Obit—Rebecca Harrison

Welimma Yog was the first Plutonian author and spent her years writing in the leftover light of the solar system. Not for her were the cities gliding Saturn’s rings, nor the ocean at Jupiter’s heart where the old cathedrals of England drift, salt-deep. When she finally left Pluto as a two hundred year old lady, her manuscripts in a battered suitcase with a faulty lock, little could she have anticipated the fame and acclaim – for who among us hasn’t weeped over ‘Stone Skies At Nunpa Dune’? Who didn’t fall asleep from their mother reciting the poem ‘No steps further but just one more’? Could Yog have known that she would never return home to the Plutonian dusk? Or that she would have written her last great work in a batter-craft riding Venus’s lightning? She never learned any other language, preferring the soft gutterings of Plutonian, but her works have been translated many thousands of times. For every time a new world is discovered, we send her works first, so that they will know the best of us. And in this way, Welimma Yog has never died. Some say that if you recite her poem ‘Wind drops on the spullamet’ into the last light of the year, she will appear and write a new tale for you alone. Who among us hasn’t tried?

photo by NASA and Justice Dodson (via unsplash)