pretending to live on one of the planets. Maybe I can just be out of circulation until Fern wants to imagine me again.

The processor says that won’t happen. Something to do with Fern blocking that whole night out, me included. Totality.

I say ok to reboot.

I wonder if we will ever think of each other again.

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Nicole Davis is an audio and film producer for Brock Media and based in London. Her short stories have been long-listed for the 2024 Desperate Literature Prize, the 2023 Bridport Prize and the 2022 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. She was selected for the 2023-4 edition of The London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme, the 2024 Granta Short Fiction Workshop, and is currently writing a collection about hard-to-define relationships.