Short Fiction | May 26, 2022

Homeless on Mars

by Jade Oates

The first light of day touches my eyelashes, and I pinch my face against the morning. I try to lay as still as a rock. I hold myself stiff and cling stubbornly to dark sleep. But like every day, I wake up as the sun rises in the sky and brace myself against this compelling force which has pulled me out of slumber once again. It is after noon. I crawl out of my sleeping bag and go to light a cigarette by the edge of my rock. 

I smoke Newports, to watch the smoke curling up into the sky. I like the sound of the lighter and the small crackle of the cherry when I inhale. I drink water in overwhelming amounts, letting it pour down my neck and hands and soak into my shirt. No one is around to see. I do not wash my feet for days and watch them become caked with dirt and red sand which makes walking feel softer. 

There is nothing here. 

It is deeply quiet.

If it were not for the darkness of night and the brightness of day, time would seem not to exist here at all. I too seem not to exist: I do nothing but breathe and listen. I am listening to the wind which blows with a soft howl through the crevices in the rock for days and nights at a time, and the sounds of falling pebbles which tumble sometimes from the cliffs and scatter on my sleeping bag. When I feel sad, I wrap my sleeping bag around myself like an enormous cloak and walk on the sand like a ghost haunting the desert, and howl with the wind. 

Tonight the sky is perfectly clear and I can stare up at a million stars–mesmerized. The night sky is more alive than this entire planet. I turn in circles beneath it and watch the way the stars seem to move in a swirling animated motion–and suddenly I understand Van Gogh, and then everything about that distant planet rushes back to me at once. I can see the white walls of museums of Earth’s cities and I can imagine the sunflower fields of the artist’s village in France which must look much like the sunflower fields of my own hometown humming with bees in the summer until they droop with the great sorrow of early Fall before the river begins to fill with fresh rain and rush with greater intensity. I would get off my bike then and start to take the car more often and put on a coat and wear socks and boots and spend more time in coffee shops and speak to people about films and go to parties and celebrate Christmas with decorations on a tree and meet my cousin’s new baby. 

But I do not have seasons here, and I have not remembered planet Earth in a long time. Looking out into space I feel the immensity of distance. I pick a star glittering in the sky and imagine that might be Earth and I long for it more than I have ever longed for anything. I call to it all night with sorrowful howls, and fall down at last as the sun begins to rise, relieving from vision the object of my longing. 

Collapsed on the red sands, I nuzzle into the sun-warmed soil. But the sun’s heat is powerful, beating down upon me. I pull handfuls of soil over my body, to protect myself from the blazing rays. I burrow deeper until I am covered by the warm red dirt, held by it in a warm cradle. I like the feeling of the weight on top of me and the gravity beneath me, which makes me feel held on all sides. In this dark warmth, I am cradled at last as I was cradled in the womb. I am touched everywhere by the red dirt and take pleasure in feeling it beneath my nails and in my nostrils. I think that I will sleep this way for a long time.

But I am seduced by dreams of plants sprouting from beneath my fingernails. The dirt cakes onto my skin as it used to cake on the soles of my feet when I lived above ground. As sweat beads on my skin it collects the red dirt and sand in little beads like tiles until my body becomes a mosaic of martian soil. I glow warmly when I find I am completely scaled in Mars. 

And then I no longer want to lay still as a stone: dirt-adorned, I come alive. Slick in my martian scales, I burrow deeper, pushing beyond my womb and sliding through the material of Mars like a serpent. My excitement causes Mars to stir, rocking me to even greater intensity.  I cleave through the soil–desperate to feel the marsquake again. I am electrocuted by the vibrations that I make, to move with still greater force, making even larger vibrations. Mars quakes and cracks around me and I am tumbling in it and pushing through it still. I make the quakes, over and over, bringing the whole planet to life. This seems like a good way to die, burying myself alive. Never have I been so alive. Rapturous, ravaging, wrestling rocks–I weave and wrap and slither, encircling the center tightly until the planet erupts with underground stars: Quartz glitter in the caverns around me–I become Mars. 

Now a crystalline egg broods in the womb left behind, alone and waiting, illuminating the underground with her expectant incandescence.