“How long is a light year?” the father asked, as we pretended to read the ads in Reader’s Digest.
In the time it took for the girl to guess, light traveled from the Sun to Mercury, the rabbit ear TV singing its white noise ostinato to anime battle music over the sweet perfume of cigarettes and old men and disinfectant. The girl’s guesses: a year, ten years, a hundred years.
“How long is a light year?” the father repeated.
The girl’s guesses: a thousand, ten thousand, a million years. What she didn’t know but I looked up later, after we drove home from Chicago for my father’s uninsurable teeth, our annual six-hour trip of cornfields and creaking metal and stale car smell, all for that Chinese dentist in Arlington Heights: a light year is the distance light travels in one year. One light year is a unit of distance, not a unit of time.
What I didn’t know then but discovered later: that trip to Chicago would be our last. Many years later, around the holidays, my brother asks me, “How long is a light year?”
I tell him I don’t know. He then follows up with, “Do you think that dentist’s still there?” I know the answer to that one: the past lives a light year away, reading old magazines in Chicago, watching TV, forever waiting for the dentist.
Tina S. Zhu is a 2024 Lambda Literary Fellow who writes from New York. Her work has appeared in places like AAWW’s The Margins, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, and Lightspeed. She is currently working on a novel and can be found at tinaszhu.com.