by Ryan Gebhart
Unamused, Jovas takes out his earplugs, then unlatches a gate on the fence and walks out to the killing floor, where the pile of guts lies on the transparent tarp. I follow him, not taking my eyes off of the gray killing machine. If it wanted to, it could do the same to me as it did to the beast, before I’d even get the chance to react. My belly — my soft, easy-to-cut-through belly — tingles with exposure. But the box is nothing more than a gray and benign-looking thing again.
Jovas kneels in front of the box and picks up the beast’s head — which is nearly as big as he is — and plops it on top of the innards. He takes a zipper on one end of the tarp, and each end comes together until it becomes a sealed and see-through trash bag.
Another Centaurian approaches, walking beneath the shadows of headless beasts. His massive eyes are tired, his posture slouched, and he’s got farm muscle like Jovas, but it’s been buried by time and hardened, old-man fat.
He stops within a foot of me and looks up with a scowl. He has two vertical scars traveling below each of his eyes to his chin, as if he’d gotten clawed by a beast at one point. He has the same bloody butcher’s smock as Jovas and the same discolorations on his face as Karo.
Wait. This is probably Karo’s grandma. She stares me down. Her pupils constrict and her irises widen, and they’re a brilliant green color. I get that warm, wet feeling behind my eyes, just like when I first met Karo. Then, as if losing complete interest in me, she grabs a pair of handles at one end of the trash bag. Jovas grabs another on the opposite side.
“What are y’all doing?” I say.
He points out the barn doors to where the land slopes down toward the forest. “We carry it to the creek.”
“Don’t you have another machine that can throw this shit out for us?”
Karo’s grandma snarls, her mouth widening like a guard dog threatening to bite. She takes off her smock, throws it to the ground, then lunges at me. Jovas grabs her by the shoulders, and he’s using all his strength to hold her back. She swats his hands away and gnashes at him. He looks at her — almost into her — understandingly, knowingly. Her eyes get soft; they get sad; they well up with tears.
I say, “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. Does she not like cuss words?”
She buries her head in Jovas’s chest, sobbing uncontrollably. He comforts her, stroking the top of her head. He says to me, “We know how you do your Thanksgiving. Your butchers throw away the turkey head. Some keep the necks, and maybe you make a tasteless gravy from its bodily juices and what you call giblets. You pay no respect to the animal and its sacrifice.” He points at the bag. “This tradition dates back one thousand generations. We eat the brain to give us wisdom. We eat the testicles to give us virility. We eat the heart to give us compassion. We eat the eyes to give us clarity. We eat the intestines to give us humility. You wanted to come here for dinner. This is what we’re having.”
He’s trying to talk me out of this. They want me off their planet, to go anywhere but here with them. I’m Karo’s invited guest, but I’ve never felt so uninvited. I’m repulsive and maybe even offensive to his grandma and his boyfriend. But Karo brought me here and there’s a reason why, and it’s becoming more likely that the reason hasn’t occurred to me yet. The Rayan War is about to start — if it hasn’t already — and I’m no closer to stopping it.
I say, “Could I help you carry this bag and give Karo’s grandma a break?”
“You’re not strong enough.”
“I know I look skinny, but I can do this. I work construction.” Never has such a simple comment felt so absurd. Like he really cares that I help Mark and his dad remodel houses.
Jovas considers it, looking me up and down. I can lift a lot of weight for my size. Like this past summer, I carried twenty slabs of sheetrock into a house we were remodeling. Shugar couldn’t believe it. He said I must’ve been harnessing my Scrobo powers. The slabs were heavy as hell, but I wasn’t going to complain.
Jovas gives me a nod, and we each lift our end. I expected the bag to still be warm, but it isn’t giving off any heat.
“Whoa, whoa.” The weight inside shifts and sloshes right up against my face. The only thing separating me from the beast’s head staring vacantly with its tongue lolling out is a membrane thinner than Saran wrap. My knees buckle and my arms strain, but I hoist the bag and the head settles to the center.
Jovas backs out the barn doors with ease, and I can’t show just how hard this is for me. So I say as casually as possible, “What is tonight’s dinner a celebration of ?” I’m breathing and fighting through the throbbing in my lower back and the burning in my forearms and biceps, but none of that compares to my quads. I’m having to do this squat walk to keep the bag level with Jovas, and they’re screaming for me to stop pretending that I’m strong enough for this.
He takes his time talking. “To commemorate the dead. Our ancestors once built a ship to travel to Earth. It was struck by a piece of space debris during its flight, killing everyone on board.”
We’ve got to be carrying over three hundred pounds, and Jovas gives no sign that he’s struggling. He’s the one walking the bag backward, yet he seems to know all the places where the path curves.
“Really? Why?”
“One thousand generations ago, our people were starving. The intention of those explorers was to colonize Earth and start over. We are wiser than those who lived before us. We learned from their sacrifice that no technology can breach the impossible distances of space. Our eyes are larger than those of our ancestors. They see more clearly. Maybe one day that will happen to you.”
I get the feeling he’s referring to me and not humanity in general.
We walk for a hundred feet or a thousand miles — I’m so exhausted I can’t tell the difference — down a narrow, meandering trail through the crops. Karo’s grandma is ahead of us, and even though she uses a walking stick that reminds me of Jenny’s, she moves swiftly and with conviction. At some point Jovas’s two boys appear, running between my legs, then underneath the bag, giggling and carefree.
“Hey dere, Widdal Wuud!” Little Dude croaks out, waving at me and smacking his hands against the stalks.
I catch a glimpse of their mom over my shoulder, who looks away when our eyes meet. We’re all trekking down the gentle slope until the crops end and the forest begins. At some point Jovas gives me a nod, and we place the bag on a creek’s stony shore.
My hands drop to my sides, and I catch my breath as a fire blazes through my muscles. We’re next to a still pool that’s fed by a series of small waterfalls upstream. Twenty-foot cliffs rise on the opposite side — perfect for jumping or diving from — and I’m not the first to think of this because someone has tied a rope swing to a sturdy tree branch that extends over the pool. Beneath it, the water is deep blue and still and just begging for someone to disturb it. Downstream, the water picks up speed again and winds and disappears behind more cliffs and trees.
A breeze cools the sweat on my face and forearms, and the world spins for a moment. Did I somehow travel back to Austin, back in time to when Dustin Freidrich was my elementary-school best friend and we’d always hang out at the pools at Barton Creek? That rope swing looks exactly like the one from which I did a flip to impress those two hippie girls sunbathing on a rock. Dustin didn’t want me to jump — he thought I was going to break a leg — but I tucked my body into a tight ball and almost got two complete rotations before splashing in. Even though the air was blazing hot that day, the water coming from the springs upstream was fresh and cold.
I breathe in the faint smell of something that resembles cedar, and I’m so close to that time and place again, back when happiness was effortless and swimming was fun for me.
The large orange sun begins to set in the west — or maybe their sun sets in the east — and the surface of the water shimmers with a mix of gold and indigo. Jovas’s kids slide off their pants and splash naked into the water, and it still amazes me how much the Centaurians look
and act like humans. Their mom sits on a flat slab of stone that rises a few feet above the shore, watching them play.
Music is playing, the gentle twang of a string instrument that picks up speed like in an intense dueling banjo competition, then abruptly shifts to quiet, peaceful chords. Across the pool from us, Karo’s sitting cross-legged in the forest, staring intently at two rectangular cuts of stone in front of him as his hand moves all over the fret. The setting sun is shining gorgeous rays of blood and tangerine through the clouds, the trees, and the ground around him. He keeps changing it up like every five seconds — happy pop chords played with angry-at-the-world strumming, then a more classical Spanish guitar style, his left hand dancing up and down the neck. But even in the chaos, there’s a theme, some kind of order to his song. He’s overflowing with emotion, lost in the music, his body swaying back and forth.
“Dude,” I get out. “He’s a freaking prodigy.”
“Three summers ago, his grandmother hired me to help at the ranch,” Jovas says, looking at Karo not with anger like I thought he would for bringing me to their planet, but with fascination, as if he’s seeing him with brand-new eyes. “After my first shift, she invited me in for dinner. While she was preparing the food, I heard him playing a violin in his bedroom. When he looked at me that first time, I knew I had to know him better.”
“Have you and Karo always been at peace with each other?”
“Yes.”
Pangs of envy stab my chest and brain. If only it were that easy for me.
“But . . . was there ever a time, you know, early on, when you doubted his love for you? Or, like, when he hooked up with your best friend?”
“He is my best friend. But he has other friends, as do I.” He looks at me with a glint of compassion and says, “Karo is not the only one for whom I have feelings. I see the things I love about him in other creatures all the time.” He nods to the mother of his children sitting on the rock. “I’ve been in love with her since I met her at another ranch five summers ago.”
“Does she know about you and Karo?”
“Of course she does. We all come here when both the suns set at the same time. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, something changes in the air. Sometimes we sit here until it gets dark and the arc of light that you call the Milky Way rises. Sometimes we fall asleep together to the sound of the creek babbling and the insects chirping.”
So that’s how their relationships are connected: they’re all hooking up with whomever and they don’t care. Maybe he’s trying to show me that I should be doing the same thing.
I keep my tone neutral because he’s only trying to help. “Hey, man, honestly? If you’re trying to tell me that I should be in an open relationship, I’m not having any of it.”
He says, “Love is not a shape. There is no love triangle, no love square. Love is a network. It’s a form of communication.”
“Neat. But the last person I’d want sharing a bed with me and Jenny is Mark Shugar. She promised me that if —”
Jovas gently takes my chin so I’m looking at him. “You’ve told Karo her ultimatum; he only invited you here for dinner. However, before we can feast, we will give portions to Karo’s parents.”
It never once occurred to me to ask why Karo lives with his grandma instead of his parents.
Karo stops playing. He places his instrument on the ground. He looks at us.
I say, “Where are they?”
“Beneath the stones.”
Jovas is referring to the two gray slabs in front of Karo. They’re tombstones.
How did they die?
I meant to say this — I thought I said it — but my mouth didn’t move. I don’t need to ask him anyway. The scars on Karo’s grandma’s face and the beasts that she raises are all I need to know. They could easily crush two Centaurians with one foot. Maybe there was an unruly beast who didn’t go into the slaughterhouse as commanded. Karo’s parents then tried to force and prod him in, and he decided he wouldn’t go peacefully like all his gutted and beheaded brethren before him. The beast roared and showed his teeth. He furiously pounded his feet. Karo’s grandma tried to save her son and his lover, but all she got for her efforts were two vertical scars on her face and two people she loved trampled and dead. She grieved. She refused to eat for days. She took her anger out on Karo because he wasn’t strong enough to do their jobs at the ranch. She hired Jovas as a ranch hand. She moved on but never forgot their deaths.
I don’t know. For all I know, they could have died under completely different circumstances.
Jovas and Karo’s grandma hoist the bag into the river and it floats. They step in fully clothed, the water up to their chests, and begin to walk with it to the other side. They don’t ask for my help, but I follow them in anyway. The water rises to my waist, and I gently push the back of the floating bag. I’m about to witness or be a part of a very sacred tradition, not to an alien species, but to this one family.
Jovas’s two sons are still giggling and splashing each other in the pool, oblivious of the fact that this is supposed to be a somber, important occasion. My eyes meet with their mother’s again, and this time she doesn’t look away. She’s viewed humans as repulsive her whole life — maybe I’m changing her mind?
I help Jovas and Karo’s grandma lift the bag out of the water, then push against it as they drag it along the ground until it ends up in front of the tombstones. Karo puts his instrument down and begins scooping dirt with his hands.
Is he . . . he isn’t exhuming his parents, is he?
His grandma joins him, digging another hole next to the other tombstone. The dirt is loose and it doesn’t take long until there are two shallow trenches that are about four feet long and a little over a foot deep.
Jovas unzips the bag and searches through the body parts, then pulls out two pink, bloody slabs connected by a long white tube. The beast’s lungs. He takes out the serrated butcher’s knife from his holster and saws down the center of the windpipe until they separate. Karo holds out his arms and takes one with a strained grimace, his knees buckling a little. His grandma effortlessly takes the other. They place the lungs in the trenches, then cover them with dirt.
Jovas says to me, “We give his parents the lungs, to breathe life into them for a day.”
“This is a . . . it’s a beautiful tradition.” It’s bloody and messy and genuine, and maybe that’s what makes it beautiful. It’s definitely a little strange to me, but it means so much to this family, and I’m in no place to judge or ask them things, like why did we have to carry the entire bag over here when all we needed were the lungs?
Karo’s huge eyes have never looked so lost and incomplete. I once wanted to ask him where do we go after we die, but now I know that my guess is as good as his.
To him and his grandma, I say, “Thank you for letting me be a part of this.”
Carrying the bag with us, we go back in the water and meet up with Jovas’s girlfriend and their kids chilling on the flat stone. Jovas sits next to her, their feet dangling over the ledge. She rests her head on his shoulder. Karo sits on the other side of him, and Jovas puts his arm around him. Karo cries on his other shoulder.
The sun has fallen below the clouds downstream.
I don’t get it and I never will, being genuinely in love with more than one person at the same time. I don’t want to share Jenny with other people the way Karo and Jovas do. I’m not an alien in perfect harmony with love and the universe, and I never will be. I’m a jealous, insecure, disgusting, and primitive human idiot, and I believe in a one true love.
The Centaurians probably view marriage as some outdated and restricting tradition, but I don’t care. I want the big clichéd ceremony. I want to be standing there with my groomsmen in a line, tears filling my eyes while Jenny walks down the aisle dressed in white, holding a bouquet of roses.
I will figure out a way to stop the war, even if the Centaurians won’t help me. I’ve already traveled four and a half light-years,
something no human has ever achieved, and I didn’t do it just for dinner.
Everyone helps carry the bag back the way we came except for Jovas’s girlfriend, and I’m guessing she gets off because it looks like she could give birth any day now. Jovas and Karo’s grandma have one end, and me and Karo each grab a handle on the other, and the two boys are on the sides, holding it up but not really. We emerge from the forest. My pants and the lower half of my shirt are sopping wet, and my boots squish with each step. The sky has darkened enough for stars to appear, but something brighter than moonlight but dimmer than sunlight remains in the sky, bathing the crops in an eerie, entrancing glow. It’s a star that’s much larger than any other on the opposite horizon from where the sun had set fifteen minutes earlier.
“Whoa,” I say. “That’s Alpha Centauri B, isn’t it?”
Jovas is focused on something else overhead. I crane my neck. A far more distant star has broken loose, darting around the sky like someone’s using a laser pointer to mess with a cat.
I say, “When y’all move stars like that, do all of its orbiting planets get flung into outer space?”
The star goes perfectly still.
“No,” Jovas says dully.
“Can all of you do that?”
“No. No more questions. I’m tired of talking.”
As we walk through the field, the crops are no longer making that golf clapping sound, because delicate flowers that resemble red orchids are blooming from their grains. They’re all leaning toward Alpha Centauri B in the still air, quietly feeding off of its dim glow.
We pass the slaughterhouse to our right, and I don’t see any city lights in the distance. What does the rest of this world look like? It can’t all be just ranches and creeks and rolling countryside. There’s got to be so much to explore, an endless array of cultures and foods and landscapes, even more so than on Earth — Pud 5 is bigger than Earth — but that’s not why I’m here. They told me I’m also not here to solve my planet’s problems, nor am I on some epic quest to win the heart of a girl named Jenny. I’m here simply because a friend invited me over for dinner and I said yes. And maybe it’s because I’m an idiot or perhaps just an asshole, but I cannot accept that.