Amira was not supposed to bring personal food into the training module, so she hid six peppercorns inside a button tin. Space food was nutritious, clever and deeply boring. It tasted like someone had described dinner to a machine.
On the thirty-second day in orbit, she cracked one peppercorn between two metal spoons over rehydrated potatoes. The smell filled the cabin with Earth. Soil after rain. Her father’s kitchen. The tiny violence of a grinder on a wooden table.
The crew passed the spoons around like a ceremony. From then on, pepper marked special nights: first sunrise over the Indian Ocean, first repair outside the station, first birthday sung in floating crumbs. When Amira came home, she planted nothing; pepper does not grow from cooked longing. But she kept the empty tin to remind herself that even distance can be seasoned.