narrated by Peanut
I climbed into bed and strapped the belt across my waist. Anything can happen at night, especially if another electrical brainstorm happens. I stared unfocused into the bottom of the bunk above me, and eventually my leg jerked.
Suddenly, we were at the dig, and Kevin was talking.
So guys he said
are we gonna tell Yaan the truth about his momma?
Doing that will bring you lower than her tits. If it wasn't for the lack of gravity, she'd have been kicking them around like soccer balls by the time she died.
If only low gravity did wonders for self esteem. At least this way it take longer for piss to make its way down your pants. Just dig.
Kevin pissed himself right there in the dream, same as he did most nights, and none of us said anything about it because none of us ever did.
"Hey Kevin," Bronnikov said, grinning a grin he only wore when he wanted to see tears,
You want to test Balls Brain theory of gravity?
It's the creature" Kevin said instead, and his voice went thin.
Look. Fuck, just look that way.
Something flashed past the edge of the frame, hairy and huge, built like an elephant crossbred with a fly, and I felt the ground drop out from under all of us at once.
I woke up sweating, the waistbelt twisted into a welt. I wasn't outside. I was in bed. Nobody was dead. Not yet, anyway. I couldn’t get the mental image of an elephant and a fly with a Barry White tape out of my head.
--
At breakfast I couldn't stop looking at my plate. Bronnikov noticed.
I heard you cry like little girl, Balls Brain he said.
You OK?
Had another dream about the Creature I told him.
It's as big as an elephant and looks like a fly. Pours acid on whatever it catches, then sucks it up through a proboscis.
That's fucked up.
They said it's like the bugs back home, man. Just huge fucking bugs. I heard about it before we even left for this shithole.
Bronnikov didn't laugh at that.
The speaker cut through whatever he was about to say next.
You have ten minutes, sand rats.
We scoffed down what was left on our plates for fear it would be reclaimed. Bronnikov reached across and tried to steal some of Yaan's food, and Yaan let him.
The speaker went: Reminder to V. M. Bronnikov, on shift to clean the toilet compound.
Bronnikov's face folded inward.
--
I saw him later, in the compound he hated more than anything else, wearing the brown ratty apron and rubber gloves. He was surrounded by filth on every side and muttering something in Russian under his breath, "Perhot' podzalupnaya," which I never asked him to translate because I already knew it wasn't a compliment to anyone in the room, including himself.
He checked over both of his shoulders, twice, then crawled into the last cubicle in the row. The lock clicked behind him.
I walked away. Some things you leave alone out of mercy.
Down in the rec room, one of the old Terra stations was playing a nature reel. On the screen, a fox was tearing into something, and behind it, out of nowhere, another fox came running.
I watched it for a long moment. Funny, the things you miss. Not the grass, not the sky.
