Rasp stared at the dark thing in the small tank in a formal dining room. The tendrils, thinner than a strand of hair floated in the water, sending small ripples of light that pulsed and shone. He was supposed to be setting the table with plates. The house robot told him so. Plates like from The Before, shining and white with small chips on the edges, a plastic cup with words faded from washings. But the memory slipped through the cracks as he dipped a finger into the tank.
The tendrils brushed his finger, sending throbs of pain into his shoulder. A memory of being alone with a boy in a closet, and friends screaming with laughter outside and the boy saying, “Should we just kiss to make them stop?” This fear of his hands, and this fear of his lips, and the thud of someone bouncing against the door. Looking down, down and seeing chipped fingernail polish and small hands and realizing that this memory was not his, but someone else’s, and that she was alone here, and he was alone here. The gold shag carpeting in the closet smelled like cigarettes and carpet cleaner and the boy leaned in, his braces cutting his lips and cheap cologne evaporating into the hot closet, choking her. Choking Rasp.
And he was back in the dining room, the plates still stacked on the table, the forks still in a tangled pile in the middle. A tan, short man in a lab coat stood in the doorway, leaning his forehead against the frame.
“What did you see?” The man in the lab coat looked at his fingernails.
Rasp hesitated, embarrassed that he was afraid.
“Well?”
“I don’t really know.” Rasp picked up the plates and started centering each one in front of each spindly chair.
The man in the lab coat pressed his fingertips to the back of his own ear, where a bare glint of silver caught the soft yellow light.
“Alona, come here. It’s playtime.”
Light from the circular windows soaked the room in amber. The sun was so faint here on Mars, the air so syrupy and yellow. Not like the rigs that hurtled across the sun’s face, filling the craft with blazing white every six hours or so, despite the thick UV windows. All the men wound in their blankets, sleeping in sunglasses, squares of light sliding across the black lenses.
The Marsborne woman who kissed him strode into the room, the furred creature trotting behind her, swatting at a loose thread on her green gown. A single stone glinted at her throat, and her teeth seemed sharper as she smiled at him. She approached him, standing inches from his face. He wanted to touch her body under the gown.
She took the plates from his hands and bent over to kiss him on the top of the head. He reached for her waist, but she swatted his hand away. Her face seemed older than before, with minute creases around her eyes and spots on her hands. The doors to the room slid shut, and a bolt hissed across it. She drew out a syringe tipped with a shining black needle. Pain flooded behind his eyes as her thumb rested against his temple.
The tendrils in the tank began to thrash and stretch toward her from the tank, frothing the water around it. Rasp felt wetness creep into his synth boots, and he looked down. The floor was covered with a gray liquid that seeped from the corners of the room. The Marsborne man crawled on top of the dining table and swept his fingers through the rising water. The liquid rose, lifting the furniture. Plasticine cups, scraps of paper, dog bones, women’s panties, and Shine cream cartons bobbed around Rasp’s waist. Panic swelled in his chest. He couldn’t swim. Swimming was not careening through the curve of space untouched, unstopped. Water crushed houses and filled lungs, not with nothing, but until your brain burned and you sank. He lashed into the water toward the table, but Alona twisted his tunic around her fist and jerked him back toward her. He slipped backwards, feeling the liquid touch his face. He flailed against the cold, opaque tide. Something muscular and cold brushed against his leg. The tank that held the tendrils was empty.
Alona wound her limbs around him and pushed him below the surface, pressing her fingertips against his throat. She had no eyes, no mouth. A tendril caressed his temple before piercing the skin under his hairline with needle proboscises, and the closet memory consumed him again. The gold shag carpet pressed against the backs of his (her?) thighs while the acrid smell of saliva filled her nostrils. The boy (Andy? Brady? Joseph?), touched her at the base of her throat, and the door swung wide letting bright light flood the space. Shapes floated behind the light, shimmering like stones underwater. A woman taller than a signal spire emerged and reached down to take She-Rasp’s collar, sliding her sharpened fingernails across her face until there was nothing left to be afraid of. And the moon, before it was broken, sat thick and full behind the woman’s feathered hair.
Rasp was himself as soon as the needle pulled from his head; he felt it pop from the skin on his temple. The gray liquid retreated around him, and the mass of tendrils floated in its tank. Alona wrapped his head in her arms and pressed him against her collarbone. His body felt strange. His muscles ticked and gathered around his right eye. The Marsborne man picked up debris around the room, placing it all on the long table in the center. Alona motioned at him. She only had four fingers on each hand, each one tipped with an eggshell-blue fingernail.
“Bring him something to drink, Pai, he’s thirsty.”
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And he was thirsty. So thirsty that his tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, and his throat scratched with each breath.
Pai picked up one of the cups on the ground and poured amber liquid into it from a fist-sized bag in his chest pocket. He pressed it into Rasp’s hand and began picking up odds and ends that had settled on the floor around them.
“What did you see?” Pai asked.
Alona waved him away.
“He’s tired Pai. Let him rest for just a minute.”
Rasp gulped at the amber liquid and for a moment he felt better. Better than better. The liquid coursed through his veins. His heartbeat slowed and warmth wrapped around his torso. The lights above him softened and Alona’s hands were cool on his skin.
“I wasn’t me, and it wasn’t here. I think it was a long time ago.”
Alona scratched his back and wrapped him tighter in her thin arms. She smelled like wet cloth.
“Go on, Rasp.” Pai stared off into the foyer.
“I was a girl, and there was boy. And they were laughing, but I didn’t hear any jokes.”
Alona twirled his hair around her four fingers. Pai nodded.
“And the thing they do in soft pornos, but also sometimes mothers did in The Before, with their mouths against someone else’s mouth, and sometimes we do it on the rigs.” Rasp searched for the word.
“Kissing?” Alona pulled back from him to look in his eyes.
“Yeah.”
Pai paced around the room, picking up bits of debris.
“The mechs can do that,” Alona said.
“Why did you do that to me?” Rasp looked at the tendrils in the tank.
Alona petted his hair. “I was only playing.”
“Well, I didn’t like it.”
Pai spoke from across the room. “It’s part of your Rejuvenation. We are providing you insight to be more efficient, more grateful, and more compliant in your current position.”
“Why, though?”
“To be happier.” His tone belayed the faintest irritation.
A chime sounded from the foyer, long and hollow. Alona slapped her palm over Rasp’s mouth. Pai slipped off his sodden golden slippers and drew in his breath.
“It’s probably nothing,” Pai whispered. “We worked out the kinks.”
The lights in the room flickered and a small voice piped in over the speakers hidden around the room. At first it just breathed, and then it rasped, “I see you.” Darkness like a dust cloud enveloped the room. The wet rugs squelched under the pressure of something unseen. Something unheard.
The alarms went off and the mechs rammed against the door. Alona’s fingers tightened under his nose, the smell of burning grass permeating from her hand. The sound of water in the tank lapping against the glass. The pressure of Alona’s palm against his lips. Grinding teeth. Heartbeat. Something brushed against his lower back, something small and cold.
Alona’s nails dug into his cheek. Her hair brushed the top of his head, the smell of singed hair clinging to her. He could not hear a heartbeat from her chest.
A garment rustled behind him and a pattering of the thing – or the not thing – echoed around the silent room. Someone leaned over behind him. Images of mother with huge breasts hanging, images of black hair streaming over his chest, a smile with teeth the color of raw oil, palms bigger than a helmet, the sun shining through the closet door, baring the dusty jackets and a rusting file cabinet. His tongue torn in half, leaking iron into his throat. A moon unbroken, holding deep wells of rustling children, begging him at the very top of the well for just a drop. A drop of sweat from his fingertips. But he was wearing his spacesuit.
And dark became black and Alona was ripped away from him. Her scream was short. More a squeal than a scream.
The lights came back suddenly, and Rasp was alone. No sign of Pai or Alona. His cheek burned from Alona’s nails raking across his face. He sat with his legs sprawled in front of him like a child in the wetness, blinking against the light. Numb. Something crouched in the seat at the head of the long table. The tank that held the tendrils sloshed, empty.
“You want to hear a joke?” He half-yelled at the thing at the head of the table.
“A JOKE,” the thing echoed back in his own voice.
“A man was washing his car with a sponge. No, wait. I got it backwards. Let me try again.”
“TRY AGAIN.”
“A man was washing his car with his son.”
The thing reared an appendage up over the table. The limb was slender and flaccid. It curled around the light fixture, pulling so tight that its skin became translucent and the skin flakes cracked off in a snow of dry gray onto the white plates. The smell of engine oil and wet dog crowded the room. A primal urge to tear at the thing until it lay in wet pieces on the table tugged at the back of Rasp’s mind. He squeezed his eyes shut and reached for the punchline. His voice was thick in his throat.
“And the boy said, ‘can we use the sponge next time?’”
Rasp barely remembered cars.
The thing poured its mass onto the table and slid closer to Rasp. Its body was made of infinite eyes. Insect eyes. Dog eyes. Human eyes. Fish eyes. Tiny black-feathered wings slipped in and out of the gelatinous mass, beating away at the still air. Loose cone-shaped teeth drifted around under the transparent torso. The gray-skinned limb unwound from the light fixture and slithered toward Rasp’s face. He was frozen there, sprawled on the wet floor, clutching at the fabric of his shirt, wanting to bite, to run, to be away from this place.
The limb rested on his jaw, cool and muscular. Rasp was no longer Rasp. There was no more Mars. There was only a sunlit bedroom with a frilly pink bedspread and a closet stuffed with plastic-wrapped gowns. Tributes to an unhappy life. A heavy wooden television with black dials squatted in front of the bed. Photographs of the dead lined the walls, all of them skewed slightly right, glowing faces nested in sepia.
A tall woman with black hair swept back from her face burst through the door and jerked the bedspread off the bed. Her face curled in displeasure.
“You are too old for this crap,” she hissed.
“I didn’t mean to.” Rasp found himself whispering through the mouth crowded with unfamiliar teeth.
“It’s disgusting. You already started your period. Wetting the bed is for babies.”
Rasp did not know what a period was.
The woman kicked a laundry hamper through the door and dumped the bedding into it. A swirl of dust motes kicked up into the sunny bedroom.
“Are you having sex with that neighbor boy?”
“No, mother!”
“Why can’t you stop pissing on everything then?”
Mother gathered the basket with a sharp breath and swung it into the door to open it. The hallway behind her was just blackness multiplied into itself. Exponents of nothing. And mother was gone.
The Martian dining room came back into focus. Rasp felt the largeness of his body, the hair on his face and his lean chest, and breathed out. Wetness from the floor soaked into his jumpsuit. The being was gone. Pai and Alona were gone. For the first time in his life, Rasp was alone.