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The Complete and Utter Drag of Becoming the Self-Taught Ghost Poet of Mars by Matt Tighe

I am the Ghost of Mars. Self-titled, but who else is doing the naming? And it's not like I've got much else to do. How many times can you watch the sun come up through a smear of dirty sky before you want to scream, or cry, or maybe just go crazy? What a joke the afterlife is.

#

“Don't you want more?”

That was what my best friend Leo used to ask me.

In school he could really psych you up with talk of what we'd do after. Where we would go. He'd get this look in his eyes and he would stare off past my shoulder like he was seeing grand vistas and crowded streets of distant cities and all that shit. After school though, he wouldn't quit it. Not even after we landed our factory jobs, one suburb over from where we grew up. It was like he didn't notice all the faces around us were us, just a bit more worn out. He was always going on about getting out, getting more, getting… something. It got too hard to listen to his dribble.

“Leave it be,” I snapped at him that day. It was so goddam hot, and I was supposed to be over on floor B, helping with the scrap iron. Even hotter over there, and I hated the heat. Funny, how I miss even that, now that I can't feel anything. Funny, but not, you know, ha ha funny.

“Grunts like us don't go anywhere,” I spat. “So why don't you shut up about it?”

I turned away and stomped down the walkway, ignoring the hurt look on his face. Harsh, and I wouldn't have said it if I knew they were going to be my last words, but whoever gets the privilege of knowing that? Besides, it was supposed to be true. I wasn't supposed to go anywhere.

I wish I hadn't.

#

I don't know if there are a lot of ghosts. I don't know if it just happens to some people. Maybe if you were a sailor centuries ago and you plummeted to your death from the crow's nest and splattered on the planks, then you were a ship ghost. And then the ship wore out, and they pried up the boards and turned them into a… god, I don't know, a bespoke side cabinet for some New England manor house, then you became a house ghost, haunting a pastel bedroom, hanging around through the years until the owners turned the place into a Bed and Breakfast and you had to watch sad middle-age couples screw each other and pretend they weren't trying to hide away from their three kids and their mortgage for a couple of days.

I can say with absolute certainty what happens when you stomp away from your best friend on a factory walkway that collapses, and you bleed out on a roll of wiring that eventually gets cleaned up and shipped out to another factory that makes electronics. Then, guess what? Factory ghost. Then NASA lab ghost, desert testing-ground ghost, launch ghost. Space ghost for a bit, which is not as cool as it sounds. Not much to do in space.

I guess here at least I get to watch dust blow about.

And pout.

Huh. That rhymes.

#

I can move a couple of hundred yards from the Rover. If I go too far it's like I'm on the end of a rubber band. I can push it a few more steps, but not much. Add that to the hundred or so yards the Rover can move in a day, and man, I really get about. A few more months and we might even get over the first little hill, get a look around. Maybe the dust is a different shade of red over there.

#

I used to think the months when the Rover was being tested sucked. Out in the shitty desert, watching again and again as the little metal handcart was put through its paces. I thought I hated that place. I thought it was boring. What did I know?

There was one thing, though, that made it cool. Well, a person, not a thing.

Dhama.

“You're so lucky,” she would say sometimes. She was one of the engineers. She would stare right through me at the Rover's insides with her deep, dark eyes, and this little half smile would play on her face as she poked at the electronics. She was the only one who spoke to the Rover, and she did it no matter who was around. One time one of the grey-haired, dried-up old egg-heads said something to her about it and she told him where to stick his laptop. So she was either really important, or a spunk, or mental. Or all three.

“You will be the first to actually be there,” she would say, as she fiddled with the Rover's antennae, or ran diagnostics, or whatever.

“You will see the sun rise through that red dust before any of us.”

There was a note in her voice when she spoke to the Rover that reminded me of Leo. Wistful. Wanting. It made me want to tell her…something. Maybe that she should do whatever she wanted to do before it was too late. That late came earlier than you thought. But guess what? I've never been good at talking to girls, and death had not improved the situation.

#

Sunrise, sunset, once again? You bet. Maybe I can be a poet. The Ghost Poet of Mars, busting my rhymes out to the great empty. I suck, but I might get better. I've lost track of time, or it has lost track of me. It's all just red dirt, red dust, red sky. I don't even get to feel the sting of the grit in my eyes.

I do like nighttime, though. The stars never seem to be the same.

Twinkle, twinkle
Little stars,
Guess who's stuck,
Stuck on Mars?

#

Around and around we go, where we stop, of course I know. We are doing a damn loop in this crater. I'll never to get see what is over that hill. Every time the Rover stops its incessant crawl, I can hear whirring and other soft noises from inside. It certainly thinks its busy doing important work. Why didn't I pay attention out in the desert instead of mooning over Dhama? I might know why the damn thing is going in circles. Not that it would help.

Why didn't I pay attention when Mrs Vickery was going on about poems in English?

There once was a ghost in a crater
Of education he was always a hater
No focus in school
After death stays the fool
Now poetry he hopes will come later.

#

Months, years? How long is either on Mars? How long do ghosts last? I mean, I never saw any others in my oh-so-extensive travels from factory to shiny white lab to desert. No other translucent sad-faced spectres floating around launch command. Surely NASA had a few skeletons in their closet? Am I an anomaly? Am I real? Maybe I'm in hell. What rhymes with hell? Yell? Smell? Or are they just things I can't do? Words are all I have left, so why don't I know more of them? I can't just do limericks forever. And what good are poems if you have no one to tell them to?

My life is red dust
Forever silence and void
I ache for colours.

What did Vickery call that? A high something.

#

The Rover has stopped moving. It has a pretty thick layer of fine red dirt on it now. I think I've been here for a long time.

Last night after the dust dropped I saw what I thought I'd seen the night before. A light in the sky. I mean, there are so many—when it's not dusty, it's so clear the stars are like white shards of ice, cold and deathly and beautiful. It takes my breath away (ha ha). But this one was zooming along in a straight line. An orbit? Not like I would know. It looks bigger tonight, though.

Stars through dust,
Out of reach. Frozen. Timeless.
Her dark eyes see through me
I fade.
I persist.

#

The lander comes down just as the sun comes up. I mean, I guess it's a lander? It doesn't look the size of a rocket or anything.

I doubt it's going to do much landing, though. Expensive high-tech gear isn't supposed to spin as much as that as it falls. It also shouldn't be trailing a half-open parachute.

What a mess this is going to be.

#

When the Rover landed I imagined all the cheers and clapping and hugging back on Earth, the sort of thing you would see on the news.

I don't want to imagine what the response is to this.

The lander hits the ground completely upside down, its rounded nose cone smashing into the red surface so hard that dust and rocks go everywhere. There is an explosion and a gout of flame, but not as much as you would expect from a movie or anything. Still, at least one very large piece of metal goes flying straight through me. There is an ugly tearing sound, and I turn to see the Rover is now two half-Rovers, sheared clean through the middle.

I'm not that sad about it, to be honest.

“Hello?”

I turn back to the burning lander, and she is standing right there next to it. She is in a suit, a spacesuit, but she has no helmet on. Her dark eyes are wide, and behind her I can see a hand sticking out from the wreckage. It's her hand, limp and bloody.

I know her. I'd laugh, not believe it could be her, could not be Dhama of the dark eyes, but she had wanted this so much. Well, not this exactly.

“The ship—it malfunctioned. I was the only one who made it to the lander,” she says. She stares at me, and then all around.

“What happened? Who are you?”

I can't tell her she is dead. Not straight away. But I'm going to say something, damn it. I open my mouth with no idea of what is going to come out.

“Do you like poetry?” I ask.

Matt Tighe

is a speculative fiction writer of horror, sci-fi and fantasy, probably in that order. He is an Australian Shadows and Aurealis Award winner, the recipient of the New England Writer's Centre Varuna Fellowship, and a repeat finalist for the Aurealis, Shadows, and Ditmar Awards. He lives on a small farm in NSW with his amazing children, his patient spouse, & too many animals. His new collection is Drowning in the Dark and Other Stories, which includes his Shadows Award winning story 'A Good Big Brother' plus several award-nominated and competition
winning stories. matttighe.weebly.com

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