Everyone has a poison that kills them. Yours happens to be the planet where you settled to have a child with the alien you love. The child itself isn’t poisonous: it has sticky fuzzy hair the color of jade like its other parent, black eyes almost brown like yours, a hint of gills ready to spread, seven of the cutest little toes, and a smile that looks human but not.
Your child isn’t poisonous, and neither really is the alien you love: when it envelops you, it flows like honey through your synapses, all thoughts melt to flesh, all pain becomes beauty. The alien you love can’t survive on Earth; it would freeze in the sun, shrivel in the sea. Your child probably wouldn’t survive either – it’s technically only half alien, though sometimes you wonder. And so you’re here, wearing a helmet that makes you sweat and a suit that breaks your back whenever you venture out. You take them off for only a few minutes at a time, until the poison creeps into your body and mind, like an icy black cloud, or in your tent where you fill up on oxygen when you’re feeling down.
Today you’re feeling down.
“What can I do for you, my planet around which every satellite revolves?” your alien asks, reaching a sinuous limb through the folds of your tent and stroking your hair with its delicate muzzle. The brief exposure to oxygen makes its skin crumple like gray papier-mâché, but it does this for love, and its touch makes your scalp tingle and your brainwaves synchronize. You’re soothed, until the limb retracts so your alien’s skin can recover. Your alien’s limbs give you pleasure like nothing in the known universe, and yet you know they could snap your neck and crush your skull if they ever wanted.
You don your helmet and suit and step outside, where your alien awaits, quivering. It turns inside out, ready to receive you, though the feeling for either of you is never as perfect as it could be if you weren’t wearing a suit and a helmet.
Your child glides up out of nowhere and wraps its limbs around your padded legs. You almost tumble into the powdery pillows of amber dust that cover the whole godforsaken planet, but the alien you love cracks one of its limbs like a whip and breaks your fall.
Your child hums and whistles. It hasn’t mastered human language yet and you wonder whether it ever will. You hum and whistle back, haltingly, and your child purrs and snuggles and makes you feel for a moment as if it were all worth it.
Your child stays this way for much longer than a human child would. The alien you love has discreetly inverted itself again and still looks beautiful and shimmery, but chaste and decent and parental.
“Okay, love, go play with your friends now,” you whistle and hum, but your child stays like that even longer, answering with something that translates roughly as, “But you’re my friend.”
One moon sets, then another, and you check your oxygen. Finally, your child detaches and glides away to wherever alien children go this time of night, to hunt, maybe.
The alien you love folds itself back into a pulsing receptacle. Your oxygen is low – you should go back to your tent. But looking into the alien you love, you twist off your helmet. You inhale the poisonous air and the black cloud descends into your lungs and spreads through your blood to your brain. You strip off your suit, down to your skin, and slip out of your boots, stepping onto the wretched soil with your bare feet. You feel this alien world seeping inside you, through every pore and crack. The alien air feels like sandpaper on your skin and broken glass in your lungs, and you want to curl up and die.
The alien you love trembles, from excitement and fear.
“Are you sure?” your alien chirrs. “Last time…”
You shrug. “I want you,” you say and enter the alien you love.
For a minute or two, the black cloud and the pain dissipate and you’re surrounded by everything good in the universe. The alien’s receptacle closes around you, its muscles oscillate, your mind is at peace yet building toward rapture, and you know the alien you love feels the same, even as it holds back so as not to pulverize you.
And then the darkness returns. Your alien encompasses you, but it cannot protect you from the outside world. The planet’s gases fill every bronchiole. You go limp, you want to disappear into the gelatinous folds of your alien, never to return to the surface of this planet that is killing you. This is a good place to end. But then the norepinephrine kicks in, you panic like someone drowning, your alien’s muscles feel confining, oppressive, claustrophobic, and you lash out at the innards that gave you so much joy a moment ago.
Your alien lets you go, not without hesitation, not without frustration, and dumps you into the powder that makes you sick.
You drag yourself naked through the knife-like air and glass-like dust to your tent. You breathe in the artificial atmosphere like a drug, to suffocate the loneliness you feel, even inside the alien you love, even in the hugs of your child. But your despair clings to you like alien dust, and even when you inhale as deeply as you can, you cannot exhale the darkness.
When you suit up this time, you walk to your ship.
Through the windows, the light of the whole universe blurs. The farther you sail, the lighter you feel, the more freely you breathe. The black cloud evaporates as you peer through the universe toward your destination, toward the still invisible planet where you were born, your loneliness turns to longing, for Earth where you’re headed and for the poison planet you’ll never again call home.
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Ⓒ Jonathan Huston