Bring your own salt.

T he doctor slides banks of sensors over her bare, slicked tummy. The whole room click and hums.  I bend around banks of green machines aimed at Cathy. Surely you don't need all this stuff for a routine check-up…what on Mars do they all do? Cathy glares at me. She likes this doctor; a  sweet and wrinkly octogenarian. The doctor says, “Nothing can grow here.” “Except new life,” I mumble. “What’s that?” the sweet doctor cranes his head around some contraption. I look at him. What I see is a stick in a grey robe gripping a blinking green device. But also very wrinkly. A wrinkled stick. On this point, at least, we fully agree. To be fair, though, he is almost exactly how Cathy described him. The kind of man who takes the Book of Standard Practices as gospel, who can recite it word by word even after shooting an entire syringe of Red Dust. Except that he’d never touch the stuff because that would be a deviation from the expected protocol as stipulated in section so...

I'm standing with Anne in the kitchen. The windows are flung wide open. It's a beautiful evening. We're sipping wine and we're staring at the gate buzzer. Right on cue, the little white speaker crackles. “We're here!” Anne presses the reply button and returns a tinny “Coolbeans.” She looks at me and says, “It's going to be so classy” and I grin at her. Tongue sticks out the corner of her mouth, she’s digging in her pockets for her gate remote. I beat her to it. A gaggle of students duck under the gate as it’s rolling upwards. One of them turns back and waves. A mom in a white Toyota says Be Good and pulls out of the driveway. Smell of warm cheese. In the lounge it's me and Carry and her guy friends of friends from Durban and Jill Rhodes and Anne and Darren Waters the housemate and also copious amounts of bubbling cheddar. I feel like an adult. Usually when we host a gathering it involves beer spills, broken glass, and at least one chunder in the garden. Bu...

The driverless car drives itself to the hosp—to the Medical Facility. Come on, Max . “You’ve been reading too much.” Cathy. Cathy is my wife and I love her. “Mmm.” “Hello in there—Max? You. Reading. Too much. Again.” I put my book down and I look sideways at her. She’s reclining in the passenger seat next to me. She is my wife and I love her. “I’m reading about Earth.” She scoffs. “Max. Come on. It’s not real.” “What do you mean?” I slide my hand under her hand on her stomach. “It’s not real, that.” She gestures. “What’s real is this.” She squeezes. “Here. Now. Us.” Under my palm I feel the material, the cool synth without texture. What she wants me to feel is the warmth of her skin beneath the lifeless synth and also the life we’ve made together. I think. But what I feel is…well, an entirely a different matter. “You keep reading about the Earth but this isn’t the Earth. It isn’t real. Not to us.” She is, of course, pushing my buttons. I know this. It is understandable. My hand is on ...

"Daddy I want this one." His son stands looking up at him with the picture book held above his head like an offering. Earnest little face. Such trusting eyes. The man knows all about this book. He's read about it, its alleged effect on children. In it are nonsense rhymes and painted images, fantastical creatures worked into everyday scenarios. A surreal cast to it all. Things of shadow behind doors. A lion curled around a little boy's leg under the breakfast table as he eats his eggs. The boy's eyes are glassy, doll-like. A little girl pulled through the slit at the bottom of the door so that she comes out the other side a flat little girl. It's creepy as hell. He looks down at his son. The boy is mesmerized. What has hooked him? What does he see in this, what is it that calls to him? The man can only think of the dark thoughts to which these images lead (to which he is lead), and how all this fantasy can only muddle a developing mind, confuse what is rea...

Men like the immediacy of war. There are no maybes here, there is only the truth of steel and strength of arm. Those dry philosophers do not last a minute on the fields of flying rage, nor do their brains look any different from the stableboy's when dashed on iron and stone.  If there are or ever were any such things as morals, or gods, they are absent. Some men swear they see glimmers of the divine during the heat of battle; an act of heroism, an impossible archer's shot - but afterwards, afterwards the flash does not linger. In the aftermath of armed conflict there is no soft angel-song, nor the hiss of demons in the shadows. Good and evil have no meaning to the corpses, nor to those who afterwards walk the red ruin.  Good and evil do belong here. They  did not make this happen. Nothing belongs, not here where what it means to be mortal hangs from its own bones. Indifference. The survivors nursing spirits crushed. On their faces writ large and disbelieving the e...

 I can’t breathe. How much longer. Do it. Heart slams so hard against my insides surely it hears me. At the dim end of the rotting structure it stands dead still. One leg suspended. Ears twitch, looking right at me. Long eyelashes. Big, animal eye. I’m in it. Mal’s not, and she has the gun. Do it. Shootititdoesn’tknowgodIhavetobrea– The silence explodes. A streak in the dimness. Blink. It’s gone. Just like that. Blink. Head ringing with the report. Behind the shattered glass the rifle barrel angles down and there is her ghost face framed in the window. Dart forward eagerly. Maybe she hit it. Little knot of hope. Hunched over where the animal was. Maybe there’s blood. Back and forth in a grid. End where its horns tore through the tumbled slats. Maybe there’s a drop. “Stop it.” Mal’s behind me. Stiff. Gun barrel across her hips. “What if you wounded it.” Squinting into the shadows and the clutter on the floor. “No." A drop. That’s all. Anything. Nothing. ...