IGMS Issue 49 (2 page)

I locked my arms around your waist. You made a noise I didn't recognize, somewhere between a whimper and a scream. But we had you, locked together, and it was so right. Only your eyes and your face grew paler by the second, you pounding against your monster, reeling it back in.

But they were stronger than you. Or me.

I couldn't let them do this to you.

I put my hands on your hips and shoved. My monster wailed and clattered her teeth. You shoved too. Together, we ripped them apart.

I couldn't look at you.

When I opened my eyes, you'd disappeared into the drunken crowd. I stood in the bar alone, until the song finished, giving you plenty of time to flee us both.

My
husband handed me the invitation to your wedding. Part of me expected you to have forgotten all about me. The other part knew your monster would never let you forget. I didn't even know how you found my address after so many years - the Internet, I supposed.

Or perhaps my monster called to yours, across time and space, dictating the town and street to your monster, you scratching it out on an envelope when your fiancé was asleep.

So you could find me again.

I held the envelope to my cheek. The dark seed of my monster, long curled into the pit of my belly, stirred at the scent of you. My husband glanced at me strangely. But he didn't have a monster. He didn't understand. Couldn't.

You trickled through my nervous system, awakening bright, shiny dendrites of memory, and my monster shook its sleepy head. I pinned the invitation to the calendar and my monster tore a great longing bite of my heart. I circled the date in black ink and my monster roared up my throat and burst through my mouth.

I'm going, it said for me.

The usher escorted me into the sanctuary. The service had already begun. We made no attempt to be quiet, my monster and I. Instead, I let my monster snarl and gnash away inside my head. It was a starved thing, pitiful and near wasted. It swelled until its tendrils pushed from my very pores, shadowy feathers I donned just for your big day.

Your monster stood at the altar next to the reverend. Oh, I knew you were there inside it, as surely as I lived and breathed inside mine. But the seething mass of wings and limbs writhed around you until you were no more than a nucleus for the transcendent being you hosted.

My feet nearly lifted from the floor. I held tight to the usher's arm to hold myself down. This was your big day, not our monsters' to steal. The usher seated me on the groom's side, seventh row on the left. You didn't meet my eyes. But our monsters reached for one another. Reached and reached and reached.

Your bride was lovely, a pale waif with no more substance than a confectionary delight. Of course, she didn't have a monster. And I understood.

My monster sought to drag me up the aisle to you. I dug my fingernails into the pew during the vows and they left crescent moons in the wood. Your left knee buckled as you walked your new wife past my pew. Probably no one noticed but me. Or they chalked it up to nerves. They didn't see our monsters brush each other, feel the ricochet of cosmic collide as the tendrils knotted.

Your eyes met mine. I saw it. I did.

But you had a sunbeam on your arm and I had a husband who mattered.

I ripped my monster away. You shuddered.

I didn't stay for the reception.

You
rang my doorbell. I stared through the peephole at your fish-lensed face. You wore your monster wrapped around your hunched shoulders like a superhero's torn cape. You knocked and the door shook beneath my palms.

My monster hid, spiraled in on itself, a snail's shell of tired and no-more. We'd destroyed everything, my monster and I, gobbling up my world to forget.

The doorbell chimed again and again.

Too late, too late, the tinny bells rang. We already ate.

A childhood, a youth, a marriage.

Nothing left.

Your monster crept beneath the doorframe, a shadow thin spy.

My monster shivered. I tiptoed away on silent feet. I hid in the bathroom until the doorbell grew silent.

We were all alone. My monster and I.

I
don't know whether you'll meet me now or not. But the coffee is nice here. And they don't mind an old woman like me taking up the corner booth for as long as I like.

I read about her passing in the paper last winter. I didn't have the courage to call. She was a lovely woman. I hope she made you happy. As happy as she could.

But that's not why I need to see you.

There are things that have to be said. My monster is restless. It rises up inside me with an urgency I can't ignore. All these years, I've learned to control its moods and wants, but now, it tears at me until I smother inside its chokehold.

What will happen to them after we pass? Will they go with us to the great beyond, wherever that is, or will they spiral out of us to find other hosts?

Maybe they'll finally be together. All these years, waiting for the two of us to set them free, so they can collide in some cosmic love story you and I never understood.

Even now, my monster flies under my skin like a million fireflies lighting up the blackness I've known for so long. It pushes the chambers of my heart faster and faster. But my heart is thin and flutters. It makes me breathless, not like valentines and heartsick songs do, but in the way of oxygen tanks and emphysema patients.

I wrap my monster around my shoulders. It gives me a momentary respite from its ever-present hunger. But its head nuzzles beneath my chin and its whispers fill my ear.

It tells me you are coming.

Your monster is near.

The hand opening the door is yours. The bowed head, weary from our shared burden, scans the room. Your monster circles you in a shadowy nimbus, a dying star in its final bloom. My monster opens itself and preens with the undying devotion of a thousand lifetimes.

You see us. Your monster flares into motion, tentacles reaching across the divide.

We stand transfixed, you and I, considering one another across the roomful of unknowing no-ones. I cannot contain us any longer.

Neither can you.

Our monsters embrace one another. Blazes of black-hot glory sear them into one flesh.

Our monsters say hello. We are ready now. We love you.

I invite you to sit down.

And you do.

Nothing sharpens my isolation like the pinprick of Sol on the horizon after dusk. She cradles our motherworld a thousand light years away while we cling to our deadly, beautiful foster-planet. For all we know, she's already long gone.

My suit's ten-minute warning pings. I pull my gaze from the constellations, glittering behind the meteor startrails. Around me, the rock spires of our world Azure grasp at the sky, their usual hue lost to midnight ink in the darkness.

I try to keep my breaths slow and shallow as my suit's O2 meter hovers above red.

I should get moving. Anna's been out here even longer than I have; she'll be running on fumes by now. I have to find her - no, I know exactly where she'll be, I knew when I walked past her quarters and I didn't hear her obsessive mutter through her door. But while I'm looking for her, I don't have to go back.

I turn east, along the giant vertebrae-like ridge we nicknamed Atlas, following the opalescent cords of minerals that sweep along the rippled stone. In the sunlight, you're an insect in this sculpted world, a minutia, towered over by stone spires and rock formations in every blue and green of the spectrum. Above you, the burnt-orange sky fades to amber near the horizon, and blazes with purple flames of aurora every sunset, before the meteors come. At night, without a moon, you're a ripple beneath shadowy gods.

I round the crest of Atlas' ridge and there she sits, slumped against the rock where a spire curves over like a doorway to her canyon, Hades. Her favourite place. The rock is scoured almost a kilometre down to stone ripples of a blue so brilliant it defies the depth.

A blip on my headset: Anna knows I'm here.

"Seris is going to be pissed." Her voice is breathless.

"
Commander
Seris is right. We don't have the oxygen to waste."

"We're terraforming tomorrow. It might be my last chance." Her suit doesn't move as she speaks. With her voice in my ear, I almost feel like I'm talking to the planet.

"It will be if you don't get back inside. What're you on, five percent?"

"Two." She still doesn't move. "I want to stay."

I could have just reported her. I
should
have, not donned a suit of my own and gone out after her. But if I'd done that, I'd be inside, staring at the bone-white walls of my quarters, and she'd be in the brig again.

Or dead. We lost four people in the first month. They wandered away into beauty and forgot to come home.

I found two of the bodies in the same spot; where the wind has carved green sandstone into twisting, coiling ribbons that fold over the valley like a canopy. Through the coils you can see that burnt-orange sky. The rock floor is covered in mineral deposits that shimmer from every angle, and with a lichen-like growth that flushes a deep indigo with heat from the sun.