By Lesa Hastings

Everyone has to start somewhere. I began as a child stalker, or rather an accomplice to my mom’s propensity for stalking.

We first saw the man we called “Tony 86” parked in the dirt lot rest stop adjacent to the motel my dad would go to after fighting with my mom. After he left us, it became the meeting point for my parents to exchange me and my brother for the occasional weekend. Mom called it a fleabag motel for lowlifes.

“Late as usual,” Mom said. Dad was late enough I wondered if he was actually coming. He was late a lot, but this time he was really late. I’d never stayed in a motel before and made up stories about the people we’d see coming and going while waiting for Dad. Minutes passed as I watched a couple argue on the second-floor balcony, then embrace in a farewell, the woman walking away with the man holding her hand as long as her arm would stretch, until she moved out of reach. Mom had stopped nagging about Dad being late, distracted by something.

She pushed her sunglasses up on her head, her long brown hair falling perfectly off her shoulders and over the seatbelt. She froze in the front seat like a hunched over statue, her blue eyes locked on a car parked along the edge of the lot. I followed her gaze to a man who looked like a suspect straight out of Magnum P.I., with oversized tinted glasses smoking a cigarette. I could see the breeze slightly move his black curly hair, revealing flecks of gray as his arm hung out the driver’s side window between draws.

“Get a pencil and paper out of your backpack,” said Mom. “Write this down.” I scrambled to get a scrap of paper and pencil stub out of my overnight bag.

“AMC Eagle.” I wrote it and slouched down in my seat to conceal that I too was now watching this stranger. I noted the car had wood paneling. Mom read me the license plate, and I wrote it just as Dad finally pulled up and parked next to us. I handed Mom the slip of paper, rezipped my backpack and braced for the interaction that happened every time we got picked up for time with my dad. He always tried to keep it transactional, but Mom always wanted to get into it about one thing or another. Dad being late never helped. My brother and I rushed from Mom’s car to Dad’s and slammed the doors without saying goodbye. I didn’t even try to steal the front seat from my brother. We just wanted to go and I hoped they wouldn’t make a scene in the parking lot. Even if I’d never see any of these strangers again, Mom’s public yelling fits, with dad or strangers, were embarrassing.

In school, we’d been learning multiplication tables and the planets. Multiplication was hard, but I loved the patterns. There was an order to things, repeated patterns that made sense as long as you could remember the order. Every day after math, we’d study space and the upcoming launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. The whole class had homework to write a letter to civilian schoolteacher and astronaut Christa McAuliffe who had been selected as a payload specialist on mission STS-51-L. I liked the name of the mission. It sounded like code. I had so many questions for her, including how a teacher gets to space, and what she expected to see in observing Haley’s Comet for six days. What does a comet do for six whole days? And are days longer in space? How close would she be to it up there? And exactly how does a crew deploy a satellite? What was the purpose of the satellite? Was it to spy? I was desperate to ask her these questions, just in case she ever wrote me back. I knew there was no way she could write all the kids back who had this assignment, but I thought that if I could ask the best questions, I had a chance. I wanted her to write me back, so I decided to include a little bit about me, hoping it would set me apart from all the other students that were sending letters. I told her Saturn is my favorite planet because the rings appear solid. But it’s really a cosmic magic trick. The rings are billions of particles of rock and ice suspended in space but appear cohesive. She’d fall right through those rings if she tried to step on them. I added my tiny quartz pebble into the letter for luck. I wanted her to have something, but knew astronauts needed to travel light.

I already sealed and addressed my envelope to NASA when I remembered one more thing. On the back of the letter there was just enough room to add a P.S. asking if she’d write back when she returned to Earth to let me know if Venusians are real, explaining that Mom insisted they were real. I told her I was more of an expert on Saturn than Venus, so if she has any information on this, I’d appreciate learning what she knew.    

The afternoon we handed in our letters, the class walked to the town post office that was just across the train tracks from the school and deposited them in the mailbox. We had just settled back in class when I was called to the office before the end of school bell rang. Mom was waiting to give me a ride home instead of riding the bus. She could tell I was suspicious of her being there since I almost always rode the bus. As we walked to the car, she offered, “His name is Tony 86. We are entwined.”

I immediately knew she was talking about the smoking man in the AMC Eagle. The scrap of paper I wrote his license plate on had been wedged on the rearview mirror of our car for a week, so I was not surprised when she said this. When Mom started talking about being entwined with someone, it meant her spirit guides had revealed this information to her and usually gave instructions to make physical contact. What surprised me was that this was the first time she was entwined with someone she had never spoken to, that she had only seen from afar. When we’d make the drive to the nearest town or city, mom would meet people at metaphysical book stores and cling on to them. They’d engage with her for the reasons of politeness, or being cornered. After these one-sided conversations ended, usually with an awkward and forced exchange of names, Mom would find these people in the phone book and repeatedly call them at home until they asked her not to call anymore. Her feelings would be hurt, thinking she had made a genuine connection, so she’d listen to the same few records on repeat and feel divinely connected to the musicians, claiming these songs were written for her on some astral level, even if the musicians, like U2 or REO Speedwagon, weren’t consciously aware of that fact. This was pretty standard behavior for mom.

The drive home was filled with explanations of how Mom found Tony 86 through the DMV and public records using my note. She’d been tracking him down and just returned from the city, in fact, where she found the bowling alley he frequented. She told me he was on a league at Crowne Alley every Tuesday night. Her research to find this stranger gave me a weird feeling I couldn’t explain, but I had to admit, it was some good spy work. She continued, telling me all the things she could not learn from the DMV, but knew from the Ascended Masters who revealed Tony 86’s spirit name to her in meditation, and had channeled the letter she wrote for him and planned to hand-deliver.

The Ascended Masters were guides my parents both used to talk about when they were still married. They wouldn’t talk to me or my brother about them directly, but we’d pick up pieces here and there when strangers would visit our house in the evening, gathering around our coffee table that was covered in quartz and amethyst crystals to help conduct energy that opened the chakras of those in the room so they could receive messages from these Masters, like Mother Mary, St. Germain, or Archangel Michael. Since these Masters existed as energy that could move through all dimensions, they were all-knowing. Mom knew she was one of the lucky ones who had a direct line of communication with some of the Ascended Masters.

I looked out the window, half listening as she babbled for miles down Highway 67 on the way home. She was in a great mood. It was nice when she was excited about things like this, like a brief and happy break from the persistent despair and rage that could overtake her at any time, most of the time.

“Tony 86 has been on a bowling league for three years,” my mom said. “We can find him there on Tuesdays. He’s a walk-in. His original soul, a normal guy—whose name you don’t need to know because it doesn’t matter, he’s gone—he has departed his body and has been replaced with a new, different soul. He doesn’t know he’s a walk-in. I have to make contact with him, awaken his consciousness, and then he will know the truth and regain his memories about his past—his real past, not his life on this planet. Then we will be united.”  

This was not the first time I’d heard Mom talk about souls coming and going and having her soul entwined with someone else, nor was it the first time she had become hyper-focused on a soul mate. She used to say these things about John Denver when we’d listen to his records and she wrote him letters every week for a while. I’d sit next to her, reading my Nancy Drew books while she’d carefully hand write pages and pages to him. She waited and waited for him to write back, and one day a letter came. It was a restraining order. She was legally forbidden to contact or come near John Denver. Mom was heartbroken and sure that the government had intervened with her heroic attempt to reunite with her soul mate. There was not as much joy in listening to John Denver songs after, and Mom would change the station in the car if his songs came on. 

Mom taught me that a walk-in is a soul that leaves a body so that another soul can replace it. I’d seen pamphlets about this in the New Age bookstores we’d go to in the city when we were already there for a grocery run because Mom was always on the lookout for more information about the Ascended Masters and walk-ins.

We were at a bookstore one day near the end of the summer when the restraining order came, and Mom was talking to the owner about local channeling groups. The scent of nag champa incense and world music, heavy on the flute, were always a familiar welcome when we’d enter the store. I loved coming to this store to look at the posters and postcards of fairies and angels, and enchanted scenes that I could only imagine being able to draw like that. When Mom talked to people at bookstores, it took a while, so after I’d exhausted browsing the posters and postcards, I browsed the informational pamphlets by the door. A seminar about walk-ins caught my eye. I looked over my shoulder to see if I was safe to read the brochure and opened it casually. It explained that walk-ins are free from childhood conditioning because they are not born and don’t mature. They “walk in” to a body and take over living that life. Some walk-ins describe their entry into a new body as something they agreed to because their previous soul was complete. This was my first understanding of a contract. I wasn’t sure how a soul became “complete” because I had heard in my grandmother’s church that the soul is eternal. I figured these walk-ins just liked to body-hop for eternity when they were “done” with one body and wanted another.

As I read the pamphlet, I had a lot of questions. I wasn’t sure I believed this could be possible, but if it was, I felt bad for walk-ins. Even if they had agreed to this previously, it must be weird retaining partial memories of an original personality, but having no emotions associated with those memories. I wondered if this was what caused déjà vu.

When it was time to leave, I subtly slipped the pamphlet into the waistband of my pants and covered it with my shirt. I snuck it home where I could study it in my room. I read that pamphlet over and over, and wondered if my mom was a walk-in. She was always trying to ascend and find peace within her own soul, she seemed to have a lot of different personalities, and she never talked about her childhood, only her future. And she really did know a lot about the subject when I’d never heard anyone else talk about it before. For example, soul exchanges can occur at any age of a person, not just at birth. It creeped me out a bit to think that everyone could trade with someone else at any time as long as they both agreed to it. What if you didn’t like it after the trade? Were there takebacks?

Mom never explained why the Masters called him Tony 86, but I figured it must mean something. I wondered if maybe it was his 86^th soul exchange, or if his soul was 86 years old. Once Mom knew where to find Tony 86, we started going to the bowling alley on league night. It was an hour drive to north Denver, which was no big deal because where we lived in the country, it was a long drive to anywhere. Even the bus ride to school took forty minutes. Mom was a very focused night driver, so there was no talking in the car. I liked getting out of the valley outside of Deckers where we lived. The nighttime city lights in Denver were different than the twinkle of only a few houses scattered over two miles, like a giant threw dust over his left shoulder instead of salt, making a scant pattern of night-lit houses across the valley. No matter how hard I tried to look up and out the backseat window, I couldn’t see the Milky Way in the city. I could only see the biggest stars up there, and wondered what the odds were that I was looking exactly where the communications satellite would pass through once released from the Challenger, or even the space shuttle itself. I gently waved to the sky, wishing I could be a passenger up there so I could see the city lights below and the stars around me—a reverse night sky, like what astronauts or aliens would see looking down on us.

***

The day of the Space Shuttle Challenger launch finally arrived. Mrs. Board rolled the VCR and TV stand down the hall to a room full of third graders honed in on the squeaky wheels creaking down the hallway from the library to the classroom. We rotated our desks, anchoring our sights on the TV like it was our own elementary school satellite, to watch the tenth flight for the Space Shuttle Challenger, the twenty-fifth flight of the Space Shuttle fleet, and the first civilian school teacher to go into space.

NASA had delayed the launch multiple times that morning due to record-low temperatures in Florida. When it warmed enough for the shuttle to be cleared for launch, the anticipation was palpable. We had never been able to watch a live launch at school before, and certainly not one where we felt like we knew someone on board. Christa McAuliffe was the first teacher to go into space, and millions of children were invited on the journey. If NASA’s intention was to get kids interested in space, it had worked. The world was paying attention and there would be live coverage. Many schools had coordinated with NASA to watch the launch as part of the six-lesson teaching series that would come from space over the coming weeks, but what we cared about was the ability to see a dream in action: A literal reaching for the stars and recognition that even country kids could potentially be an astronaut someday.

Mission control counted down from fifteen, and in the final 3…2…1 second to launch, the whole class counted down at the top of our lungs, ending with a unified “Blastoff!” We watched fire thrust from the engines and the Challenger lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center. The announcer gave us a play-by-play of the progress. “Main engine start. Liftoff. The Challenger has cleared the tower. Engines at 65%. 46,000 feet altitude, distance seven nautical miles.”

I chewed my pencil’s eraser off in suspense. Then it happened. The Challenger had a fuel tank explode and the vessel erupted into smoke, two lines forked upward, careening in opposite directions before arching and beginning to fall. The TV announced, “Flight controllers looking here very closely at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink.” The Challenger had lost communication.

I chewed my eraser for the long minutes that followed. Even the newscasters held their breath as the report from the flight dynamics officer came in, confirming that the vehicle had exploded. Forces on the ground were looking into recovery resources to see what could be done at this point. Contingency procedures were put in effect. I closed my eyes and tried to feel anything, or maybe it was an attempt to try to stop feeling everything. I swallowed and wiped wet eraser dust from my lips.

No child in that room understood the science or risk of a NASA launch, especially on a Florida morning with record low temperatures. We only knew the possibility, the dream of becoming an astronaut when we grew up was real. And no science could quell the horror of watching our dream tear apart and explode on live TV, at Mach 1.92, with a body count of seven people. Kids and teachers were crying. The librarian turned off the TV and rolled it back out of the classroom in a rush, the flat click of her shoes echoing down the hallway, as the school faculty took on the “we’re just not going to get into the details right now” looks that I had seen from my parents many times. School was released early that day because the teachers were too bereft to teach and decided it was best to have parents explain the traumatic events we witnessed. Teachers had lost one of their own.

There’s nothing as eerie as a bus full of silent kids. Not a word was spoken the whole bus ride home, but we could all see the driver’s teary eyes in the giant rear-view mirror. Something had been vacuumed out of my heart and all that was left was the smell of green polyurethane seats and texture of the bus moving over dirt roads. I had clarity now on what it meant to orbit. I lived so far out of town, everything was a departure and a return.  

At home, Mom sat me down to talk about the Challenger explosion. I imagined I was one of thousands of kids about to have a sit-down talk with parents to help process what we had just seen. I wanted to understand the mechanics of it, what happened to the bodies, because being grounded in facts was my greatest comfort as a child, but fact was not what mom excelled at. My mom began the conversation by explaining to me that the Challenger explosion was just an illusion. She sat next to me on the couch and handed me a large quartz crystal cluster I could barely hold because it was so heavy.

Mom began to explain: “It’s all part of the cosmic plan, divine intervention. The astronaut bodies were beamed off the space shuttle before the explosion. Their souls left this reality, the physical plane of existence.” She could tell the crystals were too heavy for me, so she took them from my hands and swooped them in an arc above our heads like they were the space shuttle flying through space before she reverently placed the cluster back on the coffee table.

 “Don’t worry. It happened before they could feel any pain or fear. They were all sent back to the astral plane. It was all part of the cosmic contract freeing them from their earthly prison. The media just perpetuates the illusion so that it looks real. People have to believe it is real because they are not ready for the truth.”

It seemed like she was trying to comfort me, but it did not work. I wanted to understand the science of what happened in the wake of realizing anything tragic could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. I just witnessed proof of this in my own classroom. But no words of comfort came from my mom. Instead, she touched my knee and confided in me.

 “The explosion is a signal from the Ascended Masters. It’s time to make contact with Tony 86. Tonight.”

Mom and I had driven to the Crowne Alley three times before that night, each time rushing against the clock because we only had the time between dropping my brother off at Boy Scouts and picking him up again. We’d make the long drive north, only to cruise the parking lot rows, making sure Tony 86’s car was there. I got really good at spotting the make and model of his car, and had his license plate memorized by then to cross reference in case some other bowler drove the same vehicle. If we made good time on the way there, Mom would park near his car in an open spot and watch for him. As soon as she yanked the parking break up, she’d pull out the letter she had written Tony 86 weeks ago, and hold it in her hand, prepared in case he came to his car while we were there. When we had exactly forty minutes to get back to pick up my brother, she’d slip the letter back in her purse and off we’d go.

That night, our fourth visit to Tony 86’s league night, it was snowing. Mom had arranged for my brother to go home with one of his friends from Boy Scouts for a sleepover. That was when I knew this trip would be longer than just a few minutes in the parking lot, but I wasn’t prepared to go inside. I had assumed we would follow our routine, and park and wait for Tony 86 to come out of league night, keys in hand, and Mom would make her move.

Suddenly Mom pulled the keys out of the ignition and said, “Come on. We’re going inside.” The car got cold almost immediately after it was turned off.

Mom held the heavy door for me and as we entered a blast of heat hit my face. Unzipping my coat, I quickly saw I was the only kid in the bowling alley which made sense since it was after nine on a snowy school night. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke like I’d seen in movies. Stifling a small cough, I decided it was a good time to practice being invisible, blending in. I tried to be as unseen as possible as we grabbed a two-person table as the first shift of league teams rotated out, and the second shift, including Tony 86’s team, lined up at their lane.

Mom stared at him so hard it made me uncomfortable, so I acted like I didn’t see him at all and drew multiplication problems with my finger on dirty napkins among the dinge and echo of league night. I was practicing threes: 3×1=3: Three dimensions of space multiplied by one dimension of time. I couldn’t figure out the equation that added up to the four-dimensional manifold Mom spoke of on one of our car rides to the bowling alley. She told me the fourth dimension which encompassed the other three dimensions was where realization begins, where she and Tony 86 were entwined, and where there was no space or time or human conditions; only “being” existed there in its purest form. I wondered if this was where incinerated astronauts go. The fourth dimension was where all existence extended from and returned to. I imagined it being a peaceful place in space, like the galactic pictures I’d run my palm over in library books, as if I could somehow absorb the magic in those infinite black skies with a purple glow around constellations vibrating through my lifeline, like a violet aurora borealis deep in space where only satellites could breathe. So deep in space, astronauts couldn’t get there. But deeply serene. There was nowhere more beautiful or peaceful I could imagine being the beginning and end of existence. There was no equation I knew of to map this, and it was a far cry from living in the third dimension with my mom.

On Earth, our dimension was full of bowlers in the same leather and rubber bowling shoes in a barely breathable atmosphere of smoke and shoe disinfectant. I was a kid up past her bedtime and miles from home sitting among the chaos of bowling balls smashing pins and chatter from all directions. The only constants were my wanting to go home and Mom’s obsessive pursuit of Tony 86. News coverage of the Space Shuttle was on every TV that lined the bowling alley walls. The newscasters muted under the smash of balls taking down pins, the image of liftoff and explosion on repeat.

We’d been there an hour when Mom’s entire body tensed as she uncrossed her legs and put both feet flat on the floor. I turned to follow her line of vision and saw Tony 86 looking right at me as he left the lanes and came upstairs. Mom moved abruptly, intercepting his course to the bathroom. She lunged in front of him, like an animal that had been still in tall grass one minute, waiting out its prey. Waiting as long as it took for that first movement to incite action. Taken aback, he jumped slightly, gently putting both of his hands up in front of him to create distance and uttered a muffled, “Uh, excuse me.”

Her abrupt movement surprised me. I thought we were only observers, and would only remain observers. As Tony 86 tried to excuse himself from the awkward near-collision, Mom pivoted to block his path and thrust the letter into his hands.

“Take it,” she said loudly.  “Take it. We don’t have much time.” His bowling team started to notice. One of them was pointing at us.  

Embarrassed, I watched through the corner of my eye. Voices in the immediate vicinity began hushing, some bodies even rose to get a better look. She told him he was a walk-in and that the letter would explain everything he needs to know, if he would just take it. “Take it. Take it!”

The shoe guy, who wide-eyed, looked like he had been hitting the soda fountain pretty hard all night, leaned both elbows on the counter, finally seeing something interesting happen at work. As the bartender came out from behind the bar, I saw “Manager” across the front of his shirt.

As the manager approached, mom took a defensive stance. She put herself between Tony 86 and the manager, as he calmly asked, “What seems to be the problem here?”

“I have every right to be here,” Mom shouted, making sure everyone around could hear her protest. “I’m a free American and you cannot stop me from being here.”

The manager looked at Tony 86 and asked, “Nick, you OK? Do you know this woman?”

“His name is not Nick,” insisted Mom. “He may think it is, but it’s because he doesn’t remember his real identity yet.”

Tony 86 answered, “I’ve never seen this chick or her kid in my life. She just came at me while I was heading to piss. Started trying to force me to take that envelope, like I’m being served or something.”

Mom continued to try to hand him the letter, and the manager intercepted it. “Ma’am, I need to ask you to leave. Nick says he doesn’t know you, and this is certainly not the place for a kid at this time of night. If you don’t leave in the next few minutes, I’ll need to call the cops.”

Mom grabbed the letter out of the manager’s hand and pushed me toward the exit. I was no longer anonymous. I was a child in a divey bowling alley really late on a weeknight with a mother making a scene.

Storming out backward, Mom flipped off the whole joint with both hands and yelled, “Peace and unconditional love, assholes.”

My head down in shame, I picked up the crumpled letter she had dropped when she needed both hands to give the Crowne Alley the double bird.  All eyes in the building bore into my back and I felt more visible than I ever wanted to be.

I made sure my mom didn’t see me put the letter in a trashcan on the way out with my best nonchalance. I wouldn’t risk anyone else reading the letter and Mom’s mission being compromised. I’d let her think maybe Tony 86 found it after all. That was the mission that mattered that night.   

On the way home, mom was a non-stop chatter at the speed of light, high from the encounter. “I did it. I spoke to Tony 86. Now it’s just a matter of time before he is awakened. When he does, he’ll find me. He’ll know.” She tried to determine what went wrong, why he resisted the encounter and didn’t awaken right away.

“He shouldn’t have resisted. He should have felt the soul connection as soon as he saw me, heard my voice.” He should have taken her letter without question. It must be some sort of test from the Ascended Masters to see how she reacts.

My cheeks burned from shame of being asked to leave, and I was sweating from the car heat vents on full blast, still able to smell the cigarette smoke clinging to our clothes. Snow had collected on the roads. No plows had come. I looked at the crystalized ice on the lower windshield, watching the defrost slowly break it down and thought about how space is made of interstellar ice. Grains of ice are the primary material out of which the solar system was formed, and are found in the dense regions of molecular clouds where new stars are born.

Distracted, mom didn’t see a raccoon waddling across the road in time to slow on the icy roads, and swerved to miss it. She tried to recover our course, but the car began to fishtail on the slick roads. Overheated in the back seat, I imagined the serenity of ice clouds in space, how they might look just as I imagined the fourth dimension. As the car went off the road and into an embankment, I thought we were both going to die.

Mom banged her hands on the steering wheel, cursing Tony 86 for messing up the energetic fields that protected us. Cursing that we were off the road. It didn’t look that bad to me. We’d been off the road in storms before. It was part of living in the country. I opened the backdoor of the car and got out, pulling the floormat with me. I knew the best thing to do was put the mat under the stuck tire for traction, and push while mom steered and shifted. 

It took her a minute to realize I was already out of the car. Even with my door closed I could hear her ranting about Tony 86. I knew she was disappointed in the encounter because she wanted more from him. She expected him to awaken, to thank her for locating him and to confirm that they were, in fact, entwined. Standing with the floormat in my hand, I felt the heat leaving my body in the night air, and wondered if Christa McAuliffe ever read my letter. She really could have used a lucky pebble. Or maybe I should have given it to Mom to put in her letter for Tony 86.

Without asking if I was ready, Mom ground the car into gear and hit the gas. The rear tires spun into earth under the snow. Icy mud and gravel bits ricocheted around me, and I dropped the mat in the snow to push the bumper. I pushed as hard as I could, leaning into the car until it lurched away from my palms and moved back onto the road.

The release of my weight against the resistance of the car was like an electric shock. I felt the force of two colliding objects, like we had learned about in our space unit at school. Forces always come in pairs. Equal opposite action and reaction. I saw it in the bowling balls hitting the pins and in Mom colliding with Tony 86, interrupting his trajectory. But in class we had not learned about what happened when objects do not have equal action and reaction. We had not discussed refusal or inability to interact, or the release of one object from the sphere of another and the disruption that occurs. I wondered if this was what I didn’t understand about relationships my mom tried to forge with strangers.   

Mom pulled over on the side of the road and waited, the car idling. I ran toward the car, the exhaust-filtered taillights as my guide. It clicked in my mind that the creation of stars and the creation of “being” may coexist and come into existence from the same place. People and space are entangled, like walk-ins. I shook off the floormat as I ran and wondered if my mom was right about Tony 86. What if when he awoke, he would find us. I wondered if my jeans were stained with the same shards of quartz I sent to NASA by mail. If my lucky pebble made it to space and was blown into orbit, or landed in the ocean below. I wondered if the fragments of fallen astronauts would all conjoin in the rings of Saturn, and for a split second, I wished that instead of getting back into the car, I could disappear among those glowing rings, to become invisible but part of something bigger that could be explained by proof.

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Lesa Alison-Hastings is a writer and artist with a dual MFA in creative writing. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Third Coast, PANK, and Matter Journal. Lesa lives in Colorado with her family.