Kai, Venus

Kai is smashed on two bottles lashed down 

with base to quash the doubts, wash them down, 

stashed safe within the living room and the latch of a sash 

window locking out the sound of rash traffic

and ashen memories dash dash dash dashed 

on dotted silent intervals coding names and dates.

Damia, Earth

Damia’s call to the wild was nothing but her heart’s beat, pulsing debt and bad credit. The red of unpaid which she tried to soothe by slowing her breath down to the rhythm of a youtube guided meditation. She should have said she would default this month. Arranged to pay at a later date. But her silence had left her tapping out distress signals, narrating her mental health in response to threatening emails. She hoped the penny in her purse would become a pound. Though this alchemical miracle would not suffice, its promise made light of the purse sprung in her grip.

Kai, Venus

A lesser known tourist attraction in Rome welcoming fresco enthusiasts, that’s how Olimpia had described the place to Kai. She’d also mentioned that you could get a secret tour of the upstairs floors if you managed to sweet talk the security guard on a quiet day. Kai’s visit had begun with a sugar low pre-lunch shuffle, sliding soles along the polished parquet floor. Ignoring the low rumble of his stomach, his eyes picked out lemon yellow flecks biting into the darkness of murky brown and deep blue. Sufficient zest for another lap of the rooms before he smiled at the guard and, with a casual step forward, asked him for an illicit tour of the villa’s top floor. A moment. Before he was taken up a narrow set of stairs behind a locked door, landing in a white washed shabby room, bare and unexpectedly utilitarian, overlooking the bored museum lawn and it’s neat potted lemon guards. A whisper pulled him along into another room, much like the one before, bare and unexpectedly utilitarian, and by the third he knew the fourth and the fifth would be equally nondescript. His attention shifted to his guide, whose steady pace was halted by an abrupt pivot so that he now faced Kai and shielded behind him an ornate set of double wooden doors. Theatrically the guard rested the tip of his index finger on his cheek and said, kiss? No, he said, kiss. Kai lightly pecked him on the cheek and felt the security guard grab his wrist as he leaned in.

Olimpia, Mars

Since the move to Mars, Olimpia had been reading a book of collected poems by Paul Celan before sleep. It hadn’t been an overly conscious choice, rather the first thing unpacked from the capsule on arrival a year ago. It had suited her mood then, slowly twining a papery tie to the memory of life on Earth. As she flicked through it, looking for where she had left off, she came across a pressed rose, complete with stalk and flattened leaves. The intimacy of the encounter stilled her pointed index finger, softly hovering mid-air over the page. Between the German and English parallel texts a new language had entered the book. Her finger tried to trace it and relay pronunciation to her lips.

In reverie, she had wandered back into the two day old sensation of blooming warmth within her chest that had overcome her as she watched a film on her air screen. An unexpected moment of closeness in what had otherwise been a slightly dull artist’s video on the subject of mutualism, that had risen to collective consciousness during the Earth’s COVID-19 pandemic. Compressed into a sentence, mutualism was an ecosystem theory in which interactions between two or more organisms were beneficial to every party involved. It sat at the opposite end of the table to the Darwinian metaphor, survival of the fittest. Mars had certainly not risen to the utopian vision of mutual care. Its colonisation had come after the mining of the moon for helium, and the same logic of extraction, with its singular benefactor, had founded the human presence on the planet.

Olimpia had been caught up in a fantasy of a future not far off mutualism when she committed to be a part of the cultural division on the third settler mission. On her first week at the Noachis Terra settlement she had attended a gallery opening in an old oxygen tank storage facility by the supply store. It was a tiny space, making a gathering of twenty-five feel like an overbearing crowd. She had squeezed through the gully formed between turned backs and wall, hung with small drawings depicting their martian landscape, finally arriving at the iron oxide-red gravel track outside. There, she had struck up a conversation with a middle aged white man, the gallery owner it had turned out, who after gathering information about her activities on earth told her, in Noachis we like to make sure people are nice. The sibilant scraped on his tongue like a knife flicked.

Urging herself back to the present, Olimpia found that she stumbled once again over the memory of the film screening and the Q&A session that had followed it. The artist’s lack of acknowledgement of the history that allowed his body to circulate without risk or question through space as he lectured on utopian visions of mutual care, boiled up hot in frustration. In the heat of the moment the best she had managed was a fumbled question lumpen with the phrase, ‘white male privilege’. The artist’s face crumpled at the words, leaving her ablaze with guilt. The host of the event chipped in, smoothing over the question. Despite the sales pitch of critical discussion and out of the box thinking, art seemed to be an industry guided by a sentiment of pleasant, conservative celebration. She sat, with pointed index finger softly hovering mid-air, contemplating silence; a rose crushed lifeless in between the pages of an old book.

I, Mercury

Kai sends me a new demo tape and follows up with a phone call asking me if I’ve heard from Damia. No, I tell him, she’s been quiet for a couple weeks. The phone rings out and she doesn’t reply to messages. And no, I haven’t called the police, coz I’m holding onto the last message she sent me. She’ll be away for a month, followed by an all caps, DO NOT WORRY. Which, inevitably, leaves me drowning in the stuff.

I tell him I’ve been coping by reading unsolicited phallic-phone-poetry pinged to me through dating apps. 

dip it low, 

lick, and 

suck my dick

Kai counts the syllables speculating it’s a haiku. It reminds me of a pearl, I say, grit jabbing into the soft flesh of my thumb wanting to become a pretty, gleaming bead.

Damia, Earth

Fuck it, Damia wasn’t going to pay the bank. She was going to do a runner. She swiped clothes and toiletries at random into her pink camouflage backpack and chucked it into the car along with pillows and a duvet. Some tins of food and a torch followed, the later giving her chaotic exit a semblance of forethought.

It didn’t take long before she was out of the city and the darkness became woollier, tightly packed around the beams of her car headlights. The rain was hard, lit up into broken white lines extending out in radial formation from the top right of the windscreen. It reminded her of Star Wars graphics used to denote accelerated time travel. In this elemental relativity her escape felt sluggish and painfully earthbound.

The wheels droned on through the unrelenting rain. The digital clock display told her she had been at this for three and a half hours. It was time to turn off the main road, move deeper into the shadows of the barely silhouetted mountains. The dirt track was framed by glistening grey grass and just ahead, a grouping of deer looked back lazily at her. Six glowing yellow planets orbiting around an unseen star. Swiftly eclipsed by a turn of heads and breezy hop across the road.

Inching along in search for a place to park overnight, she found campers took up most spots. They had surged through the pandemic and the resulting holiday flight cancellations. Her headlights at last shone unimpeded into a free lay-by surrounded by beech trees. She switched off the car engine, fading into momentary silence before the shimmering chorus of the beech gathered volume in the wind. The logic of capital had flexed and shifted — money did grow on trees in a crisis — but only to keep credit card bills going. The old-normal’s burning pit of debt, glowing warmly into the future.

I, Mercury

Damia wants more Kai. Yeah, Kai, that guy I told you about who lives to get high. I don’t want her to get hurt, but she’s insistent she’s in love. So is he, I tell her, with alcohol. She won’t listen, and I hate mothering, so our conversation stalls.

Where do these soul wounds come from that leave us inebriated to survive? Searching for dopamine highs from work, porn, alcohol, heroine, shopping, food… My bank says it’s concerned and has partnered with Mental Health UK. I ask Damia if she thinks they could help out, help out with Kai?

Thanks for reminding me, says Damia grimacing, I need, need, to pay my credit card today.