Tulips on Mars
I. Closing
Me and Kiefer were closing the shop when Bossman called to say we better clean up extra good since Aero Puffs was coming in for a promo the next day.
“No fingerprints on the bong case,” he said. “And set up a dabbing station.”
Usually, I would be annoyed with his tone, but we were all stoked to host the hip-hop legend. Everything needed to be just right.
When we finished cleaning and counting the tills and drooling over top-shelf tulips, we locked up and hopped the Mars rail to the barracks. I shared a B-Pod with a couple of sanitation workers and was pretty sure they’d still be up drinking, so I took a detour and stopped off at the view park. I sat on a patch of AstroTurf and looked out into space, homesickness waxing with each breath of pumped-in air. A lot of us working-class colonists tried to forget about Earth. About our choice to settle.
I smoked a gram-joint of Purple Peony, my go-to strain for spacing out to the nothingness, Aero Puffs lyrics running through my mind:
T-t-t-tip toe, Tulips on Mars
So high, so far
I’m t-t-t-tip toein’
Tulips on Mars
II. Opening
Even though it meant I couldn’t sleep in, I signed up for the opening shift so I could be here when Aero Puffs came in. I put on my collared shirt with the zig-zag pattern of tulip buds and glittery smoke tendrils, the shop’s Tulip Town logo embroidered over my heart like a badge of honor.
Besides all the colonial brainwashing, slinging Martian Tulips was a decent gig. I’d been a weed head back on Earth and had more than a passing appreciation for these space hallucinogens. I felt like I was doing some good out here.
When Aero’s new single dropped it went double-platinum on Earth and was on repeat throughout the colony. Across the forty-acre settlement, colonists were humming the catchy hook and attempting the overly-auto-tuned effect on the chorus. It was like free advertising.
I got to the shop ten minutes early, enough time to spark up with Kiefer. He was wearing the same shirt as me, but he had put his lip ring back in.
“Dude,” I said. “Bossman’s going to make you take that out.”
“Nah,” said Keifer, passing me the jay. “Not on Aero Puffs Day.”
Maybe he was right, I was thinking. Maybe the song had some truth to it:
F-f-f-freedom on Mars
High among the stars
No earthly bounds
Just that sweet sound
Freedom on Mars
III. Meeting Your Heroes
It got time for my lunch break and we were still waiting for Aero Puffs. I ate my colonial-issued box meal and hurried back to my station, not wanting to miss out.
Customers kept asking stupid questions. Not that I wasn’t used to answering them, it’s just that the visitors to Tulip Town were out of touch with Tulip culture and reality itself.
A middle-aged woman in head-to-toe gold lamé wanted to know if she could over-night a dozen Tulips to her daughter in Jersey. And a spoiled man-boy insisted on sampling thirteen different strains before deciding he would rather have a Space Beer down the street. Someone I thought was Aero Puffs turned out to be a tourist who was only here to snap a photo as proof he had been to the first and only Tulip dispensary on Mars.
Everything on Mars is the first and only, I was thinking. What is the point?
Even though Aero Puffs was running late, the store stayed busy. I felt comforted by the shop’s four walls and the bright buds glowing behind the glass case. I marveled at the variety of Martian Tulip products, all priced for the uber-wealthy space tourists. Without my employee discount, I couldn’t afford a measly gram of the stuff.
“Never meet your heroes,” Keifer was saying under his breath as he walked by with an armload of Martian Garden edibles.
I saw him then: Aero Puffs. Walking through the front door, decked in designer labels and flashing a diamond-encrusted grill. Folks swarmed the star, arms outstretched for a touch. I kept my cool with the aid of the Peonies, my mind mellow and my pulse regulated. When Aero came around the counter, I thought he smiled at me, so I smiled back, offered my hand. He must have been distracted by all the fanfare. He barreled past me and into the breakroom, his voice booming above his own hit single pumping overhead.
“Yo, I’m about done with this space schtick,” he was saying. “Somebody get me a blunt of that good old Earth Weed.”
I must have been up here too long by that point. Must have been as disillusioned as Kiefer even though I didn’t know until that moment. All I could think when I saw the living legend was that he wasn’t all that special. So what if he wrote the line:
Rags to riches,
Bitches and cars,
Gonna get me as far
as Tulips on Mars.
Uncommon Toil
As he prepared for the hunt that morning, he thought of the way his family looked at him each time he came home tired with nothing to show, and he resolved not to return empty-handed again. He had woken before the sun or his children had risen, but not before his wife. She was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. Every morning she bid him farewell with a smile.
“Good luck,” she said. “I believe in you.”
He reached the forest by sunup. He’d been tracking the beast’s movements for months and would follow his worn trail as far as the birch grove where he planned to veer north. There had been nothing toward the south but a set of fading footprints that led to an abandoned den and bovine bones.
Reaching the birch grove, he was emboldened by a new feeling of hope. The patchy white trunks were a break from the blur of green. He sat on a nurse log, host to a clump of huckleberry bushes, and set his satchel on the forest floor amid crawling insects and banana slugs. His wife had been teaching the children her ways of making strained resources go further and ingredients stretch and had packed baked goods for his journey. He had grown used to odd combinations: rosemary-mint rolls, apple-potato fritters.
Today’s savory morsel was his daughter’s invention. She had leapt toward him the night before, carrying a basketful of hand pies, her cheeks rosy and hair tousled from a day of culinary play.
“For you, Daddy,” she had proclaimed.
As he chewed, he swelled with her love and yearned to return the favor. The feeling of being loved through being provided for. Guilt crept up his throat at the thought. What kind of father could not catch a beast for his family’s well-being?
He had brought the bow and poisoned arrows, doses strong enough to stun a black bear. This beast—he had seen it before—stood eight feet tall and weighed four-fifty; a single shot could do the trick. His colleagues laughed when he shared his plan. Their full bellies rippled with amusement. None believed he would succeed as none believed in the very beast he sought.
Spend your time working, they’d said. Not chasing this so-called beast. No one can subsist on imaginary meat.
He had tried to explain that he did not plan to eat the beast. But the concept was one they could not comprehend, their imaginations gone dormant from the dullness of common toil. For the men who worked their lives away for others—bodies laboring in fields—there was no understanding his impossible dream.
He kept an image of the beast in his mind’s eye as he trekked onward. The trail gained in elevation, switching back through old growth and fernery. Flickers chattered overhead as though reporting the man’s advancement through the woods. He spotted a grouping of bent-over saplings and picked up speed, his heart thumping with hope. A musky, overpowering odor traveled the breeze, coming from the north—he was right to have changed direction.
A rock flew across his path, eye-level. Then another. He pulled his collar up around his neck, as though it were a viable defense, and yelled out. It was a yell he’d practiced—a beast call—to the shock of neighbors and his own wife, who, though she supported his endeavors, did have limits. That howl was beyond them.
He had felt bad that day months back when he came into the house from the yard after having nailed the call perfectly. She had dropped their dinner on the linoleum floor, the dog licking up the labored-over meal of potatoes and carrots and a roast of whatever meat she’d managed to talk the butcher into giving her at half-price—her husband was a hero after all, sacrificing for the community to achieve this discovery. To solve the mystery of the murdered cattle.
A rock thudded against his shoulder, the sound a satisfaction, the pain a promise. He sped toward the rock’s origin. A squirrel scurried above, and fir needles rained down like nature’s confetti. His mind was racing with scenes of triumph. Of vindication for the naysaying he’d endured.
He pumped his aging knees, creaking with every lunge as he navigated the forest floor, avoiding roots and rocks, leaping over logs. He readied his bow and arrow, anticipating that magic moment of opportunity. He wasn’t looking where he was going; he didn’t have to. He’d been plodding toward that destination his entire life. Now, here he was, about to achieve his dream of capturing the beast.
He tripped on a root then, tumbling to the ground. He felt a sharp stab in his side as an arrow pierced his body, poison rushing into his veins. The sleepiness was instant. His reflexes dulled, then ceased, and though he saw the ledge approaching, there was nothing he could do to stop the force of inertia, the weight of gravity.
His limp body fell into the ravine, landing with an underwhelming thud. The beast hovered over him, all matted fur and cow-flesh-breath for no one to witness. For no one to capture.
Perhaps the beast felt guilty then for the man’s unnecessary death. There wasn’t all that much difference between them, but for the hairlessness and weaker constitution.
What a soft species, the beast thought. Hiding behind walls and fearing life’s meaning.
Still, he would honor the man. He would carry the body home and find his own vindication among the other beasts in the forest. They would forget about the night he found the cows but left his footprints for the man to discover. They would forget his failures and call him the pejorative Bigfoot no more.
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