Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 12.
I am the reason.
Pretty kisses, America!
Chapter 12. I am the reason.
A month or more passes in sweet serenity. Roots are planted in and above ground. Work is done and done and done and there is always more because a community of people is always shifting, expanding, developing and discarding needs. Marshall and a few other women build a barn. A fall flu ripples across the farm and Lana turns the barn into a makeshift triage center. A woman named Mel dies and Jamie digs a grave. The flu passes and Beaver helps fill the barn with chickens and goats and learns how to care for them. They start their mornings together, breakfast on the porch of their cabin. Lunches are spent alone, Marshall by the creek in the woods, Jamie on the roof of the Big House, Lana in between Maya’s legs, Beaver in the barn giving pieces of his sandwich to the puff-chested roosters. Dinners are communal in the permanent outdoor pavilion that Marshall erected with Ila.
Only four weeks have passed since their arrival and already they feel integral to the existence of this community. The presence of the men among all of the women is a nonissue. Marshall finds himself well respected and unsure of what to do with all of it. He feels like he’s back with his landscaping boys though he’s already forgetting his basic Spanish. He’s already forgetting how he got here and what life looked like before and he doesn’t care because he’s safe here. There is no abuse here. No one asks him to kill and no one has to die.
He does think about his mom some days when the wind carries the smell of oak and rotting wood. It reminds him of her good days in between drugs where he might find her at the edge of the trailer park, hands on her slim hips looking out at the trees and just watching the world turn. Sometimes he’d even join her and they’d share the kind of quiet that soothes rather than cutting deep. But mostly the memory doesn’t last long before he has to imagine the reality that she’s dead from an overdose or out on the streets without Marshall’s income.
Lump the cat is probably still clawing at the door to the trailer waiting for no one.
It’s mid-October now and the hot glow of the summer sun has been replaced by trees turning yellow, grass turning brown, cold wind cutting hard across the lake. Sometimes Marshall sees big brown animals across the water gathering food in the brush. Today is a work free day because they are having a celebration. Maya calls it Fall Penance but says it’s much less serious than it sounds. Sure, it is about offering forgiveness and reproach for the unmistakable wrongs humans have done unto the planet and their inherent subservience to the Three Mothers, but it’s mostly an excuse to get high, devour summer crops before they spoil and to feel the spirit of the Three Mothers in their transitory period from summer to autumn.
For the past month, Marshall has been evading romantic and sexual pursuits by at least a dozen women on the farm. He’s kissed most all of them because they asked but the moment they try to get him alone, he frantically searches for any reason to escape.
Each day he convinces himself will be the day that he kisses Jamie but Jamie never asks, not even on the nights when they share the same bed and end up curled around one another in the dark. He can feel Jamie get hard when he spoons Marshall into the night but he does not move and he never speaks and neither of them says Please, please, please even though their bodies throb the word against one another in instinctual morse code.
Marshall wakes up aching each morning that they share a bed and masturbates furiously in the shower while he can still hold Jamie’s scent of vague spices and sweat in his nose. He tries not to think about how his cum affects the shower’s gray water filtration system. He’s got nowhere else to put it.
The four of them rarely bring up how they got here, what happened before or what comes after. Jamie is content working the kitchen each day and holding his voice in his throat until he needs it. Beaver spends most of his days with the animals. He doesn’t talk about his parents. Amelie paints over the parts of his helmet that are rusting red. What Lana does each day is unclear but her infatuation with Shepherd Maya is impermeable. She never stays the night under that big canopy but the two are rarely seen apart in the daylight and Lana likes to brag about how big Maya’s cock is over breakfast and they can’t really be mad about it because that is pretty cool.
Each of them has grown content and complacent in their own individual way. Over the past month, Marshall has begun to sense a sort of impatience among the women as though they can hardly wait for autumn to descend in its fullness. The ones that do not observe him constantly with a thinly veiled lust or hunger seem to watch with a hurried temperament as though wishing he would do his work faster, as if he has somewhere to be and rather soon. June in particular. But Maya is poker faced through and through, in perfect control of her emotions. Marshall respects that, whatever the deal is.
He sighs now and reels his line in. There is only one fishing day per month so as not to overfish the small lake. He’d been looking forward to it all month. He loves the water and the calm patience that fishing requires. But there are no bites today and he paddles back to the shore with nothing to show for his efforts but a tomato red sunburn on the back of his neck.
In contrast to the stillness of the lake and the quiet of a windless day, the farm is bustling with movement in preparation for Fall Penance (this is not considered work).
Marshall pulls his canoe onto the shore and places the paddles in the bottom. The curtain door to Maya’s hut is pulled open and she is having sex with Lana. Her face is flushed red and she grins like a porcelain cherub as Marshall passes. He flaps his hand in an awkward imitation of a wave. Sometimes he thinks that he, Jamie and Beaver are the only ones not having active, continuous sex with the Shepherd.
Every few days Marshall is confronted by two questions: What would his fellow farmers think if they knew how many people he has killed? Would they no longer be attracted to him if they did know? Maybe their impatient glares come from a deep intuition of what he’s done and they are simply waiting for him to take a sledgehammer to the door and let the truth flow.
The other question, this one a bit more troubling, sometimes keeping him up at night if he’s not sidled up next to Jamie: what is Shepherd Maya herding them toward? And if she is the shepherd, does that make them sheep and where is the fence that keeps them in? But then there is the flattery of the women and always so much more work to do, so many kind people, good food and of course the safety. He has not watched the news in over a month. He does not know who is running for president and who is being bombed and which billionaire CEO is inventing new ways to make technology worse and which hot celebrities are controlling the popularity of clothing and smoothies and most importantly, he does not know how wanted he is or if his mother is dead or which of his bodies have been found. There is nothing to be afraid of here and even in his questioning of the purpose of this place and the good shepherd’s intentions, he finds himself providing no speculative answers because there is nothing to run from and no one to ask terrible things of him. This is sanctuary, even if sanctuary has an invisible fence.
He waves to the women he passes whether their gaze is undressing him or not, though he does unconsciously group them based on their demeanor. The ones who explicitly want him: Amelie, Tara, Sadie, Kira, Tamera, Zen. Those who observe as though urging a rat through a maze toward some stinky cheese: Billie, Belladonna, Quinn, Zella, Kim, Marsha, Lynn, Darjeeling. He is kind to them all. The outlier of course is Maya. She is forthcoming with everyone else but when it comes to Marshall she keeps her cards close to her chest. Somehow, this makes Marshall want her more than any of the others. But he is devoted to his untouchable Jamie.
He finds his darling in the kitchen. Jamie is leaning over an industrial sized frying pan, carefully caramelizing enough stringy onion for an army. The crisp, acidic scent tickles Marshall’s nostrils.
He drags his hand lightly across Jamie’s back and they exchange a smile.
Break soon? Marshall signs. He’s had a lot of time to practice his ASL and he’s gotten pretty good. Jamie himself is actually a bit sloppier than Marshall, he’s discovered. Everything he learned he picked up from Isadora so they are learning together and Marshall finds this romantic.
Too much to do, he replies.
Can I help?
Jamie considers this and replies honestly. Your cooking is not very good.
This is the truth and Marshall accepts it.
Stay, Jamie signs. Keep me company.
And so Marshall curls up amongst the pillows and blanket in the corner and watches Jamie work. He’s been getting stronger hauling carts of veggies across the colony and the muscles in his arms bulge and shift and stretch beneath his smooth brown skin. Marshall wants to bury his face beneath Jamie’s arms and breathe him in.
Jamie’s propensity for cooking has earned him quite a bit of respect as well and he lately only uses his voice to give direction to the other women who cook with him. Simmer that for one minute. That’s too brown, try again. Is there sugar in this? Add a bit more. His confidence in his ability is like an aphrodisiac. Marshall can get hard just listening to him speak with authority and assuredness.
Tell me what to do, Marshall thinks. Tell me and I’ll do anything you ask of me. Tell me, tell me, tell me.
Beaver hauls in a cart full of fresh milk jugs and Marshall helps him load it into the fridge. The colony is not on the grid but they do have a solar powered generator that they use only for things like refrigerating food. Very modern. Marshall hasn’t seen a phone screen or a computer in a month. He does not think about screens anymore.
When they’re done, he and Beaver settle back into the corner and play a game to the tune of Jamie’s voice. Beaver is very good at games and always wins though Marshall doesn’t mind losing.
Beaver’s helmet is a floral mural now, long evolved from Mirabel’s original work. Maya has been giving him a salve to restore the skin on his wrinkled head but he’s gotten too attached to the rusty pot to take it off now. If he misses being around people his age he doesn’t show it. The previous week, Marshall was helping him steer a cow across the pasture and they were wading through tall grass in bare legs when he asked, “Am I gonna be having this much sex when I’m older?”
“Maybe,” Marshall said. “How much do you know about it?”
“It seems really gay.”
“Well, around here it mostly is.” Marshall took a beat. His skin was darker these days from working in the sun. “Sex isn’t just gay or straight or whatever. It’s just sex. It can be good or bad, loud or quiet, fun or boring, wet or dry, but it’s always just sex.”
Beaver caressed the cow’s muzzle and directed her to the left. “Do you like sex?”
Marshall was caught off guard. No one had really asked him that before and so he’d never considered it. “Well, I’ve had a lot of it. It feels good.”
Beaver seemed unsatisfied. “Adults are really bad at talking about stuff. I think I’m gonna stay a kid.”
“That sounds like a right idea,” Marshall said and the cow chuffed in agreement.
Beaver was always teaching him something new about how silly he was.
Midafternoon, the feast is ready and Marshall and Beaver help carry the endless pots of steaming food out to the table. They thank the Three Mothers for their bounty and make offerings to the earth: coffee, tobacco, apple cores, carrot skins, the butt ends of green onions. The smell of dirt and fertile soil thanks them.
It’s a bright day and though autumn is creeping across the colony in reds and oranges, the sun is warm like a downy jacket. They eat together, dance on bare feet in the grass. Maya plays a set of reed pipes she carved herself and Arabella strums a fragile lute and they chant in thanks to the Three Mothers, the turning planet, protection from climate destruction, outside interlopers, the continuance of the seasons despite the world coming undone at the seams, and they all believe in their thanks. They dance and dance until their feet are sore. They pound the earth flat and turn their soles brown. They sing songs that do not exist anywhere else and bow before the lake and cry for her blessings. They celebrate until the sun is arcing low in the sky and then Maya passes around cups of tea. Hot, steaming, lemon and ginger with just a couple grams of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Marshall drinks it down greedily. Lana sips tentatively. Jamie savors. Beaver is unguardedly excited.
They lay in the grass and wait for the world to shift around them.
For quite a while, it seems that nothing is happening and Marshall wonders if his body is too big to be affected by the dosage. And then a conspicuous grin creeps across his face like a trickle of water down a car window.
“Every tree looks like a really big leaf,” he says.
They’re fanned out in the grass feet pointed in the four cardinal directions, heads pressed together to form a misshapen cross. Lana’s skull rolls against Marshall’s as she looks around. “Holy shit, they do. Every branch is just like the veins of a leaf. I have veins too.”
Jamie laughs. “Lana, your sobriety,” he says.
“Shrooms don’t count,” she dismisses with a loose flapping of her hand. “Shrooms are actually, like, ultra sobriety. They’re showing me how clean and healthy my body has felt. I’m grateful, I think.”
Beaver makes a low grunting noise. “I don’t think you’re supposed to let a twelve year old kid take drugs.”
Marshall turns his own head and pushes it against the cold metal of John Beaver’s pot. The smell of grass explodes in his nose. “How do you feel, John?”
“Like my teeth are too big for my mouth. And the clouds are taunting me.”
Marshall looks up. The clouds are few and far between. Mostly the sky is its own ocean of pristine blue interrupted only by the dazzling star that pulls the earth in ellipticals. The clouds that are rolling across the sky do seem a bit menacing. They expand and contract as though taking steady breaths.
All around him, people walk. Digging their toes into the grass, breathing as big and deep as the clouds, pressing their foreheads against the rough bark of an oak tree. Marshall watches them and cannot imagine standing or walking or doing anything but looking and being informed by the way things shift and melt and solidify and melt all over again in continuous stages of phase change. He feels solid, solid, solid, has never been liquid, wishes to be as free as a gas to fill the space of his container. And he is contained, he is oh so locked in place wherever he goes.
A heron soars overhead with a wingspan like a plane and he feels like his chest might cave in.
“I think I have to throw up,” Beaver says.
Lana sighs. “Okay, come on buddy.” She helps him up like she isn’t high herself and then she leads him away, leaving Marshall and Jamie alone in the grass, heads pressed together in a straight line. Marshall can feel the way that Jamie is deep in thought. He can feel the depth of that boy’s head writhing and expanding and shimmering in his own self. He’s like an explorer in a crystal cave with a mining hat and pickaxe and all he finds is beauty.
Jamie’s infinite silence sends Marshall inward as well. His head lengthens into a hallway, a stretching corridor in a medieval mansion lined with torches and doors and intricate red carpet runners. He steps carefully down the hallway and each door opens for him, presenting a path to follow and at the end of that path he sees more doors floating freely, disorganized.
The doors tell him their names.
I am the art you’ve abandoned. He closes that door.
I am the onlooker who refuses to understand you. And the door inside of that door, I am your refusing to understand yourself. Just thinking about the second door has pulled him in and he has to back out slowly. That’s too much.
The next door says, I am the indifference of your mother, the absence of your father, the ambivalence of the child.
“Jesus Christ,” Marshall says out loud. Maybe there is something less intense to explore.
I am Lump the cat. That sounds nice. Marshall misses his cat, that fat orange tabby and his claws and teeth. Never has there been a more free spirit. He enters this door and feels hot sun on his skin, grass beneath his feet, he smells Georgia wildflowers, zinnias, swamp heat. He sees a house in an overgrown yard. The door is rotted and mottled with bullet holes. It says, I am the man you took this cat from. You’ve forgotten me. He is forced to remember that Lump the cat was owned by the second person he killed. Their face tries to force itself through the gaps in the door. He tucks that face away in the place where he put things that shouldn’t be seen and backs into the hallway. He does not want to think about killing or death.
But the next door says: I am the hurt you’ve inflicted on the innocent. Clutching his breath in the hollow of his chest, he wipes the door away with a can of paint.
And then a door that sighs with longing refuses to name itself and so he pushes his way in and falls into a woman’s arms. Her long, red hair hides her face but tears fall through the curtains and pepper his cheeks. He feels as though he would do anything to stop her sadness, even if he must rip off parts of his own skin and blot the wet from her hidden cheeks. Her desperation is a tight thing and by the time he realizes who she is, her grip on his body is too permanent to be disobeyed. Her hair draws back from her face and she is a thing he is actively scrubbing away, painting over with forced mystery and though her mouth quivers, she does not speak but she is begging him not to kill her, she insists that her husband is a liar. She grips Marshall’s wrist the way only a mother can and she digs Marshall's sharp nails into her thigh and when blood spills past his fingers, she insists that her husband is the one who hurts her, not the other way around. She is the only woman that Marshall has killed and her blood was the color of a sweet Edenic apple and her hair spat flames from her scalp in an attempt to escape its captor. She was thirty-four. She was nothing. She doesn’t exist, never did. Her name was Aria. Was she telling the truth? She does not exist, he cannot see the craze coloring her face. Marshall grinds his teeth until one of them splinters onto his tongue and he is pulled back into the hallway.
He swallows part of his tooth with flimsy muscles and stumbles forward. The doors are growing blacker, the hallway narrowing into a coffin.
The doors growl their ugly names.
I am the bruises on your back. He whimpers slightly and wipes that door away too.
I am the poverty and the evil that is meant to be bred. He’s painting over doors faster now but they keep coming and the ground beneath his feet is like an airport walkway so he cannot refuse to move forward.
I am the heating planet and the rich who will survive at the cost of the poor, the indigenous, the black and brown, flora and fauna.
He groans and stumbles forward, leaving the door ajar.
I am the man who touched his son and where is that son now?
I am the end of the world. I am what that means. He’s breathing hard, almost panting now. Is he running? Where is he?
I am the wasted life.
I am wasted potential.
I am the fear of love.
I am a pile of bodies.
A low moan escapes his throat or does it really? What happened to the sky and the trees and the sun on his cheek?
I am the people you love who cannot trust you. I am the hateful stranger. I am division and destruction.
I am the reason you kill.
Marshall cries out, “Stop!”
And then a hand takes his, warm and soft and alive and real. He opens his eyes, didn’t realized he’d closed them to the world. The sky is still there, the breathing clouds, the trees like big leaves. And Jamie’s head above his, ringed by the sun’s light like a halo.
“Hey,” Jamie says. His thumb kneads soft circles into Marshall’s damp palm. “Careful. I think you started to go somewhere bad.”
Marshall breathes deep to fill his lungs, whimpering slightly. Squeezes Jamie’s hand. “There were so many paths to go down. Lots of…stuff up here to explore. But it was all really scary.”
Jamie’s face is warm, melting like the pad of butter he drops into a hot skillet. He stands up and helps Marshall to his feet. “Probably best not to go down those paths if you’re not ready.”
They stay holding hands. “What if I’m so scared of all the things that I’m never ready for them?”
Jamie tilts his head and keeps his lips pressed together. There is a path opening in the soft of his mouth, the smoldering safety of eyes that Marshall knows now, could know anywhere. Like a crackling hearth, the eyes speak to him. Come with me, they seem to say. And Marshall goes.
don’t ask me any questions about all the things I’ve done
Previous chapter. Next chapter.
Take your shrooms responsibly, kids. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader.. I leave that decision up to you.