“Humankind” by Maria Poulatha
"We really do drink filtered urine in space. But only our own."
I’m a lifelong sci fi and spec fic reader, so this story was immediately up my alley. As an absolute sucker for subtle worldbuilding, I was enamored with the little background details, the way we get hints of a world in trouble. Most of all I loved the claustrophobia of two people stuck together in a spaceship so far from home is so good. The petty and occasionally cruel ways these two trapped characters poke at each other is so human, might even feel familiar to anyone who’s been stuck in a terrible roommate or coworker situation.
But where this story really got me is the slow transformation from an antagonistic relationship to a loving one, the way the two finally embrace each other because they’re all they really have. In the world we find ourselves in today isn’t that a lesson that we keep learning over and over, that all we really have is each other?
—Jessica Dawn
Asst. Editor, Short Story, Long
“Humankind”
I tend to my rose with the devotion and precaution of a lion tamer. Sasha looks on with scorn, a speck of sauce pooling in the left crease of his mouth, a speck the size of a sunflower seed. I want to lick it off his face, not because I want to lick his face but because it is the last drop of sauce in our ample stretch of universe and it is carelessly, tauntingly, resting on his face instead of in my mouth.
I exhale, hold my breath, and slowly lift the glass dome above my rose. Then I inhale. She is divine. Almost otherworldly. Sometimes I wish I had chosen a potato plant instead, a living thing that swells underground, skulks in the earth, a thing that I could sink my fingers into, curl around and clench like a lover’s member in the dark. I sigh and inject 2oz. of H2O near the roots of my rose and replace the dome. When I think he is not looking, I kiss the glass cover.
*
We really do drink filtered urine in space.
But only our own.
*
It is a sure thing that orbits, a predictable thing, even in vast spaciousness. I follow no orbit, that invisible trail, the cinched belt that designates the seasons, the tomorrows. A predetermined route identifies and shapes you, but I am weightless and vague like all meandering things in the universe.
*
Everyone knows I had an affair with the custodian back at the labs. He had a thin mustache and an accent of unknown origin. I only knew that he was from Queens, NY and that was exotic enough for me. When I unzipped his jumpsuit in the recycling collection room, I discovered two different women tattooed onto his smooth chest. “Who are they?”
“Baby Mama,” he said, accenting the last A, “and Mama.”
The Baby Mama had long legs and breasts like melons placed high on a grocery shelf. His Mama was just a floating head with eyes narrowed in a protective scowl as if she were straddling her litter. I hissed back at her and stretched open his Jockeys. “This is good,” I said, as I worked my way into the bulging bundle.
“You make it do good,” he muttered and I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or a command but he moaned appreciatively. Around us, torpedoes were being mounted, rockets were firing, worlds were being discovered and I was coming loudly beside a pile of cardboard boxes that used to contain petri dishes with smooth unsullied agar.
When I told my husband, because it was the right thing to do, he found the custodian and punched him right above the polished mustache, because it was the right thing to do. “What is affair?” he protested, smoothing down the tips of his distressed facial hair. “We just do it three times behind ‘Organic Waste. ’ Up-standing.”
When you are a woman you call it an affair, a liaison, an intrigue, an involvement, something complex and consequential and intertwined with other elements on the physical and emotional plane. When all the other guys in this place do it, it is an occasion for a quick high-five, as inconsequential to the greater scheme of things as you dropping your keys through a gutter grate or rolling a good hand in craps.
My husband did not leave me then. He left me later, when I had an abortion. I told him about it immediately afterwards. It was only three months before lift-off.
*
I can’t stand the smell of Sasha. It is like grapes grown maudlin at the end of the season, vinegary and stale. Although I imagine that our smells have become one, like the smell of a family whose members lose their individual odors and share a common scent which they take with them wherever they go. It sickens me to smell what must be our mutual household odor.
If he were dead, I think, he would smell different.
*
I groom my rose with manicure tools and speak to her in soft cooing tones. I utter nonsense like Sweet Pea and Bunny and I pour adoration and affection onto her like precious sunbeams. I wish my ex-husband could see me now. He didn’t leave me because I aborted our child. “Actually,” he said, “I was relieved that you did. When I learned that you were pregnant, that you might become a mother, I panicked.”
Sasha wears a sneer. “You religious?” he grunts.
“Of course not,” I say. I am a scientist.
“That dome is like a shrine.”
“Well maybe it is.”
“So you are religious.”
“Not in the conventional manner.”
“There is only one manner,” he snorts.
“That is narrow thinking.”
He pokes me in the chest. “You are narrow to think you are above convention.”
I turn away from him and pretend I am unmoved but that night, as he sleeps, I pee into his urine collector.
*
The next morning, bleary-eyed, he reaches for his “toilet water” as I like to call it, and takes a sip. His sleepy eyes bulge and he spits out the liquid, creating thousands of transparent orbs that bob in space. He looks at me through the suspended golden shower with murderous rage. “How did you know?” I ask, my lips trembling to hold back laughter.
“I am a vegetarian, remember? Your piss tastes like dead pig. You taste like dead pig.”
“Is that what my piss tastes like? I thought it just tasted like piss.” And then I float away, to the toilet, to make more drink.
*
My rose was very beautiful today. Was it the light of the moon, making everything wet and silvery like the tender undersides of seals? A hot tear sprang from my eyes. I scooped it into my mouth and relished the salty tang.
*
“Honey, I’m home!”
Week 2. Sasha would come into the “kitchen” after changing a few light bulbs, cleaning the filters and polishing a few knobs and I would laugh. “Well, you just put your feet up while I stir you a drink,” I said as I fetched his bag of purified urine.
“Shaken, not stirred, darling.” He put his feet up, lounging without a lounger beneath him. These Russians love being Bond.
*
Last sunrise on earth: I rose at 4am to climb up Walton’s Peak and watch the sun rise between two reddened crags of limestone that looked like gigantic raw steaks. I had packed sandwiches to enjoy at the top but no one else made the climb with me, so I ate all five myself.
Here the sunrises come in waves and it reminds me of when I was little, trying to sleep in my pink room that was grey in the dark, and the hours passed and now and then a truck would drive by, projecting its headlights onto my dreamless bedroom wall.
I don’t want to see another sunrise ever again, I think. And then we fall out of grace. Which is to say, we fall out of orbit.
*
Our mission: Colonization.
Our desire: The prevention of human extinction.
The only thing we could really hope for is the postponement of human extinction but we were not allowed to say this to the group of third graders who waved bye-bye from a roped-off platform at the launch. Most of them held their parents’ expensive phones and one of them yanked his pants down and posed with his moon exposed and all of them clicked gleefully. Perhaps human extinction would not be so awful, I thought. In fact it could be the greatest gift to the universe. No more entitled brats. No more colonization. No more patriarchy. No more matriarchy. Only the lyrical hum of heavenly bodies swiveling uninterrupted through never-ending space.
I’ve heard astronomers say, “I just want to know if we’re alone.” As if eight billion is not enough, as if discovering more of us, aliens created in our image, will make the universe less vast, will fold it toward us like mirrors within a box.
So, yes, it was me. I made it all go wrong. I didn’t fudge it purposely, it was going wrong on its own. I just didn’t fix it when I could have. Months later, some will blame it on hormonal imbalance and they will argue once again against women and their capacity for space travel and some will say it was space fever or the effects of prolonged solitude. The tabloids will blame my infidelity and subsequent abandonment that left me in tatters. They will quote my therapist who will flippantly and expertly label me a narcissist. Who else but a narcissist would sign up for something like this?
*
I dropped some food near the oxygen vents. The food didn’t stick but it left a greasy smear and Sasha flashed a light onto it from different angles to display the full effect of the oily reflection. “Can’t you clean up after yourself?”
“I thought I did.”
“You thought you did?” He turns so that his light is flashing into my face. “You really think you can act on a hunch here? That you can you be so careless? Do you actually care about anything?”
“I don’t care about anything? How did you jump to that conclusion?” I clench a handle on the wall to look sturdy.
“Oh I know all about you. No wonder your husband left.”
“What? Because I’m not a good housewife?”
“Good wife,” he chortles. “Not even worth a trip to the recycling room.” He laughs uncontrollably and I cannot throw something at his head, can’t even slam a door behind me. So instead I smirk and say something I regret immediately. “You’re just jealous.”
*
Mars, Saturn, Neptune…
Even the heavens are colonized by male gods; war-mongering, triad-thrusting, child-eating, raping gods. One Venus amongst them, hot, blue and alluring. And then there’s Jupiter: dangling from the belt of the greatest of them all, bound and carried by his merciless pull—his lovers, his daughters, his victims and other unfortunate, unlawful offspring. How funny of the astronomers to tidy them all up, 79 of them, with the great mob daddy, the godfather of all licentious trespass.
Leda, Mneme, Europa, Sinope, Io…
Drag, little Sinope, claw away, irregular and retrograde, fiery little revolutionary and elusive love of the god. “Anything you wish!” he spouted, lust overflowing, “Tell me your greatest desire!”
“To remain a virgin.”
At least, daughters of Zeus, you have been seen. Imagine the endless droves of heavenly bodies, stretching out toward infinity, that have never been known, never gazed upon, never even wondered about. And may never be.
Do you pity them?
I envy them.
*
“Stop humming!” Sasha hollers.
“I wasn’t humming.”
“Yes you were. You always are.”
“I do not hum. I am just breathing deeply.”
“Then stop breathing!” His nostrils are flared with volatile gas and they look deep and dark and dangerous.
We are finished with our experiments, there is no more data to collect. Sasha still connects himself to electrodes to observe the waste of a body suspended here, like a chunk of pineapple in unnaturally tinted gelatin. “Useless information,” I tell him.
“Humans may have to live like this one day.”
“We are not human without Earth,” I say, looking out the window at the shrinking blue globe.
“Now you are a philosopher.” He removes his glasses and his eyes appear smaller, more menacing without them.
“Who would want to live like this? Useless! We are useless.”
And this is what does it for him. What makes him hate me more than piss in his drink.
*
“Urra!”
Week 4: Sasha performed a triple axel turn in the air and “landed” with majestic flourish, his palm upturned like he just served a tray full of overflowing champagne flutes. He used to be a figure skater back in Russia but was forced to quit because his family wanted him to be a scientist, but he won’t admit to this concession. He insists he had an ankle fracture that refused to heal.
I applauded enthusiastically, pretended to lift one of the champagne flutes and saluted him, “Za Vas!” like I was already drunk. He performed his favorite routine, the one he did to “Eye of the Tiger,” and this often lead to a mini dance party, me kicking and bucking line dances I’d learned in country western bars and Sasha hopping like a Cossack. When the third graders who followed our course asked to see how we pass our free time, Sasha put on “Eye of the Tiger” and performed his powerful routine with exceptional bravado and a grin so full of conceit that it overshadowed the glow of his invisible partner. The real partner must have despised that grin, that swashbuckling flourish after every manly twirl. “Urra!” he shouted.
“You mean, ‘Hurrah.’” I corrected. I did not applaud or pretend to have the hiccups from too much champagne.
He frowned and let his hands drop. “No, in Russian it is ‘urra.’”
“Whatever, Tiger.”
“Tiger?”
“Do you prefer Bear?”
His face twisted and the air of dejection quickly transmuted into a look of loathing.
*
I wake early, just to visit my rose. The bloom will not last much longer and I want to spend as much time with her as I can. But as soon as I exit my sleeping pod, I sense that something is wrong. My head bumps into her glass dome, floating empty and untethered like a bottomless bubble.
*
“How do you feel today?” asks the psychologist back home.
“I feel like ramming a screwdriver into his neck.”
“You feel sad.”
“No, I feel bitter. Furious, in fact. Irate. Incensed.”
“You feel loss. It’s natural. Don’t forget to do the things that bring you joy.” The resolution on the screen has decreased miserably and I can see the fat pixels that compose her. She is reduced to her basic cells, giant Lego blocks of mitochondria. Still, I can see the sky-blue kaftan she always wears and the drop of quartz suspended before her heart.
“My rose was the only thing that brought me joy. He destroyed it at the roots. Decimated it. Devoured it. He’s a cannibal.”
“It’s ok to grieve.”
“Is it ok to get satisfying revenge?”
“Channel your grief into something more productive.”
“I want to murder him. Are you listening?”
“There are many roads that lead to peace.”
“Is this a playback? Are you even there?!” I hit the screen a few times, make faces.
“One solution,” she pauses for effect, “is to try sex.” She is saying things like ‘surpasses any attempts at diplomacy, soothing for the body and mind, ease tensions,’ but I am furiously fumbling with the buttons to switch her off. She says something about birth control as the screen twitches before it goes dark. I look around to see if Sasha has heard anything, but he is still in the toilet, trying to poop into a vacuum.
There are two injections hidden away on board. Only HQ can release them if it is deemed necessary for the travelers to put a merciful end to their journey. Astronauts talk of ways to crack this container. I could penetrate him, gently, in his sleep.
You lose muscle mass in space, no matter how much you exercise. You also lose bone density and your limbs grow softer. I have taken to massaging mine, slowly, gently sculpting the forearm into a wide crescent. One day I will be able to hook myself to the ceiling or the wall without holding on. If I am diligent, I can transform my arms into wings, although they will be purely decorative. “I can sculpt your bones for you, too, if you like,” I say, imagining bending his limbs inward like a pill bug that rolls into itself and never unravels.
“You can massage this bone,” he says, thrusting his pelvis toward me.
For the first time in months, I feel a tingle of arousal.
*
He slams open the bathroom door and tries to grip something but misses several times. His face is glistening with sweat and his pants, undone, should have dropped to his ankles. “Wow, you really do need roughage,” I say. He tries to respond but merely dry-heaves on his own venom. I chuckle but then see his eyes glaze over and his grip floundering. “What is it?” I whisper, feeling my throat tighten.
“Not good.”
“A little too much space fever?”
“Bad fever.” Saliva is shining on his lips and from the way his eyes roll back, and his arms float upwards, I figure he has just fainted. I dart closer and put my arms around him, instinctively guarding him against a fall. His eyes open and he looks up at me as I sweep the soaked hair from his face. “Probably a bit of bacteria in the food,” I say and he nods. “Antibiotic?” He shakes his head profusely. Sasha is a medical doctor. “Electrolytes? Aspirin?” He nods.
I release him to retrieve the medicine but he clutches me weakly, shaking and swearing in Russian. His eyes flood with tears and resignation as I wipe sodden hairs and shape them into forests on his head and mutter, Alexander, Sasha, Sashenka, Sashulya, Sweetpea and Bunny and massage the soft calcium of his skull but he stills my hands with his and holds them there until he falls asleep.
*
Sasha takes only electrolytes and aspirin for three days. When the medicine wears off, he shakes and clasps my wrist and mumbles things I can’t understand about a blue racecar, his grandfather’s belt and a certain lake full of ducks. I mutter back lullabies, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, which he adores. At night I tie him into my pod and murmur, “Hey, Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song, and make it better.” He hums to sleep and I kiss the space between his bushy eyebrows. He tastes salty and animal.
*
The next day there is a rose under the glass dome, an intricate origami blossom folding and unfolding in an impossibly miniscule ballet of geometry. I hold my breath, lift the dome and inhale. It smells like rose perfume. I gasp. “How did you?” I turn to ask him but he is already gone.
*
I am running out of tampons. I could have chosen to retard my menstrual cycle but the hormones only contribute to the swelling of membranes, to decreased vascular function. It will look like a bloody massacre here next month. I ask Sasha, as a medical doctor, what he suggests. “What can I do to stop my periods?”
“Besides putting a ‘bun in the oven?’ Nothing.” And then he floats away.
*
I have just enough juice and just enough lab bacteria to ferment it. It is ready in ten days. I prepare a meal for us, put on music. “Remember, to let her into your heart…” I hand him his bag of ‘wine’ and smile. “Cheers.” He smiles back quizzically then takes a gulp. His face twists with disgust but then he laughs and raises his baggie in the air before he swigs it all down in one motion. “There’s more,“ I say. But we are already drunk.
We unzip our clothes and let them float beside us, tangled together like ghostly lovers. He cups my breasts with both hands and grins, “They are so perky without gravity.”
“They always are. They’re full of silicone.”
“Sshh,” he says, covering my mouth with his as he repeatedly squeezes and unsqueezes.
Weightless sex is like making love to a cloud that is lined with thunder.
*
He knows I am pregnant even before I do. He holds my hips like he is carrying a birthday cake and a dozen candles light up his face. He wears his stethoscope half the day and joins the mouth with my belly and then with my own heart, again and again, jots down data and sends it off in the wishful direction of Earth.
I have stopped trying to sculpt my bones; I only massage my belly, marvel at the roundness, brimming with precious promise. I float naked these days, my body stretched and shiny, twisting like a trophy, and Sasha floats in and out of me, making love sometimes two, three times a day. The 34th time the stethoscope finds its way to my belly today, I seize it and pull it to my lips and whisper. Sasha looks up, unsurprised, and repeats my words.
*
The birth is long and painful with no gravity to assist but Sasha and I handle it like ultramarathoners chugging through snow and sleet to land at the finish line in the sunshine. I feel like one of my limbs is being amputated without even a swig of whisky. I bite my lips and look out the window and just then something gold and fiery streaks the dark space and I feel a smile spread across the entire universe. Look, a sacrifice. An offering. Sasha grins, “A comet.”
“If it’s a girl, let’s name her Comet,” I splutter.
“And if it’s a boy?”
“Let’s name him Comet.”
He smiles and kisses my sweaty brow. Hours later, I am with Sasha in the sunshine, clutching our little Comet and weeping.
*
I haven’t thought of sunrises or meals with forks or hot baths in months. I feed and feed the child from my breast all day and night and it is growing fat and happy and I am hungry all the time, hungrier than I’ve ever been, even though Sasha has been feeding me his vegetable portions and he is thinner than a rake. After little Comet satisfies himself, his head rolls back and his lips part and I put my nose near his mouth and inhale the entire Milky Way, sweeter than the Earth and all its smells.
“I think Comet is growing a rose inside him!” I say and Sasha smiles back at me, in a sad way, his eyes drooping and unfocused and I realize that he is transparent, that I can see stars behind him, cotton nebulae of dust and helium, asteroids streaking within and beyond him. I reach out but my hand goes right through him.
*
“The only thing that makes me sad,” I say to Sasha, “is that Comet will never learn to walk.”
Sasha ties small weighted sacks to Comet’s feet and they reach the ground as the rest of him floats upright, swaying like a clown advertising deals outside a mattress store. Both of us laugh as we slide his feet, one by one, across the floor and he chuckles with delight. But soon his face twists in anguish and he cries and we quickly untie his feet to watch him float upwards like a puff of smoke, twist and flip as gracefully as a slippery marine animal that has no need for legs. Sasha’s eyes glisten with wonder and adoration. “Evolution! At the speed of light.”
“Record-breaking velocity.”
“I told you. Man is indestructible.”
“Man is abominable. Love is indestructible.”
He laughs and pulls me to him. “Who taught you such nonsense?”
*
The merciful injections had been released at some point, broken free from their safe and made available, but when? They lie empty, like used tubes of face cream no one bothered to throw away.
Sasha concocts an elixir from his remaining store of medicine. “Painless,” he promises.
We each hold a syringe gingerly in one hand, I hold Comet in the other. A droplet escapes from Sasha’s left eye and I scoop it up and brush it onto the baby’s forehead. “Comet,” I whisper, “son of Alexander and Eva.”
“I knew you were religious,” he says.
I smile at him. What if we’d all spent our time like this, like now, instead of looking out and up toward the heavens, for something higher, something better?
We embrace, inject one another, and save some of mine for little Comet who only whimpers a tiny protest. Sasha ties the three of us together before we grow drowsy and our arms disengage, our hands unclench, my son’s mouth grows slack at my breast and our home shuttles onward, toward a soft, familiar darkness, much like the very first darkness, blessed with pulses of light. The last few months: love, sex, birth, Comet: all a dream, condensed into a seed. This is how we’ll be found, tangled tenderly, like those innocents marooned in the Blue Lagoon. After a violent throb of radiance, great galactic arms will reach down to envelope us like a hot bath, like cleanliness, like a song.
STORY:
Originally from New Jersey, Maria Poulatha lives in Athens, Greece with her husband and daughter. Her stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Pithead Chapel, The Offing, Southeast Review and other lovely journals.
*
ART:
Pancho Muñoz, or @greenpotion, is a mexican artist said to be born from the ashes of a cursed playstation 1 controller.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Maria about this story.
This is brilliant.
brilliant read, the ghostly lovers line will stick with me for some time