Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 16.

Marshall's curse.

Can you smell it in the air? It’s the beginning of the end.

Chapter 16. Marshall’s curse.

Of course Marshall knew it was coming somewhere deep down or maybe even right on the surface, visible if he only chose to look at it. He knows that safety is an impermanent thing, to breathe freely and deeply is a luxury he has never been able to afford for very long. He knew beneath all of the speak of community and colony and women desiring him and women watching from afar that it could not last. That this place was not made for people like him. No place really is. He is a thing made to be adrift, unsettled and unhappy. He knows this and he is unsurprised and yet he is still sad. There is little time to mourn.

Even less time to think and yet when he sees all those faces hovering over him—June looking mean with vengeance, Ila holding his legs down while Amelie binds them, Rachel and Ayo holding Jamie back—he doesn’t think about his impending fate or that he is about to lose his man just after getting him. He thinks about his mom.

The memory crawls into his mind like watercolor creeping across the blank page. Elaine and her halo of dead end hair hovering above him on the couch, shaking sleep from his still small body. Elaine, upon the fluttering of his eyes, pulling him to his feet, securing a backpack to his shoulders, urging quiet. And the shock that he felt was not about waking up in the middle of the night and the signs of an obvious fleeing but that his mother looked into his eyes and he looked back and those eyes that were the same dark color as his spoke of lucidity. They said, I am here. I am sober.

He was rushed from the trailer and into a car that they did not own, the cigarette tips of Truck’s pa and grandpa glowing outside the car window like steady fireflies.

“We’re gonna be okay, Mars,” Elaine said, peeling out against the dirt and gravel, wheeling out of the trailer park, roaring past the Quik-Mart beneath the streetlights and ignoring the speed limit signs. “We’re gonna be okay,” she said again.

Marshall said nothing. Only eight years in this world and he had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his life was not going to be something he would ever have control over. He existed at the whim of his father’s drinking and his mother’s drugging and the Willis men’s fists and all the people who looked away from it, so terrified of the ugliness that a single life can hold and so Marshall bore it all on his own. This was just another thing happening to him in a long line of things that happened without his permission or desire or care. Driftwood drifts—that is its fate.

They stayed in a motel and shared a single bed. Marshall was locked in the bathroom while Elaine ‘paid’ for their stay by fucking the hotel manager.

They ate McDonald’s for a week. Elaine writhed on the mattress through her withdrawal, soaking the sheets with sweat and piss and bile. Marshall watched Dateline, soaked himself in murder. He did not ask where his father was or what would happen when he found them. Elaine was too preoccupied in the fight against her body to think any further than the mattress she suffered on.

By the end of the first week, the tiny motel room smelled like something rotting and it could have been either of them.

Marshall drew distant places onto napkins, greasy fast food bags. Marshall took out the trash. Marshall gathered ice from the cooler downstairs for Elaine’s aching body. Marshall listened to people in the neighboring rooms have painful sex. He watched a woman enter a room pristine as a porcelain doll and leave covered in bruises and dripping mascara. He watched two men enter a room clad in leather and leave smelling of piss. He watched the motel manager run his greasy fingers along the waist of any woman looking for a place to stay. Marshall watched the insidiousness and violence with a detached curiosity. Marshall already knew violence as the gloved hand of America. Marshall knew that most things were made of bruised skin and bloody clothes, roadside trash and people imposing their will onto one another. Marshall drew a boy who owned a pen that ends all bad things on the back of a motel pamphlet advertising a local sex club.

When Elaine finally felt well enough to leave, she did not look well at all. Her eyes were big, receding things like pool balls being sunk into the hole. Marshall could count each of the bones in her body. Much of her hair she’d torn out in clumps and left in the bathtub. She put him back into the car and they drove to Wal-mart. She sent him in alone to steal a handful of items and stuff them into his backpack. When he came out twenty minutes later, his father was in the driver’s seat and Elaine was unconscious in the back.

Marshall climbed into the passenger seat and they drove home. The Willis men smoked and did nothing. Marshall scribbled away on scraps of paper and did nothing. Nothing is better than being stopped from doing something. Nothing gives the illusion of choice. Nothing is free.

So as the women bind him and lift him from his bed, naked as he was born, Marshall does nothing. He does not fight, does not protest, pays no mind to the cold fingers gripping his forearms like handlebars. He barely breathes. Does not react to Jamie whose words mean so much to him as an endless slew of them fall from his pretty mouth—things like “fuck you!” and “I’ll fucking kill you!” and “don’t fucking touch him!” He ignores these words so that he will not cry, he will not match the tear-streaked face of the boy who loves him. He lets the women lift him, lets them carry him. Watches without expression as Lana sits at the edge of her bed and puts a dry finger to her lips. So as not to wake Beaver, sleeping too peacefully to be just asleep.

Lana’s betrayal does surprise him though the signs were obvious. He doesn’t blame her. It was their joint decision to join a cult after all. Choices lead to more choices and here they are.

The way he sees it, they will hurt him and let his loved ones be. So he does nothing.

Out the door to the cabin, the cold wind whips and stings his bare skin, shrivels his exposed balls. Is it November now? December? He wonders how much of the past few months he’s lost to decisive ignorance, what he’s chosen to relegate behind unnamed doors.

The crops are all gone now, fields withering in the waning available daylight. He can see now with nothing obscuring his vision, no greenery or food to add depth, just how small and empty this place is. The uniformity of the cabins, the algae choked lake, the women and their compliant silence, their obedience, his own obedience. The things a person can erase to feel as though they are free. The invisible fence was always Marshall.

Ila and Amelie carry him with sure hands and he cannot remember the gentleness of their lips on his long ago. The hairs raise on his arms and his body shivers so he goes inside to stop feeling it. He is in a seedy motel room doodling on anything he can find. He is in a tent under the vast night sky practicing ASL on his cock. He is in a car with his friends playing games and running, running, running.

They go to the lake, of course, and Maya is waiting there, of course. They’ve built a pyre for him. Massive logs stacked atop one another in a crude rectangle shape. A single white plank for him to be laid upon, scattered flowers, lavender, daisies, pine needles, lipstick red roses. A pyre built for his sacrifice. By fire, so the Three Mothers do not have to touch him? He wonders.

“He’s ready,” says June. She’s been imagining this moment since they fell across the doorstep and brought rainwater down on her hardwood floors.

Shepherd Maya smiles sadly. She’s wearing a special dress today, big and flowing, dark green and barely visible in the morning’s growing light. Her hair is woven into one massive braid that hangs delicately over her shoulder. Her face is painted in a mask of greens and browns and hard lines so she looks almost like a thing pulled from the lake’s silty bottom.

“Good morning, Marshall,” she says.

“Mornin’,” he replies.

“The Mothers are pleased that you did not fight, that you give yourself over to them willingly.”

Marshall shifts slightly and the ropes chafe his wrists. Jamie is being held back by three separate women, his mouth gagged with cloth to prevent his lovely voice from making its protest and Marshall is pretending he can’t make out the contours of those shouts. Not pleading with Maya or the other colonists, but with Marshall directly. Fight back! He cries. His face a red mask of rage. Do something! he begs. Tucks those pleas away somewhere dark, this is what he does. All he can muster. Lana is nowhere in his line of sight but he can feel her nearby, watching. Compliant.

“So,” Marshall says, “is this what happens to the men seeking safety in your colony?” He thinks of Jamie. “How many others?”

“Only one a year. It doesn’t have to be a man but the Mothers prefer them.”

“Why?” Marshall asks, though truthfully he isn’t very interested. He’d prefer to just get this over with. “Why me? Why now? Why was everyone waiting for me to have sex? I thought virgins made the best sacrifices.”

“Well that’s some evangelical nonsense. The sex had very little to do with it, really.” Maya paces the length of the pyre, adjusting the flowers mindlessly. The other women, the whole colony looks on silently. To do nothing is a choice. “What matters is the opening of the door. What the Mothers require is a person who has opened the door and let their light shine through. Raw sex is best for this but anything can open the door.” She’s nonchalant about it all. How many times has she done this? And why, with her deft and capable hands does she look like Marshall holding a knife to a tender throat? “And like I told you, Marshall, your light is most special, the most hard won. The light inside of men is always hard won. The Mothers appreciate that journey.”

Marshall swallows some spit. His teeth chatter. The pyre’s flame will be a welcome heat. “So what does it do? My sacrifice?”

“Ensures us safety through the winter and good harvest in the spring. Protection from the outside world and its self-destruction. You will help keep this place clean and free, Marshall. Your bright spirit will strengthen us and the land that drinks your blood.”

A muffled cry from Jamie.

Marshall nods along and he is trying not to laugh. Would he really have gone along with this if it were someone else being sacrificed at the altar of the Three Mothers? If it were Amelie’s stupid fucking light that shone through her shitty door would he just be watching and nodding along like, oh yeah, this makes sense. The spirit bleeds into the earth and protects this lonely, isolated place from the inevitable collapse of human society. Sure. He does not know, but from where he’s standing, vibrating in place, bound in rope, he can see through it all. Still, he does nothing to stop it.

“Okay,” Marshall says. “When I die, I will be dead and that’s the end of that. I hope my spirit clogs your drains. I hope my light blinds you. I hope all your doors remained closed forevermore. I hope you live as unhappily and unprepared as you already are so when the end does come, your deaths are long and unexpected. This is my curse. Marshall’s curse.” He nods. It feels like a good curse.

His curse does not deter them but he didn’t expect it to. He is laid down on the pyre, rope cutting into his wrists, his thighs and ankles. Jamie has gone still, stony and wet. Marshall smiles at him—nothing needs to be said that he is not relieved to have said the night before. Jamie’s sobs are silenced. Marshall looks to the sky, remembers the shifting clouds, the abhorrent shapes of the white vapor on the day he kissed Jamie.

Maya appears over him, smoking torch in hand. She is calm. She has done this before.

“I’m curious,” she says so only he can hear. “You say you love everyone and yet you’ve killed so many. How can you reconcile such a thing in your mind with love?”

He wavers, lump in his throat. “I can’t. I can’t reconcile it.”

“Is that why you go so calmly, child? Do you wish to die? Do you hope the flame will cleanse you of the hurt you’ve caused in this life?”

His chest tightens. “No. I do not want to die.”

She bends over, brings her face close to his. She smells of incense and absence. “You do, though, don’t you? But you cannot do it yourself. So reckless in your killing, have you ever wished that one of them would fight back? Did you hope someone would find you out? Have you just been waiting all this time for someone to just end it for you so you can be free from the whims of others?”

“No,” he seethes through gritted teeth. He is unsure if he’s lying or not.

She lowers her torch, brings the flame close to his skin. He breathes hard through his nose. Hears a nearby mourning dove coo. “It’s sad,” Maya whispers, “that you will die having never chosen something for yourself in this life.”

Real fear grips Marshall’s heart now, a primal fear that he is swallowing because it makes him want to live. Is that it, really? It has nothing to do with light or doors being opened or closed. It’s just a person using another person to exert some semblance of control.

“I chose Jamie,” Marshall says, voice straining.

“Did you?” Maya muses. “It took you months to make a move and in the end, it was me who pushed you towards this moment. You are a chess piece, Marshall. At least now, you will be freed from choice. You will serve this land forever.”

There are no more words to pull from his chest. Nothing left to fight with. His body is ragged and his mind is no refuge.

Maya pulls away and observes the crowd. “My children. Today, we make another sacrifice to our Three Mothers. Land, water, sky.” Upon the naming of each mother, she taps Marshall with the butt of her torch. Head, torso, crotch. “Marshall has done a great service in his time here and now it is time for him to begin the ultimate service.” The shark tooth grin unfurls across her lips. “Lana, will you do the honors?”

A shifting silence ripples across the crowd. Marshall keeps his eyes trained on the clouds, passing, drifting so slowly at the whims of the wind.

A tense moment passes and Maya says, “Come, dear. Before the sun rises.”

When her head appears above his, he looks directly into it. She does not want to kill him, that much is clear. But she will.

Maya steps back, framing herself against the glow of the creeping sun across the still lake. Lana holds the torch with white knuckles. He can already feel the fire licking at his bones, the heat and searing pain of melting flesh. He can feel it all before it even starts. He can already smell the smoke as if the logs are cracking and splitting beneath him. But they are not. The torch is still in Lana’s hand. There is fear in her eyes and she says, “I’m sorry,” and Marshall says, “It’s fine or whatever,” because he only wants her to feel kind of bad about it.

She sniffs the air then as if she too can smell smoke. She begins to lower the torch to the pyre. Time moves quickly now, can no longer wrap Marshall up with grace. But his spirit will never die, he’s trying still to believe this. Death is not death. Maybe there’s that. He can almost find peace in it, almost a clarity before the flame.

And then–a dull, metallic sound rings out and Lana falls to her knees, clutching the back of her head, torch rolling from her grasp and sparking to life the logs beneath him. The flames catch. Heat rises like angel’s wings.

When Lana falls to her side, Beaver is left standing, the handle of his helmet gripped firmly, his eyes drowsy and full of anger. It is then in the gasp that follows that they notice there really is smoke already clinging to the air and something black on Beaver’s shaking hands.

There is heavy silence. And then the cracking, splintering sound of the Big House beginning to collapse in on itself.

Marshall looks at Beaver with something between horror and admiration in his wide eyes.

Chaos befalls Pleasant Farm in a few short moments. Time is no longer a thread. It pops and bursts and licks quickly and harshly like fire. Maya howls like a creature. Jamie wriggles free from his shocked captors and pulls Marshall from the burning pyre. Despite the speed of it all, the dire need for action, he still kisses Marshall hard on the mouth before tossing him over his shoulder. Together, he and Beaver drag Lana’s limp body away through the cold, hard dirt.

The women don’t fight. Their cabins are on fire. Their storehouses are on fire. The Big House is on fire. Everything but the barn is on fire. Raze everything to the ground but the sweet animals, John Beaver.

Slumped over Jamie’s shoulder, Marshall watches the Good Shepherd Maya stand at the edge of the lake, paralyzed. Stock still. Fire fills her eyes as their homes burn. She simply watches and chooses nothing. And her Mothers too, land, water and sky, care not for the people and their games of ego and survival. They, too, choose nothing.

The truck is where they had left it beneath a cluster of tall trees covered by tarp. Beaver has Marshall’s backpack. Lana spans the length of the backseat in her unconscious body. The engine spits and sputters to life on the sixth try. June is chasing after them with a sledgehammer in hand. Marshall admires her choice to do something, fruitless as it is.

The truck peels out onto the road and Pleasant Farm recedes to nothing but trails of smoke crawling into the sky like the tendril fingers of a dark and righteous beast.

END: PART TWO.

UP NEXT: PART THREE. THE END OF THE WORLD AND ALL OF THE WAYS IT BOTH IS AND IS NOT A METAPHOR.

Previous chapter. Chapters 17 and 18 arrive next week.

Table of contents.

At least we can rest assured that absolutely no one saw this coming. 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.