Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Maybe you study that page for days, for months, for years. Maybe seconds. The page splits your brain into before and after. Becomes meaningless to gather meaning to it.

This page of a liquid language reminds you of pages from a book you were given, about the coast. In the surge of watery lines. The withdrawal at low tide, leaving spirals of tiny creatures behind. Husks and shadows and evidence of something hidden by the water, revealed.

Nothing like a eureka moment. Nothing except you know the others are coming back soon. So you memorize a simple phrase. What you think is a simple phrase, in salamander language. Put the journal back in its hiding place.

You go down to the riverbank, write in ephemeral, rich mud. Words, you think, or symbols. Of greeting. Of friendship. Of solidarity.

What if it is nonsense? Most days, all you have is reality, which is nonsense, too. The mud feels good against your hand. Soft and cool and forgiving.

Crouched there still when the drone appears on the opposite shore. Pain soars in your back, your arm. You squat lower, pivot to cover your message in the shadow of your body. A drone is common, but perhaps not this drone.

A beautiful thing with three glowing eyes, effortless as it comes close. Hovers there. You pretending to be a scrap of dead flesh propped up by bones stuck in the mud.

Who knows who sent the drone. Anyone could have sent it. Anyone could want anyone else gone. Evaporated in a millisecond. Never there. No scrap left to mark the human.

The drone sings to you for a while, querulous. A new thing you haven’t seen before. It is half flesh, has wings like a hummingbird, a voice like a thrush or a wren, the carapace lithe plastic metal. Sings to you like an old friend. Craves a response. You know better.

But in the end, it doesn’t want you. Or doesn’t want you now. No demon sent it. Perhaps it’s a surveyor. Perhaps there’s no intent behind it at all. Anymore.

When the drone is gone, you shudder, relax, forage for food. Just another, ordinary day. Except you’re convinced the factory is pretending now. Smoke is just to pretend it is still a factory, not something else. The drone came from that direction, you realize. Not the town. The three pale men, they emerged from the side of the forest nearest the factory. Did they come from the factory? The smoke used to be invisible to you. Now it feels ominous, like portent.

You forage because your stomach is tight and small and aches. Berries will do. Orange mushrooms you know are safe, even if the forest stinks of gasoline half the time. As you search, the crisp blank pages beckon from the back of the journal like a kind of sustenance. Think on that as you bite down on sour berries to feel the seeds on your tongue. Your stomach hurts less. Mind becomes clear.

You decide to write on those pages. Things you cannot say aloud, that frighten you.

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