I never knew
too much about things like artificial atmospheres and fake gravity, things like
liquid diet rations, pissing into a tube, and ‘deep sleep’, or things like
ghosts…
I grow corn on
a ship, hurdling at ninety-nine percent the speed of light. The only reason I know that? It was in the brochure.
Slip, that’s
what they call me on the ship. Dad calls
me Sprout. I don’t care for either one,
but we’ve been going so long, flying so far, I can’t remember my real name
anymore, not that it would even matter.
We’ve got another eight years before we’re back on Earth. I’ve got time.
I heard, once,
things get funny when you’re in space too long.
I heard about guys walking out an airlock, thinking they’re stepping out
onto their front lawn, sidewalk, whatever, when, really, their skin
crystallizes and all the gases, liquids, and all the body’s juices shoot
through their eyes like a ketchup bottle squeezed too tight. But, as I said, what do I know? I just grow the corn.
I grew up
outside Chicago, working in my Grandaddy’s field, alongside my Pap, pulling
weeds with my bare hands. Pap says
that’s what God made ‘em for, for pulling weeds. Did that for about three years ‘til one
really hot summer, Grandpa cooked us supper, let the dog out, then went to bed
and didn’t wake up again. He was colder
than a flagpole in January when me and Pap found him. After that, some deep space trading company
bought up the farm and Grandaddy’s back acres, and roped me and my Pap into one
of their ‘long’ routes. Pap used to say
it was the least they could do. If not,
we’d ‘a been out on our asses and Pap was much too proud a man to let something
like that happen to his family, especially when he could do something about
it. Anyway, Pap talked mom into coming
along too, not that he had to pull her arm too hard or nothin’. She loved us, her boys. I think it would have killed her to be
without us for sixteen years, eight there, wherever it was they were throwing
us, and eight back to Earth.
At first, Mom
complained about stomach cramps, and she didn’t eat too much either, maybe once
a week, if that. It made Pap nervous,
concerned, and he talked her into seeing the ship’s Doc after a few weeks.
Turned out, her
gut’d been eaten up by cancer, something wicked, just completely hollowed out
most of her insides like a carved up pumpkin.
The Doc said he’d never seen anything like it, thought space might have
made it work faster, nuking her like a microwave. Doc also said the human body, it wasn’t made
for space, no matter how you played it.
Either way, he was right. She
didn’t make it two months. Passed
quietly, she did, without a goodbye.
The Captain
wanted to pop her body out an airlock but Pap wouldn’t have it, said he
wouldn’t have his wife thrown away like space trash. He buried her, instead, in the soil in the
Dome, the ship’s mid-section, where we grew the crops and most of the ship’s
food stuffs. Wasn’t ‘economical’ to fill
the ship’s hold with enough food to feed ten guys for sixteen years. Made it mandatory we grow what we eat. Made sense, even to a guy like me who didn’t
get much farther than the eighth grade.
It busted Pap
up for weeks, though, Mom’s death. He
cried so hard, so often, he had no voice.
He had these hitching fits where his body would shake, snot and tears
pouring down his face. I couldn’t watch
it. I mean, I tried, but after a while,
it just got too hard. You can only watch
a grown man, your Pap, suck for air because he’s blubbering like a suffocating
fish so many times before you say to yourself, I just can’t watch this anymore, can’t do it. So, that’s what I did. I stopped.
It’s funny, but maybe that was part of the problem. This man once hand-wrestled a cow to the
ground while hungover as shit, but now he can’t stop crying long enough to eat.
He started
disappearing before too long. Nobody
knows where he went. I got my guesses. But, he wouldn’t show up to water the crops
or check the irrigation lines and nutrition dispensers for the soil. The way it works, he and I take shifts, me at
‘night’ and Pap during the day. I say
‘night’ because it’s always sunny in the Dome.
It’s like New York City at New Years, all the time.
So, it’s not
like I’d caught him slacking. I
couldn’t. We didn’t work together,
ever. Well, sure, we crossed paths now
and again, but like I said, he’d been doing a lot of disappearing acts, so even
that stopped. But, I knew he’d been
doing it, or rather, not doing it when, we started losing whole acres of
crops. Whole fucking acres! This isn’t like back home, on Earth, where a
guy can lose his lot and write it off.
Here, when we lose a crop, somebody ain’t eatin’, simple as that.
I went to the
steel closet hutch, near the Dome’s crew quarters, at the back of the corn
field after testing the irrigation lines one day, and saw Pap, just sitting
there on the bench inside beneath the humming fluorescent bulb hoods. The room reeked of sweat and bitter, humid
body odor. He had this quiet, sour look
on his face, just lost. He stared
off. If he knew I was in the room, he
made no indication. He just sat, hands
entwined, eyes unblinking.
“Pap?” I asked,
putting my tool belt into my locker then shutting it. The hinges squeaked, grinding rust and metal
into little flakes that fell to the grated floor.
He looked up at
me, like he didn’t recognize me, at first, then he smiled for just a moment,
half-assed, before looking back down at his folded hands; lost again.
I sat down
beside him and wrapped my arm around his shoulder.
“When was the
last time you ate, Pap?” I asked, giving him a good squeeze, feeling his bony
shoulders and spine. The artificial gravity
was playing hell with his muscular system, especially without any food to
strengthen it back up. “Feels, to me,
like you’re wastin’ away to skin and bones.
Mom would-”
“Sprout,” he
said, interrupting me. He removed my
hand from his shoulder and stood, walked over to his locker and stopped, facing
it. “Do you know what happens to a
person’s soul when they die out here, on a ship, in dark space?” he asked. He reached for the locker handle and held it,
waiting for my answer.
“Pap, you
gotta’ stop this,” I said. “The Captain,
the crew, they all think you’re a couple marbles short of a jug, and I’d wager
they may be on to something, what with all the times no one can find you. Let’s get you back to work, get things back
to normal. That’s what you used to say;
hard work does the body good. We’ve lost
another lot this morning, prolly another on its way out tomorrow. We need normal right now.”
He looked up at
the ceiling and I could almost hear him smiling, though I couldn’t see his
face.
“Normal,” he
said, on the verge of a good ole laugh.
He lifted the handle to his locker and eased it open. “Tell me, Sprout, did the good boys from the
bridge send you down here to talk to me?
Did they beg you to make a
lick of sense from what I’ve been doing?
Let me tell you something right now.
There aint’ nothin’ wrong, boy-o.”
“Pap,” I said,
standing from the bench, reaching out to him.
“Nobody sent me down here for you.
I got no clue where this is coming from.
I’m worried about you, is all.
It’s been three months. You
gotta’ let her go. The grieving’s
killing you.”
He laughed and
reached inside his locker and I heard him lift something heavy from the tool
hook inside.
“Grief?” he
asked. “This isn’t grief anymore,
Sprout. No, my boy, this is beyond that
now. I can see it. I did see it,” he said, turning around,
holding a chrome hatchet with a rubber-reinforced grip. He twisted it around in his hand, testing its
weight. “I saw it.”
He took a step
toward me, glaring at me, and I bumped into the bench behind me, falling onto
my ass on its seat. I gulped, nervous,
and I could feel my palms, greasy with sweat.
This man, it wasn’t my Pap.
“Out here,” he
said, looking down on me, hatchet in hand.
He licked his bottom lip, staring through me. “In this endless void, it’s got nowhere to
go, the soul. It lingers for too long,
doing nothing, vulnerable, becoming something else entirely. I don’t know what. Don’t much matter what it is, not to me. Evil, I suppose, if you had to guess. But, I don’t care, Sprout. I don’t care.” He stuffed the handle of the hatchet into his
toolbelt and made sure it was secure.
“It’s not getting me, and it sure as hell ain’t getting you or the crew.”
It’s funny,
looking at him while he stood there, prepping to do whatever it was he had
planned to do, the only thing I could think about was the first time we’d
rolled a cigarette together, underneath the oak tree on my Grandaddy’s front
lawn. I couldn’t get it just right, and
when I gave up, he licked the rolling paper, twisted the ends, then rubbed his
knuckles on my head with a laugh, fingers smelling like sweet, cherry-scented
tobacco.
“Pap, go see
the Doc, please!” I begged. “You look like
you’re a stone’s throw away from falling apart.”
“There’s
something I gotta’ do first, Sprout, then everything will be okay again. Then we can go back to normal, eh?” He smiled.
I felt helpless
as I watched him leave the hutch, holding the handle of the hatchet, dangling
from his belt, as he walked. Anger,
white-hot, burned in my gut and I felt tears building in the corners of my
eyes. My chest hitched, and for a
moment, I thought I might be the blubbering fish, sucking for air for a change. I held my breath and let it pass, and I
waited, thinking about my Mom, my Pap. I
know it hurt. I’d hurt too. I read somewhere that people handle death
differently, and maybe that were true, I mean, it had to be, right? Look at my Pap. He’d taken something, something strange, and
he’d ran with it like a Bear’s halfback in a sweet vanilla offense.
Later that day,
on my way to lunch, I saw him standing on the edge of the cornfield, staring
down a row of stalks, hatchet in his hands.
He gripped it, afraid, and I thought I’d heard him talking, not in
English, words sharp and menacing. It
rattled my spine and my blood ran cold.
I got goosebumps as I watched him, talking to nothing, whispering to the
field. He started yelling, the cords in
his neck bulging, surging, screaming at the corn stalks.
I took a deep
breath and clenched my jaw, wincing as Pap shouted louder, waving the hatchet
now, above his head, gesturing with his free hand at something I couldn’t see.
Before I could
talk him down or reach out to him, like a son ‘prolly should do, like he would
have done for me, he’d disappeared into the field, corn leaves flapping behind
him, cackling like a riled jackal.
I considered
running in after him for a moment, but him with a hatchet in whatever state he
was in, it sounded like a bad shake.
Instead, I headed to the cafeteria, hoping this hold on my Pap would run
its course, leaving him the man he was in the start, before Mom died, and he’d
be back in the crew quarters by the time I’d get done fixing the broken belt in
the west acre. I’m tellin’ you, it
didn’t turn out that way, no matter how much I sit here, amongst the broken
piping and leaking hydraulics, wishing it couldn’t have gone the way that it
did. But, a good friend of mine used to
say, ‘if wishes were horses, bums would ride’.
So, where’s my fucking saddle?
It was probably
two weeks after I’d seen him, Pap, charging into the cornfields with the
hatchet. Things had settled. He’d gotten back to his routine, ya’ know,
testing the nutrition dispensers for degradation, maintaining the water purity
levels, regular stuff. He’d even gotten
his appetite back and started putting some fat back on them bones, really
fillin’ himself back out. He was comin’
around, and I even caught him smiling now and again, though he’d never admit it
if you called him out on it.
That particular
day, he’d spent about two hours trying to get pump one unclogged. Some topsoil had gone soft and wedged itself
something fierce in into the filter, and it wasn’t budging for shit. He called it a day, figuring I could get it
at night. My hands were smaller, and I
was the only one who could fit into the line if I couldn’t get it topside. I remembered seeing him head to the cafeteria
to grab some supper when I was walking to the pump hatch, putting on my
toolbelt as I did. I went in, clean as a
whistle, came out stinkin’ like ten-year-old shit and sludgy mold, but I got
that bitch unclogged, sure did. Took me
a couple hours too, but the only other things that needed doing weren’t at the
top of the list, so I figured I’d grab me a shower before I got back to it.
I’d gone into
the crew quarters to grab a fresh pair of pants and a shirt before I headed to
the bathroom when Pap threw open the bulkhead hatch and slammed it shut behind
him with a hollow clang, planting his back against it, looking like he’d just
gone toe-to-toe with the devil himself.
Sweat streamed down his forehead and cheeks, pooling into the collar of
his shirt, soaking it a darker color the size of a dinner plate, and I wasn’t
sure, but it looked like he had bloodstains on his hands.
He struggled
for breath, looking around the room, eyes darting back and forth like
typewriter ribbons.
I ran to him
and pulled his hands out, palm open.
“Jesus, Pap! You’re bleeding,” I said.
He yanked his
hands back from me.
“It ain’t
mine,” he said, turning around and twisting the bulkhead lock clockwise,
securing it. He backed away from the
door, panting like a dog still, ruffling the small amount of hair on his head.
He spun around,
remembering I was in the room, and grabbed my shoulders, shoving me back
against a shelving unit on the far wall, rocking it on its teeny legs.
I stared into
his empty eyes, scared shitless, and I couldn’t tell, but I might have shit
myself.
“It was gone,
but now it’s back, Sprout. I thought I’d
killed it, rammed a hatchet right through its skull, spilling its brains all
over the dirt, but God-damnit all, it’s back.”
He reached behind me, grabbing something with some weight from the
shelf, and handed it to me.
I looked down
at his offer, a hammer.
“God can’t see
us way out here, boy, here, where real and not real, I think, are one and the
same. I believe the soul, it’s a portal,
boy-o. When it’s got nowhere to go, it
opens. I don’t know much about heaven or
hell, but what I do know is that something’s out there and-”
Something
screeched, like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard, on the bulkhead hatch. Pap turned, listening to the squeal snake
along the door, weaving along the outside of the crew quarters. When it stopped, he looked at me, the color
in his face gone.
My heart
quickened, heat building behind my cheeks while sweat rolled down the back of
my neck. I didn’t know it, but I’d
started shivering.
Pap flung me
aside, knocking buckets and boxes off the shelf, searching. He stopped, grabbing a tin of rat poison, for
the small little stowaways we’d find from time to time. He slammed the tin into my chest and waited
for me to grab it.
When I did, he
said, “Pour some of that into the vent, there.”
He pointed at the vent covering over my bed.
I held it up,
looking it over, hesitant. A clang
echoed from the other side of the vent, where the thing let out no doubt. Something was scrambling through the vent’s
track, following it.
“You wanna’
wait ‘til that thing is munching on the black stuff in your gut, the stuff that
never sees sunlight, before you start dumping that shit, Sprout?” he asked.
I stared at the
vent cover, hands shaking, the liquid in the tin shifting back and forth,
frothing inside.
Pap tore it
from my hands, along with the hammer, and buried the teeth of the hammer’s head
into the vent cover, prying it open and throwing it to the floor. He plucked the tin’s lid off with his mouth
and turned it upside down. The dark
liquid chugged out in thick waves and I heard a shrill scream from inside the
duct. I ducked, covering my ears with my
hands, screaming out while the shrill scraped the inside of my ears.
I saw Pap fall
back, tin flying through the air, bouncing along the floor, leaving a trail of
dark poison behind. He crashed, skidding
along on his back. I looked up at the
vent duct and my stomach dropped, tears swelling in my eyes. The air sucked out of my lungs and for a
moment, I was dizzy. What I saw defied
everything I’d ever known, and I still doubt from time to time what I’d seen.
It looked like
Mom, but the skin on her face sagged away from the bone, her eyes shriveled
like rotted raisins. Piss colored juices
bubbled out through rips in her moldy, rotted skin. She smiled, black, oily slime dripping over
her lips and down her chin, and she waved before slithering back into the duct,
hiding back in the darkness within.
The ammonia sting
in the air from the poison burned my eyes and throat as I crawled over to Pap,
making sure he was still breathing. He
lay there, staring at the duct.
“It lingered
too long,” he said, over and over. He
looked at me as I sprawled up onto my knees, leaning over him. “God can’t see us out here, Sprout. He can’t help,” he said, grabbing my collar. He sat up and pushed himself up onto his feet
with a grunt.
“Stay here,” he
said, kissing my forehead. “Whatever
happens, don’t come out there. Not if
I’m screaming, not if I’m pleading for you to let me in. Whatever I say, you CANNOT open that
door. Got me?”
I nodded,
feeling like that boy back on the farm, looking up to his Pap.
He smiled and unlocked
the bulkhead hatch.
“Lock this
behind me,” he said. He smiled and
slammed it behind him.
I ran, locked
it, then slumped to the floor beside the hatch, burying my face into my hands. Funny things happen in space, I thought to
myself. It could have been my brain
playing tricks on me, funny shapes in the reflections of steel and casings and
all that shit, right? What the hell was
going on?
I sat, waiting,
tapping me feet on the floor, working through the nerves. Hours passed, yet I stayed put, waiting for
my Pap to come, to open the hatch and tell me everything would be okay, that
Earth was just around the corner. My
ears popped and it felt like I was a hundred feet underwater, pressure shoving
me down against the floor. Blood
trickled down my cheeks, dripping from my ears and it felt like someone was
squeezing my eardrums. When it finally
stopped, I stood, hoping Pap would come inside any second. When he didn’t, I opened the hatch and
covered my mouth with my hand.
Whole lots of
crops were missing, barren stretches left, ripped up from the soil, like a
tornado had whirled through, tossing entire dirt tracks all over the dome. Stalks flittered through the air like
snowflakes. Nutrition dispensing pipes
jutted up from the torn dirt tracks like broken bones poking through flesh. On the ground, a long trail of field soil
stretched from the field’s edge to the forward airlock, where the emergency
shutter had slammed shut, sealing it tight.
Pap had opened
it, and hadn’t escaped the suction himself.
I stood there,
looking around the dome, just as lost as Pap was that first day.
I lied to the
Captain, saying Pap had accidentally triggered the airlock on a maintenance
check. He would have wanted it that way,
I think.
We’re a few
days out from our destination now, and we’ve still got a long way to go before
we’re home again. I don’t know what’ll
be there, waiting for me, and sometimes I even forget what Earth looks like. It’s funny; space has a way of doing that to
a guy. As I write this, I’m having a
hard time even remembering what Mom and Pap were like, and I have this urge to
go outside, like an itch you just gotta’ scratch.
Maybe that’ll
change when we get planetside, maybe it won’t.
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