“Orchards are nice.”
“And we would be the crazy toymakers out on the edge of town, and when the terraformers really truly needed us we could help out.”
“But only when they really truly needed us.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I think so.”
“I think so too.”
“What is the name of this new colony?” I asked. “If you’d meant to go back to Outpost or take me back to New Landing, you’d have said. So what’s this one?”
He grimaced. “Mesoasperia.”
“Really?”
“I’m sorry. It’s the one that’ll take us; I checked. Otherwise we’d have to wait another eight months.”
“That’s too long.”
“I know it.”
“Well, we can start poking the children to nickname it. Children are good at nicknames.”
“Children are awful at nicknames,” said Stephane. “We’ll find ourselves living on Boogerbreath Five.”
“The toymakers of Boogerbreath Five,” I said. “We’ll make them remember pepperoni.”
“And forget squashy floors and pears.”
“No, that won’t do,” I said. “The floors yes, but I can’t do completely without pears. A few pears only. Pears in moderation.”
“The pear-moderate pepperoni toymakers of Boogerbreath Five,” he said. “I think it’ll do.”
It would. I was nearly satisfied it would.
FIELDS OF GOLD
Rachel Swirsky
When Dennis died, he found himself in another place. Dead people came at him with party hats and presents. Noise makers bleated. Confetti fell. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.
His family was there. Celebrities were there. People Dennis had never seen before in his life were there. Dennis danced under a disco ball with Cleopatra and great-grandma Flora and some dark-haired chick and cousin Joe and Alexander the Great. When he went to the buffet table for a tiny cocktail wiener in pink sauce, Dennis saw Napoleon trying to grope his Aunt Phyllis. She smacked him in the tri-corner hat with her clutch bag.
Napoleon and Shakespeare and Cleopatra looked just like Dennis had expected them to. Henry VIII and Socrates and Jesus, too. Cleopatra wore a long linen dress with a jeweled collar, a live asp coiled around her wrist like a bracelet. Socrates sipped from a glass of hemlock. Jesus bobbed his head up and down like a windshield ornament as he ladled out the punch.
Dennis squinted into the distance, but he couldn’t make out the boundaries of the place. The room, if it was a room, was large and rectangular and brightly lit from above, like some kind of cosmic gym decorated for prom, complete with drifts of multi-colored balloons and hand-lettered poster board signs. On second glance, the buffet tables turned out to be narrow and collapsible like the ones from Dennis’s high school cafeteria. Thankfully, unlike high school, the booze flowed freely and the music was actually good.
As Dennis meandered back toward the dance floor, an imposing figure that he dimly recognized as P. T. Barnum clapped him on the back. “Welcome! Welcome!” the balding man boomed.
An elderly lady stood in Barnum’s lee. Her face was familiar from old family portraits. “Glad to see you, dear.”
“Thanks,” said Dennis as the unlikely couple whirled into the crowd.
Things Dennis did not accomplish from his under thirty-five goals list (circa age twelve):
1) Own a jet.
2) Host a TV show where he played guitar with famous singers.
3) Win a wrestling match with a lion.
4) Pay Billy Whitman $200 to eat dirt in front of a TV crew.
5) Go sky-diving.
6) Divorce a movie star.
As Dennis listened to the retreating echo of P. T. Barnum’s laughter, a pair of cold hands slipped around his waist from behind. He jumped like a rabbit.
“Hey there, Menace,” said a melted honey voice.
Dennis turned back into the familiar embrace of his favorite cousin, Melanie. She was the one who’d been born a year and three days before he was, and who’d lived half a mile away when they were kids. She was also the one he’d started dry-humping in the abandoned lot behind Ping’s groceries when he was eleven and she was twelve.
“Mel,” blurted Dennis.
“Asswipe,” Melanie replied.
She stood on her tiptoes to slip a hug around Dennis’s neck. She wore cropped jean shorts and a thin white tee that showed her bra strap. She smelled like cheap lotion and cherry perfume. A blonde ponytail swung over her shoulder, deceptively girlish in contrast with her hard eyes and filthy mouth. She was young and ripe and vodka-and-cigarettes skinny in a twenty-one-year-old way, just like she had been the day he was called to view her at the morgue—except that the tracks where her jilted boyfriend had run her over with his jeep were gone, as if they’d never been there at all.
“God,” said Dennis. “It’s good to see you.”
“You’re not a punch in the face either.”
Dennis reached out to touch the side of her head where the morticians had arranged a makeshift hairpiece made of lilies to cover the dent they hadn’t been able to repair in time for the open casket. At first Melanie flinched, but then she eased into his touch, pushing against his hand like a contented cat. Her hair felt like corn silk, the skull beneath it smooth and strong.
She pulled away and led Dennis on a meandering path through the crowd to the drinks table. “How’d you kick it?” she asked conversationally.
“Diabetic coma,” said Dennis. “Karen pulled the plug.”
“That’s not what I heard,” said Melanie. “I heard it was murder.”
Dennis Halter had married Karen Halter (née Worth) on the twenty-second of November, six months to the day after their college graduation.
Karen was the one who proposed. She bought Dennis a $2,000 guitar instead of an engagement ring. She took him out for heavy carbohydrate Italian (insulin at the ready) and popped the question casually over light beer. “I can still return the guitar if you don’t want to,” she added.
Karen was an art history major who was being groomed for museum curation. Dennis was an anthropology major (it had the fewest required classes) who was beginning to worry about the fact that he hadn’t been discovered yet. Karen was Type A. Dennis’s personality begged for the invention of a Type Z.
Melanie was similar to Dennis, personality-wise, except for the mean streak that had gotten her expelled for fist fighting during her senior year of high school. She and Karen had only met once, six months before Karen proposed, at a Halter family Thanksgiving. They didn’t need to exchange a word. It was hate at first sight.
“Hillbilly whore,” Karen called Melanie, though not to her face.
Lacking such compunction, Melanie had called Karen a “control-freak cunt” over pecan pie. She drunk-dialed Dennis three weeks later to make sure he hadn’t forgotten her opinion. “When that bitch realizes you’re never going to change, she’s going to have your balls on a platter. If you marry her, I swear I’ll hand her the knife myself.”
Melanie died instead.
“Murder?” said Dennis. “No, I wanted her to pull the plug. It was in my living will. I never wanted to live my life as a vegetable.”
“Unless it was a couch potato, huh?”
Melanie spoke with the too-precise diction of an over-compensating drunk. Her tone was joking, but held a vicious undercurrent.
She flailed one hand at Dennis’s spare tire. The gin she was pouring with her other definitely wasn’t her first. Probably not her fourth either.
“Worked out for you, didn’t it, Menace the Dennis?” she continued. “Spent your life skipping church only to luck out in the end. Turns out we all go to the same place. Saint, sinner, and suicide.”