The book of mars

Visiting Space

My parents and I are going to visit outerspace. Its night time and we’re in a family car traveling to the space station. We stop at McDonalds and while they’re inside, I get into my space suit. It’s a stretchy black mesh material and on each side of me I have some control pads for my hands.

When they come out, we eat and drive over to the station. Every family or visitor has their own cube inside a building (I don’t remember the building, just being in the cube). It’s a big wooden box with a wheelchair access incline inside of steps that lead into the center of the room. We get into place and I guess we rocket off!

At first, we’re all nervous and doing our jobs stabilizing the cube in space and tracking ourselves to our destination. Then we settle down and my mom starts ice fishing, because there’s an empty hole in the bottom of the cube to the right side. I look into it and there’s just black black water, as if the water was over the blackness of space (and then floating beneath our cube?) The fish are mechanical but also organic in a way that they grow the mechanical parts of themselves. My dad is playing with fishing line and hooking little beads together on it and stringing it around the cube in a decorative way.

I don’t remember landing, but we all are on stable ground now. I was unengaged with what my parents were doing for most of the trip and when I go over to them now that we’re here, I realize they’re fighting. They speak something about a lady that my dad meets here, or maybe a guy that my mom meets here. I don’t care! Let’s go explore!

All of the cool parts are lost in memory. My mom is somewhere, and I’m with my dad. We are about to go into a museum for something. The world around us is the same as Earth, just more exciting because it’s NOT Earth. It feels like I’m in an amusement park, and everything could be mundane but still not that bad.

Inside, the museum is a multi-tier building that stacks on top of itself. The biggest room is the first, and then you walk up stairs to a smaller room, etc until the last room which is an observatory. My dad and I are in the last room. Instead of peering out of the glass windows, I look at the display case in the center. There are a lot of crystal rock art sculptures. I’m amazed at one of them: It’s all solid clear crystal with a fist coming out of one side. I’d assume that it was carved to look that way, but so much of it seems to be natural. I am on another planet, so I don’t question it. I put it in my jacket after pondering about video cameras watching us and hoping they just aren’t around.

We walk out and no one notices me or questions me. Outside, we have to go through a gate with a guard who’ll direct us to our next attraction. The big rock has slipped down my pant leg, settling kind of near my shoe. The exterior of the museum looks like my old neighborhood.

On a tree there’s a hand painted sign that says “Give me one instant chocolate Reece’s cake mix and I’ll trade you a FREE TOILET!” That’s dumb, I think. No one wants a toilet. I have the conclusion that the guard we’re about to see put that sign up for everyone to see who comes from the museum, hoping someone has one of the cake mixes.

He looks at me and my dad and doesn’t question my bulging pant leg. We’re directed to the cubelot, where we meet up with my mom. She’s mad at my dad and I see a voluptuous lady with a thousand blonde curls wave at my dad. I see! We get into the cube and start going home.

Half-way through space, we stop at a little planet to get some food. It looks kind of like the other McDonalds. My dad meets his friend and tells us about some new information they found out about Earth.

“They took apart all the walls on Earth and on the light switches they found hind markings. E.T. did it when he was having his stay on our planet! Whenever a light turns green, I puke.” My dream self thought this made sense: he implied that all the walls of Earth, as if there were walls on the “outside” of our planet, were inspected for residue of the infamous E.T. (the movie dude in my dream was an actual alien who visited for a little while). The light switches he spoke of were what made the traffic lights work. The word “hind” was a kind of sexual term that implied he tried to have sex with them.




Fragment
It’s the last two days of the world. Everything has been ending and I am alive for these last days. I jump between the layers of my potential realities, but it’s all over…