If This Should Happen, Please Comfort Me

I raise the heavy wooden spade over my shoulder and drive it deep into the soil once again. It’s six in the morning and the sun is just beginning to rise. The world is a mournful blue. Each of my muscles ache. I’m alive with exertion, with the rich, earthy smell of peat, with the muck caking my fingernails and the soles of my garden boots. I pause to catch my breath, jamming the spade into the dirt and leaning over the handle for support. The second I stop moving, the dawn air chills the layer of perspiration and morning dew blanketing my body like a second skin.

I never used to plant the tomatoes this early in the year but recently, as soon as May, the weather’s been so scorching the flowers drop before they even have a chance to bloom. I grow them by seed, just like my father had, before his back got so bad his doctor begged him to give up horticulture and settle down in an independent living community by the coast.

When you grow tomatoes from seed, the plant takes proper root, anchoring itself deep into the earth. With good soil, you don’t even need fertilizer. The plant knows where to find the minerals. How to pull life from the land itself.

Years ago, I cultivated pink and yellow tie-dye berkeleys and striped germans bursting with juice. The neighbours would gather to grab a basketload, and later return with beets, or carrots, or whatever they themselves felt called to raise from the earth. Nowadays, everyone is leaving, and I have the whole community garden to myself. No one can be bothered anymore, with anything slow.

I lift the spade again, and when I bring it down, a supersonic BOOM rattles me. I strike the ground at an odd angle, and the wood splinters beneath my fingers. I drop the two halves with a curse and look up to see one of AstroLife’s monstrous vessels taking off into the atmosphere, ferrying yet another round of celestial pilgrims to the moon. The corporation must have expanded its schedule again. I watch the titanic ship rise higher and higher away. I wonder what the thousands onboard think of the broken blue planet they are leaving behind, but, standing in the midst of my personal Eden, anything beyond myself can’t help but feel imaginary. Insubstantial.

Mission AA6712 returns from the moon at three p.m. and by evening my husband is no longer imaginary, but skeleton, and skin, and the heavy masculine scent of smoke and industry. Anton squeezes past the smattering of leftover friends spread across the table and lands on the chair beside me. He thanks Megan for hosting dinner and congratulates her on her upcoming migration. Megan waves him off, feigning humility.

“You know I never would have gotten off the waitlist so quickly if it weren’t for your connections.” She tilts her glass at Anton. “Pays to know Astrolife’s best shuttle commander.”

We’ve just made it through the first course of hydroponic crudités and microalgal hors d'oeuvres I know must have cost Megan a fortune to import from space. Most people, when celebrating their final days on earth, choose to indulge in all the comfort foods they’ll miss on the moon. Fresh meat. Seafood. Tropical fruit. Dairy.  Instead, Megan seems to have perceived her time on the planet as a sort of tour of duty—the migration, her honourable discharge.

Megan is beaming when she pulls the steaming ceramic dish from the oven and places it at the center of the table.

“Lunar lamb.” She announces proudly.

I poke at the mound of lab-grown muscle fibre when she slides a plate in front of me. Anton jabs his elbow into my side.

“Don’t be dramatic, Sofia. I eat it all the time.”

I force a forkful into my mouth. The meat is soft and tender and pulls apart in sinewy ribbons. This lamb has never breathed or played or lived, and yet, it tastes no different than if it’d been raised in a pasture. I can’t deny, it’s the best roast I’ve had in my life, and yet, I can’t help but feel as if I am choking on every bite.

Anton’s elbow presses into mine in the back of the taxi ride home. I pray that, any second now, he’ll wrap his arms around me—pull me so deeply into his form that I won’t be able to tell the heat of his body from the warmth of my own. Instead, he shifts towards the door, and I can’t tell if he’s even looking at me through the darkness of the car’s cabin.

“The apartment is getting expensive, Sofia. Land tax keeps going up, and I just can’t see how—” He cuts himself off.

Anton said once that even with the artificial gravity, his footsteps on the moon are so light it’s as if he’s floating on air. He's heavy now when he addresses me. “You know AstroLife is working on bio-domes for commercial use. It’s very possible that in the next five years we could have a garden up there just like we do here. It’d be the same thing.”

I stare out the window at the ever-changing landscape. Sparse branches speed past silhouetted by the setting sun. There really should be more leaves this time of year.

“I need to go out tomorrow to get a new spade.” I finally say.

Anton still won’t look at me. “This isn’t sustainable, Sofia.”

For the rest of the car ride home, neither of us speaks again. That night, although we climb into the same bed, an entire galaxy occupies the space between us.

The next morning, Anton doesn’t come with me to the hardware store. Or the general store. Or the supply depot. It’s finally at an antique shop the next town over that I get a tentative promise to call if they hear anything about a spade. By the time I return home, it’s almost evening, and Anton has started dinner.

“Lamb.” He shrugs. “Real lamb.”

We orbit each other around the kitchen. Anton sets the flatware. I lay out the cutlery. At rest, we sit at opposite ends of the table, two objects in opposition.

Anton said once that his favourite part of the journey to the moon isn’t the dramatic thrust beyond the borders of our own world, but rather, the slow sobering descent back to it. He admitted that, sometimes, he shuts off the engine and thrusters and all the other noisy machinations that allow for humankind’s exodus from the Earth, and allows himself to revel in the sobering silence of cosmic space. I wonder what he thinks of the silence between us as he slides his plate into the sink and descends into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

My phone rings in tinny urgent pings. I pick up, and my father’s familiar, aged voice cuts through the noise. “Darling, guess who’s going to the moon!”

When I’m sure Anton is asleep, I sneak out to the garden. At this time of night, the ground is so cold it sears the skin of my back through my nanotech sweater. I appreciate this ignition of the senses in the same way I appreciate the requiem of the few remaining cicadas and the tactile grit of silt between my fingers and toes. As hard as I search, I can’t spot the moon beyond the cloud cover.

I hear footsteps crack the frost layer of topsoil, growing closer to me. It’s a long time before Anton finally speaks.

“The store called. They don’t have a shovel right now, but if you leave a card, they can charge it and ship to you if one ever comes in.”

I don’t correct him. Instead, I open my arms, and he descends to me. Amid the mulch and detritus, we hold each other like fossils from the Triassic Period. He brushes a kiss against my scalp, and I feel it ping between my neurons, shooting all the way down to the tips of my toes.

“Sofia, come with me.” He begs. “I hate that you are so far away. What is there to stay for?”

He works his way down the side of my jaw, nestling his head in the curve of my neck. Beyond him, I see a flash in the murky night sky.

“What would you think if I grew a rose?” I whisper against his hair.

Anton makes no indication that he’s heard me. A cloud drifts overhead and I try to wait for the light’s reemergence, if only to confirm for myself whether it truly was a luminary or just the electrical light from a passing plane. Anton’s hands soon distract me and I allow myself to sink into sensation, stars forgotten.

Mission AC2242 leaves Earth the next day at seven a.m., and by evening, all the crew members are accounted for, except one. They say it should have been easy to miss the asteroid, but for some inexplicable reason, the spacecraft’s engines and thrusters had all been shut completely off. There is evidence that Anton’s escape pod deployed, but it wasn’t found among the Atlantic along with the rest of the crew. They’d have liked to search longer, but a violent, pervasive storm broke out that night, grounding all forms of travel, including the space ferry meant to transport Megan away from our primordial chaos.

In the days that follow, I don’t look for Anton among the stars. Eventually, the storm breaks and I find that the tomato seeds I’d worried would wash away have sprouted, piercing through soil and air in pretty curls of ocean green. I visit my father at the coast, one last time, to send him off. They still search for Anton. Before returning home, I stop by the sea. I wade in,  just deep enough that the force of the tide threatens to drag me all the way in. The waves crash in complete cacophony.

I root my toes into the receptive sand and revel in the noise.