A Tissue Floating in Mercury

Sixty years after he disappeared into the sky, Kristen was shocked to find Jack sitting on the foot of her bed, yapping away like he always did. He had turned the light on when he came in, snapping her out of a pre-dawn doze she would have awakened from soon, facing another day of pain, deep aches and stabbing knives dulled by an artificial nurse who always chimed sweet tones while applying the ointment too roughly where the cannula irritated her nose.

She’d watched him regard her with pity for a moment when he’d entered the room, but she understood; her once elegant tattoos now wrinkled like ancient scrolls around her arms and throat. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and his left arm now seemed to be made of silver, iridescent reflections of the sickroom gliding over its surface, but he looked barely a day older. Irritating. He was wearing the same stupid t-shirt she’d last seen six decades ago. Typical.

Jack was running his mouth as people afraid of their own inner thoughts do. At first she’d found it attractive, the constant prattle erasing the 20 year age difference. He was cute and full of wonder, but as they drifted apart again and again, only to re-entangle months later, she had finally realized he wasn’t “childlike,” he was a child. Flighty and petulant, mean at times, pouty and silent at others, there was only one way a forty year old man could have successfully avoided any and all real attachments and responsibilities: he had simply refused to grow up. Taking him all in now she was annoyed all over again.

She wanted to accuse him, not for what had happened on that dark highway so long ago, but for daring to show up now, for this. Kristen slowly raised a bony finger and leveled it at Jack’s face, which she had once called “kind” but which she now hated. He was saying something about attack ships on fire but the gesture silenced him. She croaked “You…” but he cut her off.

“You’re awake?” he asked, shooting a glance at her monitors and commenting that her oxygen levels were awful, that he was surprised she was conscious. He was comparing the smell in the room to Formicidian sugar mines when she barked at him.

The loudest sound Kristen had made since entering hospice exploded from deep within, “Shut up!” she shouted. She then started coughing so hard the room spun black. Catching her breath, she found him proffering a tissue between mercurial fingers. He suddenly looked very sad.

“For the blood,” he said, touching his lips with his flesh hand.

“You dare…” she continued, but could not find her voice as she shakily dabbed the red away from her lips.

“Your lips were red the last time I saw you, too,” he said, “I should have kissed you goodbye.” She bristled.

“Oh, Kristen,” he chuckled and said it didn’t have to be like this. He was right. She could have gone with him. They had both gotten out of the car and approached the craft, but when a door had opened in its side and a silvery ramp flowed like liquid towards them, only Jack had bounded up into the hazy interior.

He had turned and looked at her then, but she was frozen, a thousand thoughts swirling like the mists spilling down the ramp to her feet. They were both backlit while that long moment hung in the air between them, her by the headlights of the still running car they had left behind, him by something bright white and pulsing within the ship. To her it seemed to have been a thousand years ago. How long had it been for him?

He smiled at her bewilderment and explained that because of the speeds at which he had been traveling only five years had passed for him. He told her that he had always cared for her but hadn’t loved her until that moment had stretched between them across that alien threshold. He told her that as that door slid shut between them and he turned into that mist to face the light he had hated her too, for choosing to stay.

She tried to tell him that there had been an investigation, that the case was famous, that she had been on talk shows and experienced a kind of celebrity on the UFO circuit, how it wasn’t Hollywood like she’d wanted but it hadn’t been bad. It was hard to get the words out, though.

He talked for a while about a space emperor and being taken by pirates and museum planets and haunted planetary systems. He assured her that ghosts and demons are real, but not the way people thought. He told her that he had returned because he had always loved and valued her and had wanted to share his adventures, but he had hated her for staying behind on what he could now confirm was a forsaken rock in the shittiest part of existence. He wanted her to know what she had missed out on.

He hadn’t changed an iota. She sucked the oxygen to explain to him that him returning this many light years in the same shirt from some band no one had ever heard of to gloat at an old lady on her deathbed was why she was glad she hadn’t gone. How of course she’d always wondered, how at times it had eaten her up, but look at him, an additional half decade of wisdom accumulated and all of the universe his oyster and he had made a point to come back for what? It was petty. “Petty!” she exhaled and began an explosive series of coughs.

He slid closer and rubbed her back. “Of course you’re still pretty, Kristen. You’re the prettiest girl in the universe.”

Then she did the most spiteful thing she could think to do and raced ahead of him into the next adventure.