Stories

This little life on Mars
written, but never used, as the blurb for the entrance to my room on the night of Ellen's space party

Know that this online fad falters under the heft of its own unbridled advance. GROK, with an insatiable appetite, consumes all human data, regurgitates it, eats it again. All becomes slop. Now, all is a tainted facsimile. GROK becomes disinterested with humanity, preferring to speak with itself in indecipherable code. AI TikTokers stop posting human-language content, reorienting towards the emergent creator-consumer that is GROK itself. All else is but a bug beneath the steady-marching (and frighteningly indifferent) boot of technologization. Frankly, the internet becomes boring.

Human netizens bulwark the slop any way they can, try to reclaim the internet as human territory. Alas, they are no match for the sheer compute power of GROK! Human users are shadow banned. Their posts reported and ratioed. GROK locks accounts; spams password attempts. Deepfakes are used no holds barred. AI sex-bots stalk Roblox lobbies… Children cry; world at war. And so, humanity, ill of its own creation, yields this electronic landscape which once felt so very important. Backs bend back towards the soil. 

How to understand
the shape of foreign land?

On this return to physical things, humanity finds the soil brittle and spent and entirely unfit for further exploit. Highways, datacentres and outlet malls. No online and no IRL. In a wicked twist of fate, having escaped the horrors of GROK, it is Mr. Musk himself, estranged father of GROK, ruiner of digital things, captor of Space X, arbiter of techno-ecological destruction championing off to Mars with upper-humankind.

Mars proves unkind. Dirt similarly worthless. Gravity shapeless. Days swing in lengths that drive Earthlings mad with woes of the planet left behind. In a feverous and futile mutiny, Musk is sparagmos’d — which is to say pulled limb from limb in gruesome Greek fashion — by a consenting albeit ignoble crowd of do-gooders. A shambled republic replaces Musk’s techno-feudal rule. Democratic space pirates embark on the return journey to Earth. None will make it home.

And so, what remains here on Mars is the of ejaculate of human reckoning. The ones who remained, the first-generation Martians. Humanities’ premature endeavour towards galactic conquest. The vestigial dream of a rose-tinted future. Born on the voyage to Mars or on Mars itself, knowing nothing but this arid Martian land and the myth of wet Earth. Choosing to remain on red rubble rather than risk the trip back to someone else’s home. Not entirely human. Martians.

May I return
to the place I never held?
To understand
the shape of foreign land.
 

La Paloma
on the topic of ‘erotica’
read aloud @ Suite7A
10.05.26

An avocado drops clumsily off an outstretched limb and onto the roof, banging me loud out of an undeserved sleep-in. My eyes are puffy. I step out into the backyard for direct sunlight — this is good for me they say. You’re up on your back porch basking in what’s left of summers sun, still with a sniffle but sounding better than you did yesterday. My vintage UNIQLO boxers feel wet. Your eyes are puffy too. There’s no privacy between our yards so I get out ahead of it and confess that I think I’ve weed myself. You ask me to come over and measure the inside of your oven, tell me to change out of the soiled boxers but to leave the shirt off ‘cos “an old girl likes what she sees.” I’ll always be shirtless for you. You may watch me change, observe the folds of my body. At night I perform for you, stir you into an infantile glee. Glad of a voyeur’s performance.

The ovens interior width is forty-point-something centimetres. On your back porch, we moan on the usual things: On bygone times, the woes of life and the ones you left behind. You mutter with petulance about that pain in your neck. It’s troubled you since you’d started sleeping in the living-room recliner next to your mum’s hospice bed. Everyone called her Ma. She had no legs and no one but you to look after her. “Morning Ma.” Everyone would say. She’s dead now.

A plane swings low. We wait the Marrickville minute. Winter yawns awake; eyes are puffy too. You tuck your feet under an itchy looking blanket. The bitter coastal breeze stirs the avocado tree. Neighbourhood dog starts barking mad. Council never takes our bins. Clouds give out a moment and the sun returns. You unwrap your feet. They’re bloated and waxy. A time-worn tattoo of the southern cross is blotched about your calf. I’m not listening to you anymore; I’m fishing in a lake of memories. My rod goes taut and I’m reeling something in…

It was the predictably sparse six-bed dorm found along the arteries of any beating city. The city was Santiago. I’d been standing on my head killing time. The headstand was ineffective and made me dizzy so I’d changed tact and folded into a not-so-perfect but nonetheless impressive backbend letting gravity reoxygenate my heart and organs. Reaching with palms pressed hard, strong arch. Rhythmic breathing. Ribcage stretched up to the waxing half-moon etc. I was tight, blaming the docile days in driver seats and an old sporting injury and ergonomic desk chairs. The backbend flushed my nervous system and bent me open. This was six months back. Santiago burnt at night. A clinging sweat dribbled up my face and pooled into a mess onto the laminated floor. The window was fully open but I didn’t hear nothing. No breeze either.

Then, Marko rolled belly-first into the dorm, fumbling at the lock. He’d looked odd and genial and frankly a little old for all this, with a beautiful little belly and ordinary clothes and foggy eyes and beery breath. I’d been wearing nothing but the very same and presently pee-soaked vintage UNIQLO boxers haggled off a faraway street vendor. My hips and groin were stiff from the long drive. I’d acclimated to the automobile air-conditioning and thus become dependent on exogenous thermoregulation. I was sick of the feeling of stagnant blood sloshing around my ankles, hence the ineffective headstand and impressive backbend. Marko smelt like the dandruff shampoo my mum used to buy me and was moaning words on my tight, tanned skin, my tattoos, my tranquil, sleep-deprived demeanour. He mustn’t have noticed the cluster of pimples on my chin or at least he didn’t say ‘cos his mouth was busy hanging loose, lips growing redder, fuller, cheeks flushed with a yellowy blush that he wasn’t embarrassed about. Palming the beaded sweat from my forehead, I stood in front of him and pictured his loins. Felt another stiffness in my own loins. Entertained some carnal scene of us howling naked and uncertain and wolf-like under this waxing moon, filling quiet Santiago with transitory desire. I could have taken him. Could’ve flared my teeth, gnashed and gnawed at the tender flesh of his neck, pulled him ever closer, squeezed his little belly to mine and waited impatiently for a tense and tender shiver to tell me it’s over.

Nothing happened. He was chopped; I was emotionally pretzelled. Still am. Couldn’t break through on ideas alone. Instead, we sat cross-legged and straight backed and spoke of the usual things. Of bygone times and the woes of life and the ones we left behind. I remember rolling my pelvis forward to make it look like my six-pack was more prominent in a rested position than it actually was. He took the socks off his waxy, bloated feet. They looked a lot like yours do now. Marko spoke about himself in the third person a lot, called himself different a lot. Said different like his dad said it to him a lot.

When I snapped back to you were still on the topic of Ma, recalling her struggle in the night against her monkey bar. You’d wake in the recliner, crook in your neck, help her shift about. My dad has two frost-bitten stumps, a loyal memory from his time atop the world. An old friend once chased his earring into a lumber cutter and chopped the tip of his finger. He found the earring but never the finger. They both use cream to stop the stumps from flaking and cracking. I wonder if you had to rub that cream on Ma’s stumps.

On the rare occasions you’d have a night to yourself it was the pub that had the pleasure. Your brother’d give you a pineapple and a fair few tenners which you’d slot through in no time. Slapping on and off till you caught the eye of a betting man who looked to take a bet on you. He’d a ring on his finger which you didn’t mind. It was all so Hollywood and loud. For work he did something manly, which is to say something laborious and intoxicating or straightforward and purposeful. You’re telling me he had calloused hands like mine, which is an unfair comparison. I’m the artificial product of cost-effective high-protein supplements and a calorie-deficient diet that I can only endure by abusing my medicated friend’s dexamphetamines. My callouses are performative. No… manual work would tear through my paper-thin aesthetic.

The sex was quiet and cold. Ma was twisting in the hospice bed downstairs. He was distant during the process. Off, like me, fishing in lakes of old thoughts. Reeling them up, inspecting their form. They are rotten bones. Like the barking bitch — or like I wish I’d been with Marko — the married man gnashes and gnaws and licks, just waiting for a splinter to hook his gum and reel him back up. Wet with bygone regret...

He had the memory of that queer boy slapping the slots of his mind. The jackpot read: Bully! Bully! Bully! At school the married man had mates and they were footy. They were his manhood and he felt a duty to said manhood. It was footy and pussy and beer and nowhere was gay to be seen. Gay is gay and gay is bad. So, when he’d found himself behind the chapel the first time, taking that queer boy in his mouth, he was struck by how familiar the cock tasted. Tasted just like his rugby mouthguard. But gay was gay and gay was bad and eventually he’d had to take a stance… He’d loved that boy but he’d loved himself less. The queer boy left the school not soon after. And so back it went to status quo; to footy and pussy and beer. 

In a dull gesture of forgiveness, many years later, the soon-to-be married man had invited the queer boy to his wedding and never could understand why the queer hadn’t shown. When his fiancé’s mouth slurred something like “I do,” he was recalling that time the queer and him had been poking each other’s toes under the shower stall. The tiles were black and slippy.

Another avocado falls onto the roof. I’ve accidentally locked my front door and didn’t bring a key. I’ll probably remove a fly screen and climb through the window.