This piece was initially published in Quarto’s 2021 Print edition. It was selected as the 2021 fiction winner by guest judge Hilary Leichter.
Illustration by Mel Wang
My mother had a surgery the year before we moved to Mars. She was a bone-hard woman who liked to wear button-ups and black pants. The nurse who attended her bedside during the long recovery that followed the operation was a plain-faced man named Marcus. In the end, my mother was left with a long, earth-colored scar down her chest, not quite straight, ending just above her bellybutton. She showed it to me once. After she had moved back in from the hospital, Marcus came over to check on her every day, and after she had begun to stand up and walk around again, he kept on coming, until eventually they thought it best he just start sleeping there. In the mornings, I would watch him scratch himself over a massive bowl of my cereal and point his awakening eyes at the news.
There were fires all up and down and everywhere, like there are that time of year each time it comes around. They talked about them on the news, giving them names as if they were famous people. I knew then and had known for a while about nakedness, about adults who liked one another taking their clothes off in each other’s presences. I’m not sure how I knew. Anyway, in the same semi-intuitive way I knew this, I knew that Marcus would never leave, because my mother would find it too hard to let anyone else watch her take one of her striped collared shirts off, revealing the fried flesh of her patched-up body, button by button.
One day I woke up and the sky was dark orange. I heard my mother coughing in big, hollow whoops from downstairs and thought for a second that it was a year ago and Marcus didn’t live in our house. Then I walked into the kitchen and asked what was going on.
“Didn’t you hear, buddy?” said Marcus. “We moved to Mars.”
And I remembered seeing on the news that in the next state over, it was snowing.
Owen Park (he/him) is a senior at Columbia College studying creative writing.