Memory Box

All day long, the children are left to their own devices. They deepen the pits they’re digging, line sticks along the edges to form palisades, pile gravel in the outfields to make cairns like the ones they’ve seen on Mars. It’s a cold week, the atmosphere thin, but like children everywhere, they refuse to acknowledge that sweaters exist. The sky darkens to burnt umber. From their father’s workshop comes the whir of the drill, then silence, then a stream of profanities too muttered to make out. 

What’s he preparing this time? It’s become a weekly ritual. These will be memories to hold onto, their father says. Memories are worth their weight in gold. Do you understand? 

The children always nod, but they glance away from his tight mouth and reddened eyes, embarrassed by his fierce, tender hold on the coping saw. Gold is just a word in the history lessons, like T-Rex and dodo and Earth.

“It’s time,” he calls. In the workshop, the table is clear except for a house rising from its middle. The house has windows and a sloping roof. It’s surrounded by fences. Within these fences, animals cluster. The children gawk. “It’s a farm,” the father says.

The farm looks nothing like the ones they’ve seen on the spaceships or here on their home world, where gravity outside the dome drags anything with mass too strongly toward the planet’s core—the farms here are rows of square plots under artificial lights, uniform shoots struggling upward in a balding pelt, the mountains a dry smudge in the distance.

The youngest child picks up a small, four-legged creature. “That’s a dog,” the father says. The child emits a slight noise and cups the dog to his chest. He’s always wanted a dog. He’s read about them in books. A dog would lick his face, squirm in his lap. A dog would take away his loneliness. The middle child bends to peer into the kitchen. 

“The sink works,” the father says. “Go on, turn the faucet.” 

As a thin gush of water splashes into the basin, the oldest child hangs back. The garden stretches behind the house. The tiny round tomatoes still smell of primer, fresh-painted in a red so bright she can almost taste it. It’s the flesh of gods, her mother had said once. Like ambrosia, with a twist of skunk. She’d bunched her fingers to her lips, released them into the air. 

She’d always been doing things like that—little gestures from the old world, as if she’d stepped out of one of the educational movie clips where the people’s skin glowed in black and white, their celluloid faces relaxed, never imagining exodus might be likely, or possible.

There’d come the day when her mother had grasped at her hand, too weak in those last hours to exert much force. Everyone on this mudball’s just trying to do their best, she’d said. 

Out there, her body floats in space, sheathed in its pod after the sky burial ceremony.

The hovercraft driver had lost his license, but that doesn’t matter. Some people are reckless, the oldest child thinks. And should never be forgiven. But then, against her bitterness, she can hear her mother’s voice, songlike. She can see her—sighing, looking out at the new galaxy, turning to speak, her eyes glistening. Starwalkers, she murmurs. We’re starseeds, spangled through the universe, so far from home. We’re transplants, taking root.

“Here,” the father says. He’s holding out a tiny basket, woven of dead grass.

The oldest child doesn’t ask where he got the grass, or the water. Her thumb and forefinger forage, clumsy and huge, in the tomato plants. Soon the basket is full. The youngest child is whispering to the toy in his hands. The middle child is holding her knuckle before her eyes as a tear of water gathers itself, readying to drop. The father’s rearranging the graveyard, shuffling two headstones closer in the fake peat. And the oldest child’s hearing rain rattling down, or what she’s imagined rain would sound like—it’s pattering onto her toes, dry pebbles of raintorrent pinging against the floor, the tomatoes sliding from their basket, askew in her hand, and the sound is just as if it were pouring so hard the garden soil is drenched through, and she’s in a dark kitchen, her mother canning at the stove, the soft tomatoes brined and sealed, a dog barking to be let in.

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