GG Kasenova

Madina Kasenova worked the trajectory calculations from an Almaty institute, travelling out to the pad for the launches that mattered, and retired from the control room into part-time teaching. Her husband is a poet who calls her style romance-free backgammon. She has beaten him eight hundred and forty-one times, a figure she can produce by date from a file begun in 1998 for reasons she has never adequately explained. He has won sixty-three. He does not dispute the numbers and has written two poems about them, one of which she liked. Nobody else in the family is permitted to see the file. She has calculated, unprompted, how many more he would need and what rate that implies, and she has told him.