Eric DePriester

“How was it,” he yawns.
“Amazing,” I say. “There’s this boiling ocean of gold.”
“Of course.”
“And I’ve never seen crabs that tall.”
“Right.”
“Intelligent, too. They had this sign language—”
“How’d they taste?”
“Well. We didn’t eat them.”
“Oh? We were in San Sebastián last summer, and…”

***

I walk out my door and down a street I’ve walked a thousand times, feeling the eyes and edge more than ever before: the unwelcome energy.
Last week, I strolled the Martian wild without care or concern. Guided by the glow of a dock full of pleasure cruisers, I floated along ruby ridgeways, past self-aware sand sculptures, and through blue fern rainforests. Then, I fell fast asleep on a rock-hard cot, safe and happy and home.

***

“I’d live there if I could,” I say.
“Why don’t you?” she says.
“I don’t know what I’d do. Teach?”
“Why not?”
“English is a minority language.”
“Work one of the cruises.”
“I’m not qualified to be a guide.”
“Mine plutonium.”
“Hm.”

***

My hand lingers in the freezer, fingers bent between a bag of peas and the ice tray, and the cold ripples through me, returning me to a glacier bay flanked by two-story high centipede skeletons, the rush of leaping out the boat and into the water, the flood of frozen death and a panicked swim for life, the ladder out and into a warm towel, a cup of cocoa and liqueur, a last look at alien abyss.

***

He slaps his camera. “Come on, come on.”
I gulp my drink.
“Wait, wait.” Beep. “Christ, I’d kill myself if this stopped working.”
“What?”
“Why even go?” He thumbs past sand-tsunamis and convex caverns.
“Beautiful.”
He stops at a long-bearded man. “Recognize him?”
“ZZ Top?”
“The one and only. Well, one of them, I don’t remember which. But on our ship, staying right down the hall. Can you believe it?”
“Wow.”
“I’ll say.”

***

She’s talking Texas, and I can’t care.
After you’ve sailed across space, traversed blood-red dust dunes, inhaled the infamous vapored waters, and eaten barbecued Kol-lak-tu, a crossbreed of apricot, spinach, and guinea pig—
It’s all dirt—even Austin.

***

“The goose-spiders,” I wax, “they’d let you get as close as could be, closer than you’d want to be, and squawk and spin their feather-webs like you weren’t even there. Or if they did see you, they were curious, almost like a welcoming committee. No fear, no reason to see humans as a threat.”

“We’ll teach them,” he says.

***

It’s the same post-vacation hangover, something I’ll shake in a week; I never moved to Portugal. Mars was a trifle, a temporary life free of daily toil, of course it was charming and grand and a near infinite existence, everything I want except my dog.

Are dogs allowed in space?

***

“It’d be better with someone,” I say.
“Is that an offer?” she says.
“The dating pool is pretty shallow.”
“And that’s a lot of space to be alone.”
“Exactly.”
“You should put that in your profile.”
“Looking for a partner to pioneer Mars.”
“Eh.”
“Might land better in person.”

***

There are no cuisines or customs to integrate, the scenery impossible to replicate in any way, the experience so far from normal that I can’t misappropriate a thing, no new habits or thought patterns that could weather the crush of Earth.

I look at photos, smile, think, “What a lovely trip,” and turn back to bland madness.

***

“What’s the attraction?” I wane.
“Stop,” she says.
“If you want Denmark, go to Denmark. This is like Disneyland.”
“People love Disneyland.”
“We can’t look at decorative windmills all day.”
“We can get a glass of wine or a Danish.”
“A person?”
“A pastry.”
“That sounds fine.”

***

“We have to go back,” I say:
To myself in parking lots, past strangers in weed dispensaries, near anyone named Jack or Kate, over photos I don’t recognize.
I have to go back.

***

Boots crunch and slide through frozen dust. Towering ferns scrape the milky sky. Ahead honks a goose-spider, and another, and a brattle-bamble sings. Firemelons flower with sticky-sweet ripeness, just this side of rotten. In the distance, jagged crags of ice and Earth with some crimson mystery atop, all alit in the moonlight. A warm breeze wraps around me, fresh and foreign, awakens me.

I open my eyes.

Eric DePriester lives in Los Angeles. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The 34th Parallel, and Five on the Fifth, among other publications. His feature film “Treason” was released in 2020, and his short film “Composure” in 2022.