QUICKSILVER, by Lonni Lees

Have you ever noticed how things look better from afar? Nearing the end of a flight, as the plane descends, the beautiful neon lights lie scattered below like a million multi-colored stars. But walking in that same city, you kick away the litter on the sidewalk and sidestep the piles of dog feces and empty bottles. A homeless addict lies curled in a fetal position in the shadow of a doorway, sleeping in his own vomit as rats scurry across his ragged clothes and nibble on his gnarled hands. On the same street you see a beautiful woman walking toward you, the street lamp forming a halo from behind her auburn hair. As she passes, you see her blemished face, the dark circles beneath her emotionless eyes, the needle tracks marching up her bare arm like a hundred fire ants.

Once, when my wife Sophie and I were on a road trip, she spotted a beautiful bush pregnant with brilliant red roses. I pulled over and stopped. She ran up to the bush and bent over to inhale its spicy essence only to be repelled by the sight of hundreds of aphids crawling across its crimson petals. From afar, the moon is magic and the earth is a peaceful orb of shimmering blue. Up close our planet teems with pestilence, war, tragedy and grief. Like I said, everything looks nicer from a distance.

My name is Sam. My profession as a geologist has taken me from Mexico to South America, from Africa to the dry heat of the American Southwest, each assignment a new adventure. I’ve been on the moon for three months, walking the rims and domes and grabens, analyzing its selenology and collecting samples. The goal, if it’s determined there are ample amounts of key minerals, is to set up permanent mining facilities at the most promising sites. Five more days and they’re sending the ship to come for me. Food and water supplies are running low and all I want is to go home to Sophie and our daughter. I’m sorry I ever volunteered for this mission. Even a geologist can get bored looking at rocks month after month. And the lack of human contact is swallowing me. I long for the sound of running water and the scent of pine and the sight of lush, green leaves and the sweet smell of Sophie.

Flawed as it is, I miss my planet Earth.

I sit here, looking out at my home planet, filled with an overwhelming longing. It’s beauty calls out to me. Something beneath me reverberates, like an aftershock. A brilliant flash of light burns my eyes, temporarily blinding me. As my vision clears multiple mushroom clouds reach to the heavens from the Earth in noxious tendrils, then more and more until every continent is enveloped in their deathly poison. It takes time for my brain to register what is happening. In one insane instant earth has turned from blue to the poisonous yellow of death. Man has finally pushed all the red buttons and destroyed himself, obliterated his own planet, destroyed his own home. I hear my own screams.

All is gone.

Sophie is gone.

As is my precious daughter.

The ship that was to come to my rescue is no more.

I scream into the nothingness, weep for my loss, cry over my own fate, destined to die on this alien landscape. Alone. Forgotten. Sleep finally comes, filled with nightmare visions and longing and loss. A soft sound, like wind chimes in the wind, slowly lures me to unwelcome consciousness.

She, if you could call it a she, stands before me. A vision, a hallucination? Her eyes are dark as the black universe that surrounds us. Her naked gray skin shimmers, smooth and sleek as quicksilver. She is beauty. She is ugliness. My heart races as she reaches out to me and I face my moment of death.

I freeze as she wraps her long fingers around my skull and looks silently into my face. She tilts her head as if studying something deep within me. I wait, welcoming the moment when she crushes my head with her strong hands and ends my nightmare. Instead of death, the beautiful sound of wind chimes again escape through her thin lips.

I thought I’d never hear the sound of another’s voice again, but then the creature slowly forms words and speaks to me.

“Sam. No afraid,” she says. “No sad. Come.”

Numb, I follow her across the forsaken landscape and into an entrance that tunnels deep below the moon’s surface. My eyes adjust to the darkness and this hidden world beneath the seeming deadness above. Sheets of water cascade down the rock walls. Life-giving water. She captures some in a small container and hands it to me.

I don’t know how long we’ve been here. It could be days or weeks or months. I call her Quicksilver and with each passing hour she becomes more beautiful, her un-nippled breasts and the curve of her hips an increasing temptation. She is kind and gentle and she seems to read my every thought in her determination to ease my loss. Although I still ache for Sophie, her image becomes more distant with each passing day. But nothing heals the loss of my daughter. Her innocence, her life, was taken from her along with millions of others in the final gasps of a hostile planet gone mad.

A planet gone forever.

And I alone have survived, to live out what time is left to me in this alien world.

Quicksilver walks over to where I sit, leans down and sits next to me, snuggling against my body.

“You hurt,” she says softly. “I make better.”

“I’m trying,” I say as she wipes the tears from my cheek.

“Me. Baby. You.”

In her infinite empathy, this beautiful alien creature has taken my pain as her own. If there is a god what would he think? Am I to continue in this loneliness or am I to embrace the unspeakable?

My hands caress the length of her smooth body as she holds me closer. Slowly, my fingers reach between her thighs then hesitate. I spread her legs and reach my hand between them, feel the smoothness, the strange smoothness. There is nothing there but the same sleek skin that covers the rest of her body.

Confusion.

“Different,” she says, rising. “No worry, Sam. Me. Baby. You.”

Quicksilver stands, smiling down at me. She reaches her hands over her head and stretches. And stretches. Her body elongates and thins as it reaches up toward the ceiling of our tunnel. Her form distorts and her screams of pain shatter the darkness. The screams become more and more intense as I watch her form slowly rip in two like an amoeba. I close my eyes, but am unable to block the sounds of her torment.

Finally, silence.

“Me. Baby,” she says.

I open my eyes and Quicksilver is standing over me. Smiling. And next to her stands her mirror image looking down at me.

“Happy now. No more lonely,” says her perfect clone.

I am laughing.

I am sobbing.

I am home.