I got there because I was thinking about the kind of science fiction I used to read and watch as a kid. You know, where people wear chrome jumpsuits and robots serve them their breakfast in the morning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I thought, I should write a story about a tailor who works in a world where the only clothes that people wear are chrome jumpsuits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then <\/em>I thought, I don’t know anything about tailors or how they work and I should write about what I know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then <\/em>I thought, but maybe it would be more interesting to write about it as if I knew, but really just make things up as I went along. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then <\/em>I thought, okay let’s get started. How do I make this interesting? What’s the story here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, at around that point I really started to spin out and so I decided to start again from the top and that’s how we got here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some days this is really easy, but today’s not one of those days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I really want to revisit that space tailor idea. Hang on.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I could smell the rocket fuel on her boots before she came in through the sliding doors. I was working the graveyard shift at my brother’s shop, Shekoda and Sons Tailors, it was called. The sign was all lit up in retro-inspired flash bulbs. Jack Shekoda was our father, he’d taught us everything he knew and more. Friends used to call him Big Jack. It was my younger brother, Jack Jr. or JJ, who really took to the business. I could do the work, but that was about it. My heart wasn’t in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few earth years back, Big Jack got caught in a solar storm as he was passing Jupiter. He was headed to the moon colony to personally deliver some new suits to an old friend who was heading up operations there when his ship caught a solar flare. It careened into Europa. That’s when JJ took over the shop. I joined him an earth year or so later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’d always been a bit of a disappointment to the old man. He wanted me to be an explorer. See, he’d grown up in a time when the only humans in space were either rich tourists or scientists floating around in a dinky little space station. The human race hadn’t visited earth’s moon in decades, and his head was filled with utopian visions of a spacefaring future where humans were good. They explored the cosmos, seeking out new life and civilizations, boldly going where no human had ever been. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time my brother and I were walking, humans had spread throughout the galaxy. Big Jack was one of the first entrepreneurs to open up a shop at the station on Pluto, and that’s where we grew up. He had learned how to make suits from his father, working in a little shop, making bespoke Italian suits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, that’s probably enough background to get you up to speed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was around 03h45, and I was just a couple hours away from the end of my workday and the beginning of my two sweet weeks of annual leave. I was looking forward to taking a vacation at the resort on Enceladus. They had a fantastic spa with great views of Saturn’s rings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sliding doors hissed open and the smell of jet fuel filled the room. That happened all the time, but there was a hint of something else that made me look up. Far above the unmistakably sweet smell of the petroleum based rocket juice hovered a musky, lightly floral scent. It was unmistakable. I only knew two women who wore that perfume. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My mother, who’d passed away, and her<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Hey Mac,” she said, “It’s been awhile.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I missed yesterday’s post, but Friday’s piece of exploratory fiction clocked in at over a thousand words, so I hope I had some goodwill banked with you and you’ll forgive me. Today we’re going to take a lighter approach though. Had a bit of a false start with this one. I was going to talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-day-in-the-life","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.markdunn.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/bavarianwoman-692x1024.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n