Dang, I been gone a long time. Been swaying away from the parenting funnies and doing some more creative writing. I just submitted a story for a contest at NYC Midnight Movie Making Madness and thought I’d throw it up here for fun. The genre was science fiction (which I love watching in Film and on TV but have never written); the subject “house cleaning.” Thanks for reading!
Clean for Life
She found what she needed within days of meeting him but she’d had to stay with him, posing as his housekeeper, for two full moon years since. At home on Planet 10, that was enough time for her to grow her long hair out and cut it twice.
Not that there was much of a house to keep in this godforsaken expanse of desert dust he called home. There were four small rooms underground covered by a semi-circular solar dome which she had first seen on foot from a half-kilometer away. Even near death, scorched from the planet’s four blistering suns, she’d been reminded of pictures of Earth’s Louvre museum in Paris in the ancient history books her mother used to read to her at bedtime. She and her mother traveled the galaxy without ever leaving P-10. Now here she was on P-13, without her mother and no way to get back to her, no way to save her life. But she kept hoping anyway.
She sighed and tossed her black hair over her shoulder as she swept the dining nook. He was out now, skimming the near ridge for the three indigenous plants they could eat. All the others were poisonous. He’d learned which ones were deadly by eating one every few weeks and recording the effects on his body. Most of them caused violent retching, chills and a fever that would kill any other human, born or cloned. But he recovered fully each time to test yet another plant until he’d tested them all.
“I’m glad I did it before you got here,” he once told her. “I’d never forgive myself if you’d eaten the wrong root, if you’d suffered that way.” He had laughed ironically at his own words. “And that would be one hell of a long time to not forgive myself.”
That was why she had left her mother’s home five moon years ago to find him, why every government official in the galaxy hunted him. Every human on all twenty-two planets knew of his immortality. And they all wanted it for themselves.
They had their reasons, some of them noble. Dilnek Ram, P-8’s leader, had spent his whole life fighting to eradicate a deadly disease confined to his planet. The sickness had killed many and quarantined the rest of the planet’s residents, including him, from interplanetary travel. He simply wanted his people to live, explore, intermarry with those outside the boundaries of their native atmosphere. Jam Sim of P-14 had a similar problem, different disease. And P-18’s Sol Tum, who drew criticism from the Interstellar Council for her idealism, wanted her people to live forever just so they could all eventually find their true callings and enjoy passion in their chosen work.
But he was hiding from people like Mosk Ruul of P-22 who wanted his DNA to clone an army of similar geniuses to fulfill his eon-old quest to rule the galaxy. Tar Sil of P-1, a former friend, cared not for any precious blood composition, but only for revenging the loss of Sil’s love interest to him.
There were countless others with desires to use him for their own selfish purposes. She just wanted her mother to live.
She heard his footsteps descending the stairs and looked up from her sweeping. After he had learned to trust her enough to tell his secret, he told her his body was 118 moon years old. But his face belonged to a man a fraction of that age. It was tanned gold from the suns, which seemed to shine from his ocean-blue eyes when he saw her.
“I’ve gathered enough to feed us for some time,” he said, smiling. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind making the mélange dish tonight, since we have plenty of all the hornish roots now?” He looked at his feet and then back at her, hesitantly. “Maybe … uh … I can help?”
In all this time he had never offered to help her cook or clean.
“Oh! I … well. Of course,” she said, trying to hide her trembling hands.
The time had come to tell him the truth.
***
It wasn’t that she had told him only lies all this time. She really had landed on P-13 – his hiding place for almost ten moon years now – accidentally. The ship she piloted throughout the galaxy and to four planets before this one was old and neglected, discarded by its owner to a junk shop to be recycled for parts. She knew when she stole it and left her ailing mother, who begged her to stay and let the way of nature decide, that it might fail her. And it did. But miraculously. The crash had not killed her, and it brought her to him.
She had walked away from the ship’s smoking fragments with only a small satchel of food and her scanner – a device her now-dead father had created and tinkered with in his work tunnel for most of his life. The scanner was unique in the galaxy; its existence was known only by its creator, his wife and their daughter. It could clean for and scan DNA material and clone any living thing. It had been used only once. Her mother had enjoyed the honor, and her father had cloned their precious dog lost to disease.
When, days after the crash, she stumbled over a crest that looked like countless others she had crawled over and saw his solar dome, she instinctively dropped to her knees and frantically clawed at the dust and sand until she hit red clay. She removed as much of a hole as she could, snapping off each of her fingernails, and half-buried the scanner there. She had no idea then that she would need to come back for it. But she did.
On the verge of unconsciousness, she crawled to the dome. She never reached it and remembered only the hazy red aura of a human-looking orb walking toward her before she collapsed in the sand. When she finally awoke and her eyes were able to focus on her surroundings, she found herself lying on a small cot and covered by two thin white blankets. A warm sensation much different from scorching suns’ heat ran through her. As the room came more clearly into focus, she gently turned her head. He sat against the opposite wall yet close to her, on the floor with his elbows on bent knees, staring at her.
“Can you hear me?” he asked in a calm, firm, voice.
She nodded.
“Can you see me?”
She nodded again.
“Can you talk?”
She opened her mouth and rasped a croaky “yes.”
“Then you need to tell me right now why you came here.”
Startled, she locked eyes with him. And she knew. Even before she regained strength, walked again, retrieved the scanner, and cleaned the house of his hair and fiber and mucus and DNA, she knew. But it all exploded into her mind in an imperceptible moment and she answered without hesitation.
“My … ship crashed. I was on … my way … home. P-10.”
Maybe he had known, too.
“Where am I?” she croaked.
He stared at her, not unkindly. After a very long time, he answered.
“P-13.”
She grinned at him, the hinges of skin in her lips crackling.
“Good,” she said. “Never been here.”
Then she fell into a fast, deep sleep and woke, as he told her, ten days later.
***
They stood next to each other in the tiny cooking alcove, her chopping the roots, him taking them from her and searing them on the cookstove. The living quarters were small and she was accustomed to standing close to him, but this time she felt a rush like she felt each time she launched her ship, hoping it would rise again. She felt her cheeks flush hot, and did not look at him.
“You’re doing well with those,” she said, gesturing with her knife to the cooking food.
He laughed out loud. “I know it’s hard to imagine since you’ve been doing this for me for so long now, but I actually did cook for myself once.”
She giggled. Giggled? She could not remember ever giggling in her adult life.
“I didn’t mean it that way. Well, yes I did. I didn’t think you could make something that looked appealing enough to eat.”
He returned her teasing banter, a first for both of them.
“Well, it is a secret I’ve kept all my life. I’ve been working and honing my skills in this little cave for many moon years. I can cook.”
She sensed him smiling but his words pierced her heart like a laser. Her father’s face flashed in her mind, how animated it was when he worked, how proud it was upon revealing his scanner to his family one evening long ago. Then, her mother’s face – gentle, fair, soft with love for her only child. Tears welled up in her eyes. One dropped onto the blade of her chopping knife and glistened on the metal.
She dropped the knife on the counter and backed away from it, sitting down heavily in a chair behind her. He turned and, seeing her anguished face, lost his own smile. His eyes searched hers, still running over with tears, and it seemed to her that he understood. But how could he, possibly?
She wiped her eyes with both hands, inhaled deeply and looked at him directly.
“I knew about you from the first day,” she said, hugging her arms across her chest.
He turned and set down some roots. He turned off the cookstove, faced her again, and waited.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and meant it. “Please wait here for me. I’ll be back.”
She stood tall and looked at him softly, then ascended the stairs and went out through the dome into the dust. She had re-buried it closer this time, just over the first crest. He would have seen her doing it if he had been home. But she had chosen solitary times to dig it up, use it, bury it again.
She came to the place and quickly unearthed the scanner. She wiped it off with the hem of her tunic then fit it on her right hand. Nearly two moon years since she had worn it and it still fit her hand perfectly. Its rectangular blacklight nestled snugly in her palm; the plastisene fingerprint covers molded to the tips of her four fingers; the thumb-mounted fiber vacuum and nanoscreen fitted to the back of her hand – all of it exam-ready. Her meticulous, genius father had made a flawless machine.
She returned to the dome and descended the stairs wearing the scanner on her hand. He was still standing against the counter, eyes gazing at the floor, arms crossed. He looked up when she entered.
“I didn’t know it was you when I landed,” she began. “But I knew before you told me yourself. I’d been looking for you for almost three of your moon years when I crashed, and I’d almost lost hope. I didn’t even know what you might look like since the last pictures of you were taken so long ago.”
He didn’t respond, just continued to look at her serenely. She went on.
“But it seems you really don’t age.” She looked at him tenderly. “You look just the same.”
“Go on,” he said, with an air that told her he was tired of seeing his unchanging face in the mirror.
She held up her right hand. “My father made this. He was brilliant, truly unparalleled. He finished it before he died, but on his deathbed he refused to let us use it on him and forbade us from telling anyone in the galaxy about it. He wanted us to destroy it, but my mother saved it when he died. To keep a tangible part of him with her.”
He nodded in response.
“I know the feeling,” he said evenly.
She continued. “You believed my story and kept me on here with you. I knew I didn’t have any way to get back, but I just had a feeling when I opened my eyes on that cot and saw you … have you ever felt that way? It’s like your body inflames and your heart swells and you can feel the blood course through your neck? And you just know?”
He turned his eyes to her and she saw his answer.
“Yes,” he said. “I have.”
“I was cleaning one day and, I’m sorry. I rummaged through your desk drawers and found the handheld hologram device and turned it on. I saw the message from the Council. Then I went out while you were on the ridge, and I dug this up from where I had hidden it when I crashed. And I came back and cleaned some more.”
She walked to him and flexed her hand, powering on the scanner with a whip of her wrist. The blacklight glowed cobalt blue. She picked up his hand, turned it palm-up, passed the blacklight over his thumb. A single, miniaturized fingerprint reflected in the nanoscreen on the back of her hand. Then she ran the thumb vacuum over his tunic, sucking in a loose blond hair that had fallen there. The strand, and the DNA readout, appeared on the nanoscreen.
She flicked her wrist, powering off the scanner. Then she took it off and placed it in his open palm.
“My mother is sick,” she said, looking deeply into his eyes. “That’s all. There’s nothing else, never was.” She nodded to the scanner. “Take it. Mother kept telling me nature should decide, anyway.”
She turned and began to ascend the stairs.
She heard him clear his throat and say, “Your ship can fly.”
She faced him again, standing on the stairs.
“What?”
“It’s over the tenth crest, to the north. You can leave if you want.” His tanned face was soft, his eyes bright and focused on her.
“But when …?”
“I have stores and stores of roots, darling girl. There were no skim trips to the ridge. I guess we’re both liars.”
She descended the stairs and went to him, slowly wrapping him in her arms, kissing his tunic in the place on his chest where the errant hair had been.
He held her tightly and said into her hair, “There’s a vial for you on the launch controls. It has what your mother needs. I figured long ago you were here for it, like anyone would be.” He pulled back and looked at her. “But you’re not like the others. Are you?”
“I’ll come back,” she said, her heart hurting.
“You won’t.”
She kissed him full on the lips, pressing hard, then spun on her heels and ran up the stairs and out the dome.
He looked at the scanner in his hand. At least he would have a tangible part of her with him.
Forever.
