Post-Funeral Mission to Mars

As the airplane enters the towering clouds, Billy spies wispy ghosts and shifting white valleys. What is turbulence to everyone else, to Billy is an angry fog monster.

An old woman snores beside him. Others resign to airport novels, electronics, and the anticipation of the cart. Humming engines and whooshing air vents backdrop the cries of a baby, of two teenage girls absorbed in gossip.

Billy peers out the cold, turbid window and sees Harryhausen beasts run amok in the cloudscape: dinosaurs gnawing on cars and bridges, a distant Cyclops ripping a train off its tracks.

A break in the clouds reveals a stretch of suburbia, of baseball fields where an interest in sports fell short of home plate. All around, long thin roads blink with ant-cars: “Ants can lift fifty times their own weight, you know,” his mother once said, not long before she got sick.

The edge of an upcoming cirrus cloud swirls over the wings: Here comes Conan through the smoke of battle, sword dripping with ruddy sunlight, bones sailing through the fog as he charges an army of skeletons.

Suburbia slides back into view, its rooftops the color of cigarette ash, a string of retention ponds like chicory weeds in cracked pavement. His estranged father intrudes upon his thoughts: “Earth to Billy, Earth to Billy—I said grab me another beer!”

He takes out a collection of stories by Ray Bradbury. After reading for awhile he returns to the window. There, Charles Knight mammoths [ding] struggle in [ding] tar pits [ding]: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Please fasten your seat belts and turn off all electronics. We’ll be landing shortly. Thank you, and have a great day.”

People gather personal items and shut off their devices. The woman beside him stirs awake. Tears fill the boy’s eyes; he cannot bear to live with his father again. He turns to the window. There, his mother’s face takes shape in the clouds.

“You can go anywhere, Billy” he hears her say. “Anywhere at all. Outer space? Sure! Just hook your imagination to the stars!”

A fiery sunset now paints the clouds, and Billy wipes away tears. A voice explodes from the intercom static: “Mars to Billy . . . —ars to Billy . . . This is your mother . . . —der alien attack! I repeat, we’re under —n attack! . . . Please—ome to Mars at once. We need your help!”

The plane morphs into a silver rocket, a space suit drops from an overhead compartment. Billy squeezes past the old woman to the aisle, climbs into the suit, snaps on the helmet. Passengers dissolve one by one as he enters the cockpit. Outside, a reddish landscape breaks through the clouds.

(From the book The Hunchback's Captive and Others)