Stone (Volume 1, Issue 5)

CW: brief mention of suggested suicide.

Image Description: A person in a puffy, white spacesuit and an oversized helmet stands in front of tall, red stones. The stone on the left is smooth and rounded, while the stone on the left is rough and craggy. Smaller rocks are wedged between the two pillars of stone.

Credit: Nicolas Lobos / Unsplash via Webador

Stone (Volume 1, Issue 5)

by Laura Browne-Lambert

Shonda stretched languidly, squinting at the bluish tint of the rising sun. It looked smaller in comparison to the sun on Earth. It had taken Shonda about a week of her life on Mars to acclimate to the slight differences in the sun. Roughly two-thirds as large as the sun appeared on Earth, Shonda kept expecting it to grow to emulate the summer sun she had loved to watch traverse the sky during school vacations. Since the birth of her son, Jamal, she had enjoyed sitting on the porch steps with him. They would clap their hands and tell stories about the shapes they found in the fluffy, white clouds that stood out against deep azure skies.

Martian skies were different. Mars’ midday skies were yellow and brought out the rusty, red hues in the rocky soil. And the sunrises were blue. A hazy blue that left Shonda sleepy and cold. Thank God, she wasn’t the only person left on this rock. It seemed like a terrible thought – being glad that another human would die the same, lonely death she would – but Martin’s presence gave her courage. She felt less alone, knowing that she wasn’t the only person who would miss out on getting one last hug from their wife.

Shonda sat up and turned her head to check on Martin. Most days, he proved himself to be a late sleeper. More often than not, Shonda had to poke him awake to get him to help her harvest frost to supplement their water supply or go on another food run in odd corners of the devastated colony.

Today, he sat huddled against the wall, resting his head on his knees. He shivered slightly. Shonda frowned.

“Marty, you good?” she called from her sleeping mat. He didn’t answer. Shonda pulled herself to her feet and shuffled his way. “Marty? Hey, Martin!” Shonda tapped him lightly on the arm. He jerked backward and smacked the back of his head against the wall. Shonda cringed sympathetically. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Martin stared at her with bloodshot eyes and a wan expression. “Marty?”

“’M’fine,” he grumbled finally and dug his palms into his eyes.

He didn’t look fine, but Shonda didn’t press him. Instead, she dragged herself to the window. The blue haze of the Martian sunrise stretched across the horizon, a craggy expanse of dust and stone. Her eyes followed a vista that was straight and still all the way to –

Shonda gasped. “Holy –”

Martin looked up. “What?” he asked, his voice flat.

Shonda’s eyes stretched wide. The stone people. “Marty?”

“Yeah, what?”

Marty?” Shonda felt the tingling in her fingers that always came when she had a sudden fright.

“What is it, Shonda?” he asked from his place on the floor. He sounded exhausted.

Shonda beckoned him impatiently. “Marty, get over here.” She waited for him to trudge slowly across the room and stand next to her before she moved aside and planted him in front of the window. She watched his face turn an ashy gray color as he saw the pile of living stones. It had changed drastically overnight. New stones had joined with the existing pile of rocks to create a mountainous assortment of boulders.

“Oh, shit!” Martin looked truly awake, now. “Did they –”

“Yup.”

“There’s more of them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like – a lot more.”

“Yeah. What I don’t get,” Shonda mused, “is how we slept through all that. They had to have made noise – maybe even a small quake.”

Martin looked thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t know how you slept through it, but my dreams,” he broke off. “I think the sounds of the stones would have fit in just fine.”

I should be studying them, Shonda thought. She crossed the room and dug through the piles of junk in the maintenance closets until she came up with a pair of binoculars and a water-stained notebook.

“What are you doing?”

Shonda didn’t answer. Instead, she plucked a pencil from behind her ear and dragged a chair to the window. She settled in, binoculars held to her eyes and waited for something to happen.

“Seriously? You’re just gonna sit here and study them?”

“Basically.” Shonda adjusted the settings on the binoculars so that she could view the detail in the stones.

“Shouldn’t we be arming ourselves?” Martin asked incredulously. “Planning an escape? Something?”

“I am.” Shonda tapped the seat of a nearby chair. “Have a seat, Marty. You can be my scribe.”

Martin sat down automatically and accepted the proffered notebook and pencil. “Shonda, I don’t know how to tell you this, but the research colony was a bust and nobody is ever coming back for us. We should be trying to figure out how we’re going to survive out here. Or maybe we should just open the airlock and go outside without our suits on. But there’s no point to sitting here and staring at a pile of sentient rocks like we’re bird watchers.”

“You can bird watch if you want. I’m a geologist. I’m going to study them. Maybe I’ll learn something about surviving here. If I don’t, well, eventually NASA will send someone to try again, and they can learn from my notes.” Shonda adjusted the dial on the front of the binoculars again. “I’d say the pile of stones has grown by about sixty percent. I recognize some from yesterday, so the original stones aren’t any bigger, but there are new ones.” She glanced at Martin. “Are you writing that down?”

“What did you say?” Martin stared at her.

“I asked if you were writing my notes.”

“No, before that.” Martin looked at her urgently.

“The stones have grown sixty percent?” Shonda’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

“No, not that.”

“I’m a geologist?”

“Yes, that.”

Shonda stared at him. Is he trying to waste my time? “You already know that.”

“What kind of tools do geologists use?”

Shonda put down her binoculars and crossed her arms. “Rock hammers, hand lenses, augers, things like that. Where are you going with this?”

“Got any C4?”

“Dynamite?” Shonda thought for a moment. “For seismic surveys, sure. We kept it in one of the firesafe bins in the lab.”

Martin jumped out of his seat and hurried to drag his spacesuit over his underclothes. “Perfect. I’ll be back in a while.”

“What are you going to do? Blow them up?” she asked.

“That depends.”

“On what?” Shonda exclaimed.

“You’ll see.”

Shonda rolled her eyes. “Stay on the comms!” she shouted as Martin disappeared behind the airlock door. That man’s energy runs from cold to hot in seconds. She picked up the empty notebook left on Martin’s chair and made the notations he had ignored. Holding the binoculars to her face, she resumed her study of the rocky assemblage. She marked her field notes with the new boulders which, though colored similarly, had slight differences in the chipped patterns on their faces, almost as if they had been decorated. Shonda was reminded of the tattoos and scars some people used to adorn their bodies.

The land ahead of her remained quiet until she saw a bipedal figure traveling awkwardly across the outer swath of crumbling research colony. His arms were laden with an odd assortment of materials. What is he doing? Shonda readjusted her binoculars so that she could watch Martin. At intervals, he hammered a stake into the ground, set something at its base, and stretched a lead from one stake to the next. Tripwire, Shonda realized. That’s dynamite he’s placing at the bottom. He’s making a fence out of explosive tripwire. It was a clever way to protect the little survivable space they had left, Shonda admitted, even if she didn’t like the idea of triggering explosions so close to their camp.

“Looking good out there, Marty,” she spoke into the comms. Martin waved a hand her way in response.

Behind him. Something moved. Shonda gasped, quickly setting her binoculars to view the craggy mountain over Martin’s shoulder. High above his head, an appendage grew out of a particularly bulbous stone and smacked one of the oddly shaped lumps on the stone’s side. Shonda watched in fear and wonder as the amputated bulb rocked back and forth in a frenzy until it sprouted a limb of its own. Using its new limb, it levered itself up the side of the stone it had been cut from and settled between crags in the stoneface like a child resting on their parent’s shoulders. Shonda’s jaw dropped as several more boulders followed suit. Notebook forgotten; she pressed the button on her comm.

“Uh, Martin?” she said. “You might want to come back to base.”

“Why, is it lunchtime already?”

“No, Marty, look at the stones.” Shonda looked at the mountain once more to check for certain that she hadn’t imagined what she saw. She hadn’t. “They’re reproducing.”

Want to join the conversation? Follow Underground Bookshelf on social media.

Like what you read? Share Underground Bookshelf with your network.

Rate this story.