Kate Day - In the Quick

I opened the door. Amelia’s limbs were long and still. Her hair lay flat against her ears instead of floating away from her face. She turned toward me; her cheeks were pink. She said something I could barely hear. I think it was, Took you long enough.

I didn’t think you’d want to see me. My voice seemed wrapped in cotton.

She smiled at the woman and asked her if she could have a minute, and the woman stood and said, Just the thumb, okay?

Got it, Amelia said, and waited until she left the room.

I sat down across from her. Up close I saw that the prosthetic had a cupped and glossy palm and slender articulated fingers. I didn’t want to look at it. Out the window a large yellow leaf fell from a tree.

Amelia pulled both hands into her lap and began speaking. Her voice was fuzzy. She was talking about Inquiry. I didn’t want to listen to you, she said, but I should have.

I pressed my swollen foot hard into the floor. Amelia—

She held up her good hand. I just want to talk about what we need to do.

Even if they’re alive, we can’t get to them, I said. That’s what you told me.

James says they’re close to a solution with the fuel cell.

How close?

NSP is sending you to the Pink Planet to find out.

I don’t want to go anywhere. The pressure in my ears was worse and I shook my head and opened my mouth, pulled at my ears. I want to stay here.

What’s the matter with you?

My ears are stopped up.

Her face was exasperated. She said something. I think it was, Have you tried— But I didn’t catch the rest. She stood up from the table, hugged her prosthetic to her chest, and hung her head upside down. She pulled at her earlobes.

I got up slowly, bent over, hung my head the way she had. The pressure in my ears stayed the same. I pulled at my earlobes and the two points of pain seemed to bore into my skull, until—

There was the faintest pop and my earache evaporated. I tentatively released my ears. I slowly raised my head and the air was full of sound. A high whistle from a vent, sharp clicking from a nearby breathing-therapy machine, the crunching rumble of a truck on the road outside.

Thank you, I said, and my voice was loud and brittle.

You’re welcome.

She sat back down, still hugging her hands to her chest.

I looked at her prosthetic. Really looked at it. In the background the breathing-therapy machine clicked and clicked and clicked. Does it hurt? I asked softly.

She didn’t answer. In her lap she worked the thumb of her prosthetic back and forth with a popping motion. Sometimes, she said finally. It’s weird. Sometimes it feels like it’s still there.

I’m sorry Amelia, I said.

I know you are.

A man wearing shorts and a Candidate Group sweatshirt came into the room. He sat down in front of a machine and began doing leg exercises. I watched him push the heavy pedal with his feet.

There’s no official rescue plan, Amelia said. Not yet. But that’s what we’re working toward.

I’ll mess it up, I said.

No you won’t.

I’m not ready.

She scrutinized me. You look puffy. Have you been taking the pills they gave you?

They don’t work.

It’ll get better. In a week or two you’ll be ready to go back up.

I started to protest again but she interrupted me. What else are you going to do?

When I was a little girl I had night terrors, or that’s what my uncle and aunt called them. I’d wake in the night standing in the front yard. The icy air prickling my bare arms, and my uncle’s warm hands on my shoulders. It was the only way he could wake me up—to take me out in the cold. I remember the feeling of the sharp gravel against my soft bare feet and the flat black of the night sky above my head.

In the morning my aunt would tell me about the screams that woke them and what I looked like when they went into my room. Red faced and sweaty, my hair a dark nest on top of my head. But I had no memory of those things. I remembered only the cold air against my skin and my uncle’s soft and precise voice in my ear. He said my name, June, June, June, until I came to.

Then he took me back upstairs and sat with me. I remember how quiet it was, my aunt and cousin asleep in their own rooms, the curtains in my bedroom drawn. I lay in my bed, and he sat in a chair next to it. Sometimes he read to me or we drew together. But mostly he just talked, about what he was working on, his students, or the astronauts who trained in the buildings next to his lab.

He talked a lot about the Pink Planet. My moon. He described its surface, rocky and rose tinged, and the silt that blew through the air. From memory he drew the structures NSP had built there. He had developed the solar grid that powered its three outposts, so he knew all the minute details. The first two buildings were tiny, a satellite station with an adjacent landing site, and a remote agricultural outpost. The third was the Gateway, a sprawling complex intended to be the home base of the Explorer program, starting with the second mission, because of the favorable launch windows created by the Pink Planet’s orbit. Each structure had started as a single mobile habitation unit and had been expanded over time, but the Gateway was by far the largest, with living quarters and labs and control rooms and launch pads growing like limbs from its first and central module.

I remember falling asleep to the soft scratch of his pen, with pictures of pink rocks and white modules and shining panels shuttling through my mind.

When my lander touched down on the Pink Planet with a grinding thnnnk, it was night. The landing site was a semicircle of light swimming in an expanse of black, and it felt as if I could be anywhere: the top of a mountain, the middle of the ocean. The moon. Mars. I extricated myself from my jump seat, my limbs stiff with sitting in one position for so long. My right eye twitched and a dull ache vibrated at the base of my jaw. I rubbed my face three times and put my helmet on, secured it, and grabbed my locker.

I stepped onto the surface. I was glad to move. The trip to the Pink Planet had meant too much sitting, too much doing nothing. I turned slowly in place, tried to discern shapes in the darkness. Topography. Anything. There was nothing but an unfamiliar rushing wind. I took a step and my boots sank into the silty soil. And another unsteady step. I reached down and ran my glove through the silt and waited for something. I think I hoped the feeling of sitting with my uncle in the night would come back. The sound of his voice telling me about this place, the feeling of him sitting close.

But my old bedroom at my aunt and uncle’s house, with its paintings on the walls and bookcase in the corner and bright rug on the floor, had never felt more far away. I was standing on the moon that I’d heard and read and thought so much about as a child, that had always felt like mine, and nothing about it was familiar.

I followed the lights, reached an airlock, and went inside. This was the smallest site on the Pink Planet, the satellite station; it housed a staff of scientists and satellite specialists, as well as rotating maintenance crews. There were ten people inside the five domed modules, but two of them were headed back to Earth. NSP had just shut down the planet’s agricultural outpost and they were the last to leave. I was headed to the only other site in operation—the operations station to the north called the Gateway.

I drank water and took a pain pill. I forced myself to choke down an oatmeal bar. Then I helped unload the supplies that had been delivered with me. By the time someone could drive me to the Gateway my eyes were scratchy with exhaustion.