The First Bit

From the beginning, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford had wanted to grow up an become an astronaut. She wanted to go into space and do something first, and if she was lucky she might get married or whatever. Then Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford had made a mistake that her parents, her best friend, her doctor, and a placemat in a Chinese restaurant had disapproved of; she had gotten engaged. It was inconsequential to Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford that her fiancé was a freelance writer; (a job Archibald Brian Deacon Cranford thought was either mishandled or useless) it was inconsequential to Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford that her fiancé cut his hair short and left his beard long; (a sign of unfaithfulness, Marjorie “Tenacity” Jones, thought) it was even inconsequential to Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker that her fiancé was (as Gabriela Carey put it) a “total jerk;” it was inconsequential to everyone, and especially Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford, that her fiancé was a snake, and she was a tiger.

Really though, it’s possible that the placemat was right, and everyone else was wrong, and wrong to have wronged a perfectly well intentioned placemat. (To be perfectly fair, it was not the placemat, but Gabriela Carey who had pointed out the calendrical incompatibility; the placemat had only corroborated the point, if determinedly.) Jacob Tracker’s work as a writer might have been stalled at the time of his union with Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford, but it picked up shortly afterward; he remained wholeheartedly faithful to Cypris, despite his hairstyle, and he changed his hair also; he wasn’t a jerk at any point, and it’s likely that he was only described so because Gabriela Carey was feeling jealous and put out (she had been attempting to acquisition a fiancé for many years, with no success). The fact remained that Jacob Tracker was a snake, and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford was a tiger. The fact remained also that Jacob Tracker was eager to start a family, and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford was hellbent on doing exactly the opposite. It could be said also, that Jacob Tracker and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford didn’t have much in common, and disagreed on some very fundamental issues. 

Their marriage was short-lived, to say the least. Their divorce was neither tragic, nor unexpected…for everyone but the newly-dubbed Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, who spent a large amount of time after her divorce creating facsimiles of Jacob Tracker so she could stab them with knives, and an even larger amount of time moping around her parents house in sweatpants and high dudgeon. She drank a staggering amount of coffee during this time, and consumed only chocolate and popcorn. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker watched romantic comedies and cried about the happy parts, and laughed perhaps a tad maniacally during the break-up parts. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker’s method of coping was drastic, and long-winded, but it was effective; she was ready to move on past her marriage after only two months and about a hundred gallons of coffee. There is no surviving footage or evidence of Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker marriage or the stretch of mourning that followed it. Archibald Brian Deacon Cranford had been a policeman for a large number of years, and he was acutely aware of how important evidence could be. This was unhelpful; Marjorie Jones’s knowledge of the effects of gasoline and matches on any photo containing Jacob Tracker and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was priceless, however. 

With the wedding album up in smoke, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was finally free to pursue a career of some sort; instead she decided not to do that, and proceeded to live with her parents until they forced her out the door, tossed her a bag with some clothes in it, and told her to get on with things. 

Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker tried to work at places she didn’t like. She tried retail, and was fired quickly. She tried sales with the same result (her “involuntary reallocation” from retail wasn’t quite as forceful, or insistent, or penguin-related, though, so it could be argued that the result was slightly different). In a fit of desperation, she became a bank-teller (at the only bank that still had bank tellers), but was laid off the following week when the branch became completely automated. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker became very, very good at running during her turbulent search for a meaningful (or even a more-than-temporary) career. She had a car, but it didn’t work, and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was prudent enough not to use her rapidly-dwindling reserve of divorce-money on repairs instead of food. So she ran to work.

Cypris’s city was not even remotely designed for distance-running. There were very few ways to cross large sections of the city on foot, and many involved hopelessly circuitous routes, or else they lead to nowhere that anyone would want to be, or they lead somewhere that everyone wanted to be; no matter what, there was no easy way round. So Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker never took an easy way round; she ran extra. She woke up early so she would have time, and then she started running faster and faster so she could have sleep. By the time Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was laid of from her job as a bank-teller, she was in excellent physical condition, and almost completely out of money because her new apartment was in a good part of town and her job was in a different town altogether, where the minimum-wage accounted for a much lower standard-of-living. 

So, when ACRONYM started putting up flyers looking for people who were insane enough or desperate enough, and who also happened to be in decent shape, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was ecstatic because she fulfilled every requirement, something which had never happened to her before. She took a bus across the country without even telling her parents, (they were very angry about that) and in one swoop, managed to secure a job as an astronaut…well, almost.