The Ocean Mystery on Mars

Blow him a kiss and be done with it. Turn your back, no hard feelings. It can be done, honest. Try. Like cutting your fingernails, or trimming your hair or scraping off dead skin with the loofah in the shower, ditch the dead stuff that’s doing you no good, shit that muddies your complexion, ages you before your time.

You have a press pot that strains your coffee to an only so-so degree. By the third cup you’re more chewing than drinking, but at least you’re awake.

The red planet used to have seas, they say. If water is necessary to sustain life then you must be living because you cry night into day. The tears have yet to dry up, though the other end of the spectrum is, shall we say, arid. There’s a well you draw on each time you traipse down the hall of remembering, see all the old portraits hung too high in bad lighting. You didn’t preserve the usual snapshots of pleasant picnics and slow motion swings in the playground and dancing under a mirror ball at some cheesy dance, your attire too much spangle and glitter and an off the shoulder gown, he in a velvet—yes, goddamned velvet—tux. Midnight blue, ruffled shirted and gay. Both of you gay, a word thrown around then without so much loaded into it.

When two kids hook up that early and stay together through all kinds of bad, worrisome shit, not to mention the naysaying relatives, well, you think you’ve triumphed, you believe in life after life.

Then fifty knocks on the door, your children are out doing their own gay thing in the high school under the same mirror ball because schools don’t invest in much for one-night celebrations; they’re more accountable for tests scores and graduation rates, who’s got what scholarship to where college, the statistics they can crow to their public. So your kids will toe-tap along the same gymnasium floor, sneak in liquor, get high in the back hallway near the boiler room entrance (Do they still have boilers? Didn’t heat pumps or something render boilers obsolete?), maybe get knocked up in the Chevy’s backseat (some new model, not an Impala for sure), launch their own starry stories upon some young thing’s boney hips.

You stand before the medicine chest mirror, lifting your jaw to examine the fucking hairs sprouting like so many mushrooms in a dank forest. The moisture of Mars has come to inhabit your chinny chin chin upon which you wield the eyebrow tweezers, expertly. Meanwhile your gay-as-the-day-is-long partner has landed a lover as old as your high school son. He may be your high school son. Your stomach boils and you’re out of antacid.

So blow them both kisses, tainted with sour burp. The laws of physics, when examined too closely, break down, they say. Nothing is ever as it seems. Unseemly, unseamly, the planet’s orbit unravels. Your path’s drawn too close to the sun. You’re gonna burn up, burn out. Sit on the toilet and compose yourself. It’s just a hot flash, which you can sustain. And the red you’re seeing behind your pained, closed eyes, it’s merely Mars, flashing its nuclear dawn in your face.