On Astronaut Wings

Astronaut “Oz” Osborne needs to make sense of his life and he only has one clue to go on. Zaria Wonder, twenty-five and carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, knows nothing about Oz’s quest, but she has the one thing he’s looking for; if only she could find it. A mysterious coin from the long-defunct Mir space station links Oz and Zaria together, but neither can foresee how the coin will change their lives. Oz has only a shred of evidence to go on to locate the mysterious coin that fellow astronaut Carmen White found on the Mir space station over a decade ago. Now that Oz’s world is crumbling around him and the Space Shuttle program is winding down, he needs to find Carmen’s coin like never before. Zaria Wonder received the coin from Astronaut White years ago during a classroom visit, but now she is grown up and caring for an autistic nephew and a troubled mother, while struggling to making ends meet as a barista in a Huntsville, Alabama coffee shop. After all these years, she’s just starting to understand the coin’s potential power to rescue her and her family. Oz and Zaria might have continued along the same, purposeless trajectory, if it hadn’t been for Astronaut White’s tragic death in early 2008. Oz and Zaria both experience the same jarring sense of grief and misalignment following Carmen's passing. They realize that their lives have gone way off course and that they need to take action. Oz wants to find the coin and Zaria wants to hold onto it, but neither of them understands what they need to be happy. Even after her death, Carmen seems to influence the course of events, using the mysterious coin from outer space to help the ones who carry on her legacy.