PLANET GRIM by Alex Behr

Author:Alex Behr [Behr, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Published: 2017-10-11T23:00:00+00:00

MY MARTIAN LAUNDERETTE

Troy paid attention, so things made sense. He stood on a metal stepstool, next to a rattling dryer. His back ached. He weighed 249 pounds (113 kg), which on Mars should have felt like 92 pounds (42 kg, a fucking nymph), but inside the inflatable space-colony dome, he was still huge, lumbering. Colonists were naturally nostalgic, and they had set up the space colony to replicate conditions on Earth, terraforming it with artificial greenhouse gases to make it habitable. No relief for a fat man. At the back of the Laundromat, Troy poked his hand through a hole in the wire mesh covering an air exhaust vent. Someone had inched down through to the other side and cut it out, hoping to steal from the coin-op machines. The space colony was crawling with drug-addicted thieves. All you needed was a clean brain scan to get here, and you could barter pharmas for a baby’s scan from any orphanage on Earth. They always wanted meds.

On Earth’s second day, God had separated the water in the air from the water on land. But on Mars, water was buried underground. The colony pumped and processed it, neutralizing the bad taste. And where water flowed, humans followed. The miners were drawn to the Laundromat not only for the promise of clean clothes but also for the steaming, sudsy water in the machines—it prompted saccharine visions of waterfalls and primal memories, when they were suspended in the saltwater curve of their mothers’ wombs.

The Laundromat, painted Earth’s sky-blue, had two aisles of washers separated by a long folding table. In the back were the dryers, stacked two high. About a dozen chromium miners, all men, were doing their laundry, standing over the machines with their eyes half-closed, humming to themselves. Their faces and hands bore the effects of heavy metal poisoning: mottled brown skin and dark pigmentation on the palms. Mars’s thin atmosphere made the miners buoyant, and they gobbled serotonin re-uptake inhibitors to make them work happily. One sat quietly in a plastic chair. He must have wet his curls in a public bathroom and combed it down. It was greasy on top.

Troy stepped down from the stool, adding the air-vent repair to his mental list of chores, and swept up the ochre-colored dirt. The miners tracked it in, those nasty, poisoned folks with their constant vomiting and diarrhea, no wonder they needed the Laundromat so often.

Troy sipped a cola a customer had left behind. He frowned. He smelled rot around the can’s sharp lip. Microbial rot. The supply ships didn’t arrive from Earth too often. The colas went bad and no one fucking cared. He stuck his hand inside his pants pocket to feel his lucky pebble, his sacred pebble—the one he had found in the dust by a shredded bra.

He needed Bobbi’s attention. She was slumped on a taped-up stool, her butt folded over the seat. She was eating her hamburger and French fries, as she did every day, as if her life as a Laundromat manager on Mars were one extended Happy Meal.

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