Blog Post

by Nessie Sturm

I think it's my accent; it draws out poetic waxings about the dream of getting away from the city and settling down somewhere rural, somewhere quiet, somewhere you can look up every night and see the stars. People don't like it when I tell them I prefer the the roar of traffic and the smoggy, streetlight bleached sky. They don't understand that out there, where it's just you and the people you went with, that quiet gets pregnant with neglect; the spaces between the stars, with things best left as conjecture.

When we first arrived there, that farm as far away from civilization as Pop could find, he called it our own hills outside of Zoar. Never mind that there were no hills to speak of—a flat, featureless expanse in all directions. I didn't see it like he did. Before dawn came to light the world Earth-like again, the ground merged with the star-cluttered sky, turning the stretch between our dimly lit farmhouse and barn into a spacewalk. I tried to summon that imagery for my Mom, who was unable to deal with the horror of her increasingly isolated life. "We're visitors to a distant world," I told her, hoping that her love of the final frontier would grant her any peace. Instead, I simply spoke the unspeakable: we were like stranded aliens deprived of any hope of assimilation, let alone survival. She regarded my vain attempt at comforting with a silence that stretched out for months.

Yipping broke that silence. I stood still on my spacewalk, wading in the infinite, early morning dark. It was so subtle at first, barely puncturing the sound of my chores; I thought it must be my noisy, ear infection riddled ears or the animals and machinery that cluttered our little subsistence farm—my Pop's attempt at finding a life that made sense to his broken, angry brain. I might have even jumped a bit as the calls got louder throughout the day—my own broken, nervous child brain waiting for the moment when my rural busyness would be interrupted by the return of that man or the weeping of my mother. As the sun rose to the center of the sky, I discovered the meaning of the yips scrawled in a trail of blood on the other side of our property. Clumped, dirty red goo led me to the answer: a momma fox, formerly caught in a trap, having ripped her legs ruined escaping, food from the lure still held in her dead, maternal jaw. I stared down at her and then followed the yips to their source, a den burrowed underneath our barn filled with crying baby foxes. Being a mom is thankless.

It was thankless for my mom, who did her best to help on the farm at first, while Pop was off at his real job, manning a feed store fifteen miles north in town or drinking himself silly with what little money he made. That was our family: a city slicker who was born for a more erudite life stuck in a dead-end marriage with a loner so broken from the army that his best intentions, his code of morals, were nothing more than a constellation of unchecked justice for past wrongs and raisings. And, of course, their one kid—raised oh, so wrongly—who did his best to prevent his farm and family from collapsing under its own weight. I didn't know it at the time, but those animals of ours weren't well. None of us knew what we were doing, and we were all too afraid of each other and the world to learn better. In our fear and silence, the cows, horses, and chickens wore as thin and mangy as we had.

I was twelve, so what was I to do but guess at husbandry, like an alien probing a cow it'd just abducted, and try to block out all the death. A teacher of mine once asked if I liked getting to take care of all the baby animals on our farm. I answered "yes" and swallowed all the times those babies went cold in my baby hands. Being a mother is thankless. They say foxes start having their own babies when they're nine months old. In a way, that's what I was. That's why, when I realized what the yips were, a maternal desperation—unbefitting of my role in Pop's eyes—arose in me.

I ran inside and found my mother staring at nothing on the couch. When I told her what I'd found, a starlight lit in her eyes that I hadn't seen in months; it was like we could finally communicate again, like we were on the same page.

"Grab a crate, Dylan, we got work to do," she said to me. I luxuriated in receiving a coherent sentence, holding back tears as I followed her directions and then running with her to the den. Together, we pulled out the kits, put them in the big crate I found, and carried them inside. If only she had this sort of fire for the sickly animals we kept or the son she let suffer labor on her behalf, but I didn't think that then.

All I thought was, mom's back.

There was no internet in those years, so we did what we thought was best. What we thought was best was a white poison dispensed out old of baby bottles down the throats of the unsuspecting, desperate foxes—us two moms who never should've been given the responsibility. Cow's milk isn't what any creature needs, except for calves. By the time it became clear that we had made a mistake, all we could do was watch together as fox after fox breathed a final breath. There were five kits that we had saved. It was in the second to last's dying that I stopped talking. I just looked in the crate at the lone, frail survivor—cuddled up between four bodies—and made a sound I didn't know my body could make. One of those exhalations of misery, grief, guilt, and confusion that appears more like a releasing of pressure from a machine than a feeling held in the heart of a human boy.

It was then that I heard my mom's final full sentence. "If only you could have told me what you needed." She got up and left for the bedroom before the final one died. Pop got home before I could do anything but sit near the corpses and cry. He stood over me and shouted about how stupid I was to bring wild foxes in; he beat me senseless for my unfinished chores; he called me a faggot as I lay on the ground—another fox waiting for death.

Even if that slur does apply to me these days, I could never bring myself to reclaim it like the other men I know do. All I hear when I hear it is that evening swimming in the fresh smell of fur and ensuing decay. All I feel is the parts of the flesh around my cheeks, tongue, and throat that come, in some part, from that man—a worry that if I were to say it, it would bear the viciousness of him. I stopped my crying and took the kits out to bury in the back. Whatever he said to my mom brought forth an incomprehensible wail that ended in a thud. These were the most words and touches shared by us in months.

I didn't see my Mom or Pop much in the following days, leaving me to take over all the so-called care we gave to our animals—an unsatisfied transaction like drawing water from a stone: no eggs nor milk, no animal fat enough worth killing to eat, no horse trained well enough to ride. Just me wandering like a ghost—black eyes, sheet white complexion, and all—around the farm, steering clear of the mound of fresh dirt which rose up to the left of a lone sycamore tree.

With Pop, the stretches of silence were always a gift. If I was doing good, tending the farm, staying out of the way, and not saying anything inexplicably effeminate—how, I never knew—then he'd say he loved me by never looking at me. But, for Mom it wasn't that way. Back when Pop was deployed, when we still lived in Colorado Springs in a little apartment that didn't reek of rotting wood, animal feces, and fear, we were inseparable. I hardly remember all of what we got up to, being that I was a little kid at the time, but what I remember is precious. Among them, the most precious were late nights spent watching sci-fi shows on our little TV. Star Trek was Mom's favorite, on account of the barely concealed crush she had on Deanna Troi—though I did not understand it as such then—and the much more explicitly stated love she had for, as she put it, utopic space odysseys.

She wasn't a good mom, often forgetting to do the types of things a mom is supposed to do. I think she was real young, a kid like me, though I have no one left to tell me how old she was back then. I could probably look it up in hospital records or something, but it's joined the ranks of things that I feel better off not knowing. Even if she wasn't a good mom, she was a good friend. That's how she treated me back then: as someone who she could talk to about her one true love in life. Even after we had long since watched every episode of Star Trek across all the series available in 1991, I still indulged her just for the moments when she would tell me all about her dreams of being an author—about the book she was always working on, a sci-fi epic she titled Rosetta Bouquet.

She never read from the actual text, which she stated needed more work and was too mature for me, but she would regale me with all the appropriate details she could muster. Little stories about the universe she was building and the aliens in it. I remember it clearly even today; it centered around an earth woman named Ren, who found herself abducted by a diverse group of alien anthropologists hoping to bring about an intergalactic community. Their ship, The Bouquet, became a vehicle for interrogating human assumptions and language. We'd watch an episode of Star Trek, see some weird alien, and that starlight would shine in her eyes as she tore into another idea from the book. Like how aliens born on a planet that always rained thought about being wet, or some such thing. I'm not much of a fan of sci-fi, if I'm being honest. But I was fan of the moments where she wasn't just staring at nothing.

Never was she more not staring at nothing than when she was describing Ren's relationship with one specific alien, The Bouquet's captain, a female reptilian alien named Kelience. Theirs was something more than just a thought experiment about the ways different planets breed different hearts; it was a friendship blossoming despite the language and culture barrier.

Only with a life behind me, do I realize how sad it was that this young woman, stuck raising a child for a man on the other side of the world, misunderstood and alone, dreamt so intensely about getting to communicate with someone else. Only now do I see how similar her name, Karen, was to the protagonist of her story. Only as her sole heir did I gain access to the bit of Rosetta Bouquet she wrote. I found it while going through her things when I turned eighteen. My heart rose when I saw the name scrawled at the top of a little blue notebook. My heart broke when I saw that there were only fifteen pages written. Of course, considering how often she spent asleep or staring at nothing, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. But, if I thought the brevity was a knife, the contents were something far sharper.

Contained within the pages of her dream was one thing I didn't expect: the subtle, but unmistakable implication that Ren and Kelience were far more than just friends.

If things had been different, what could we have been? What we were, was two fragile homosexuals trapped on a farm under the watchful eye of that man. Maybe we could have escaped and returned to the city together, endeavored to find a life full of that communication we both craved. My own little dream to nurse and never finish writing—a story that lives more in my heart than in a way I would ever put down on paper.

The closest we would ever get to seeing each other as we were happened a few weeks after we moved to that doomed farm. Late at night, while Pop was fast asleep drunk as a skunk, she woke me up, her eyes wide with excitement and desperation. "Dyl, get up. Quiet now. I need your help."

My first, sleepy thoughts were that she was going to rescue us—take us far away from that remote hell that scared me senseless and worked me to my bones. Instead, we wandered out into the fields, drenched by the type of burning starlight you can only get somewhere empty like the Panhandle, carrying a bunch of heavy boxes. As we walked, Mom spoke breathlessly about a mail-order high altitude balloon she had saved up for and that had finally arrived while Pop was at work. She showed me a sealed letter which she was going to send up; she spoke about the possibility of some distant creature finding it, like a battered woman speaks about winning the lottery and buying her way to freedom. I wish she had spent that money secreting us off to the city or even just buying lotto tickets in vain. I was not so lucky.

Star and torch light, desperation and frigid, shaking hands, a pair of closeted homosexuals building a balloon, and a mysterious, furtive plea that lifted up and disappeared into the spaces between the stars. Is anybody out there? Each day without an answer, trapped in the endless nothing that was North Texas, the starlight in Mom's eyes dimmed. I would see it a final time, shone for a litter of foxes, and then never again.

I don't pray much to God. I never believed in him, even when I was young. Mom snuck that space-age atheism into me when Pop wasn't around. He did his best to fight back, forcibly grilling us on the contents of the bible day after day between pretending to know how to be a farmer and a father. After the foxes, I started. I prayed for anything to change, for a single word to exit my mother's lips. I lay in bed and sent up my wishes to the stars where God maybe lived, a little note for a creature whose existence lacks evidence beyond faith. There must be a God, or else what is the point of any of this. There must be aliens, or else we're all alone, trapped with each other and our mouths that evolved to communicate—our hearts that evolved to suck at it. I prayed and prayed and prayed.

One day, the prayer was answered; the letter was opened. I was in my room, sitting perfectly still in bed after hearing a shouting match in the kitchen, hoping desperately that I would stay forgotten. The argument had ended a while prior, and the night wore on—a silence that smothered the decaying farm we huddled in. I listened to the silence like an astronomer stares up at the stars searching for life. Except, I listened in fear; I hoped for nothing.

Yipping broke the silence, at least yip is the closest I can approximate to the sound I heard. It appeared almost to descend from on high, coming through the ceiling then floating down the backyard by the sound of it—foxes descending like angels. I heard my Mom's gasp and the back door slam open. I head Pop shout, calling after her. Then, nothing.

We all wonder what we might do, if we were to see something impossible. Plenty of actors on the shows and movies Mom and I stayed up watching would bet their careers on their performance of surprise, awe, and terror. It's not like that in real life, at least it wasn't for me. I stood. After waiting fearfully for any further sounds from Mom or Pop, I followed my parents out through the messy living room, out the still open screen door, and into the dark of rural Texas and the sky above.

That sky was blotted out by what at first appeared to be a cloud directly over our property. My eyes adjusted and drank in what looked like an enormous, spindly hot air balloon, interjecting itself between my eyes and the cosmos. I followed it down, a shape that sharpened to a column carved into the earth; at the point where it stuck into our yard, the memory gets murky. All the weeds were gone, a chore that I never seemed able to complete fast enough before more took their place. A sweet, cooked, metallic smell filled the midnight air. The grave of kits was still there, a slight disturbance in the dirt illuminated by the lights from our kitchen, but the tree had been burnt to a crisp, rendered all knotted and coiled. At its base were two more mounds: Mom and Pop, or what remained of them.

Things look so different when they die; they lay too close to the ground—skin and muscle drooping achingly heavy. The foxes lay low in their crate; my parents, strewn about the dirt in a manner that did not imply sleeping. Even if it did, the blood, vomit, and melted flesh that spilled from them was undoubtedly fatal. I just looked, doing nothing as my brain did everything it could to not kill itself in shock. I think I smiled, my face unable to make an adequate expression for the situation.

Perhaps, if I was like one of those actors on TV staring at a tin UFO or an alien that was just a cheap costume dyed purple, I would have had the wherewithal to remember that the sycamore tree was to the right of the grave, not the left; I would have seen the burned stump. As it was, I only noticed something was wrong when the thing I thought was the burnt tree moved and took me.

Tangled up in the bouquet that was this being, I could do very little but watch as it carried me closer to my Mom's corpse, degraded so badly by radiation that nothing remained to hold starlight. That same invisible death threatened to take my starlight—bubbling rushed up, curdling my skin until it reached my face and seared my eyesight red and sparkling. We, this creature and I, passed into the column. My sense of touch was one of the few senses that remained. Cool air comforted my blackened flesh; shifting branches wrapped around me—so thin, yet so strong; convulsions shook my body broken on the altar of interstellar poison.

I was dying; I knew it then cloaked in colored darkness. Would I meet God, I wondered? Was this being, this burning tree, God?

When Lot fled with his family from Sodom, that ancient city where homosexuals could live in open, joyful communication, did he bear any of the burns that turned his wife to salt? Did he truly remember what he escaped when he injected his life into the oral history of the Old Testament? Did the people of Zoar interrogate his wounds or his memories? When my Mom and I built the space balloon that night months prior, marks of our secret were made on my body. In the dark and cold of the prairie, I couldn't feel any of the wounds as they were made. I only saw them in the light the morning after. Cuts covered my fingers and hands; ticks, my privates; bug bites, my neck and legs; scrapes, my knees. My mom made up some story about me sleep walking out into the dark and her rescuing me. Pop sat me down and interrogated me for hours about each one, searching for a lie that might've proved I sought to abandon him.

The police did the same the morning after my parent's deaths. They found me alone in the farmhouse, naked and ruined. It made the news: a mysterious, injured boy found alone, his parents missing save for two human shaped burns. I was not Lot, having no interest in sharing this story then—codifying it into the bible of rural American alien encounters. They asked me about the hook marks in my arms and legs, the missing right eye, the burns, and the strange punctures that lined my back. I told them that I had no memory of it.

Like when I told my Pop that I could not remember my sleep walking, like when Lot told his daughters he didn't remember sleeping with them, like when I told the police I only remembered walking out into the backyard, it was simply easier than facing the whole of what answering truthfully would mean. It's all still there, like the stories of Mom's unwritten Rosetta Bouquet. Icy, metallic hoists pierced my skin, and strung me up. Rustling, windy sounds emerged from the thing that had taken me. Pinpricks, slices, and fillings replaced the dull pain of my nerve burned body. My eyesight returned, but only in my left eye. With that burned, frail orifice, I drank in shapes and shadows: a creature moved like an accordion hat rack or a caterpillar—a blurred bundle of sticks stretching out this way and that—taking what must have been surgical tools off of something that looked like a Christmas tree, decorated with scalpel and drills instead of stars.

How long this went on for, I can't say; the pain was impossible. But, judging on what came after, the fact that I survived where my parents were reduced to nothing but piles of salt, I reckon that this alien was trying to save me. At one point, it stopped its work and laid me down on the floor. I stared up at it, wondering what parts of its body might be a face. Were the knots that coagulated in the center eyes that might contain starlight—hope for what love might lay across the expanse of space? Did it evolve to even drink in that starlight, like my Mom did every evening as she waited for this thing's arrival? Waiting for it to come and whisk her away on an adventure? As it looked upon me, an odd thought arose in my burned mind: Mom would never get to find out if this thing could talk. Neither would I, on her behalf. Even if I could speak, there'd be no bridging the gap of language and knowing; for what could a child all burnt, frozen in fear and pain—a child who wasn't good at talking or understanding other humans—and a creature like that hope for?

That is, except for one bit of communication of which I am absolutely certain. As it loomed above me, its tangled body clearly addressing the boy on its balloon ship's floor, it let out a squealing, shaking sound. Before losing consciousness, I thought that must be the type of sound its kind would make while staring down at a fox, dying in a crate.