For You I Return
by Addison Smith
He has blood made of cold brew and flesh made of chocolate. He spends most of his time writing about fish, birds, and cybernetics, often in combination. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction, among others.
You can find him on Twitter @AddisonCSmith.
I retch and my throat burns. Bile pierces the porous tissue of my mouth where rot and infection have eaten me away permeating the microscopic layer of sensitive material an instant before it alerts the ship. You feel it, I think. Can you ever understand it? Hosts feel pain.
Lights flash red in my quarters. Our vessel sets a thousand scripts into motion—notifications to apprehend me for my crime, the crime of you What would Maya think of these notices? Maya, my love, who would not know whether to protect me or kill me or leave me to the others.
I wipe my lip and rotten-teeth grin. They can’t have you. I love you. I have loved you since you introduced yourself to me weeks before on our excursion into the depths, where strange things live and Maya rests. Since you showed me the scale of the world and the tiny space I occupy—not tiny at all to one like yourself who can move between spaces too small for human or rodent or air.
I love you for your words—thoughts cooed after long nights where I have blacked out, done strange things for you, entered places I am not allowed to be and washed the red from my skin in a sink dirtied by clot and gore.
I love you, and though they mean you harm I know it cannot be. You flow through my body, blood hot and thick in my veins. You suffuse me, overtake me. They tell us you are a lie—that my love for you is to ensure that I will die protecting you or live to spread you.
I breathe deeply as red light bathes my skin and bare feet toe the corridor beyond my room. They come for you. I know you are a parasite and I know what I am meant to do. Even so, I protect you.
The door slides open and I meet my first challenger. My palm drives upward into her chin amid the crack of cartilage and the slow realization of pain. The ones who follow hesitate. They are unsure—so unlike you or me or the endless depths. They want a thousand things and they conflict in their minds, making them slow to decide.
The next approaches and her trachea collapses in my hand. You build within me like a spore seeking fertile flesh, but for now you are mine, this woman’s body broken and unable to serve. I hold you dear, but you are in my sweat and my blood and the sick which drips from my lips.
Suited bodies lay around me, thin plastics meant to protect their bodies from you, but I am your vessel and it is me they must fear. I step into the corridor and already I feel you taking control of me to further your desires.
The blackness creeps around me as you take over my body, and in that blackness I see Maya’s dive lights fading into the black as her body sinks farther away from me, deep into an alien sea where no human has been.
Soon even those thoughts are gone. The world slips away and I know no fear.
I return.
I am in my body, our ship, the boundless ocean and a strange world outside. My thoughts return to me, bringing pieces of my dissociation with them. In those empty hours I see blood and broken bone and a trail of bodies leading me to this place. The memories are bruises on my flesh which you are quick to caress.
The dead surround me, but I am no longer in my quarters. You have taken me far this time, deep into the ship where I cannot hear the groans of deep sea pressure. This is not my place, but it is where you need me, and so it is.
My thoughts move to memory and you push me away to prevent me from mourning what I have lost. She was not you, though I loved her. She is the reason I am dead inside—a mere carcass for you to do with as you will. Without Maya I have no place, no heart, and it is a void you fill perfectly with your words.
Tears well in my eyes. It is curious that you allow me these thoughts. My mind clouds with visions of her face, her malfunctioning suit, the water taking her lifeless body to the depths.
But there is more than that. I see her hair draped over my lap as I caress her scalp. I remember long nights and evenings too short, as we court and make love and plan our future when the mission is over and we have returned to the surface, to orbit, to our home.
“Maya.” My voice echoes from thin ductwork around me, as if those feelings are enough to rattle their walls, free them from rivet and screw and collapse the ship into the sinking beyond with my infected body at its core.
I know why you have brought me here, though I don’t want to see it. The ship’s air circulates through these vents, and bodies lay all around me, trailed by red streaks where I have dragged them, packed them into the ducts so the air may carry their disease. My hair blows in the false wind, but I feel nothing, the same as the dead which surround me.
I beg you to take me again as tears fall from my eyes. I don’t want to see them. You can protect me from death, from their bodies, from Maya and the lights of her suit disappearing into the dark.
My hands are on my face, tearing at my hair and digging nails into my cheeks. You take me, and though I am broken, the darkness is sweet.
I return.
Maya stands before me, pleading with me as she holds something sharp in her hands. It takes me a moment to realize it is a harpoon—the same she carried when she drifted away. Her face is bloody and streaked with dragged fingers, but she is alive. She points the harpoon at me and shouts as tears fall from her eyes. I cannot hear her over my own thoughts and your pressing voice.
I hold my ears against the noise and scream silence into the ship. Maya is dead. Maya is dead. I relive her death again and again as she stares with concern. I am back outside the walls, and it was not her suit which failed, but my own. How did you find me? How did you get into my suit for me to carry you home and spread you to my family?
I scream again, and the harpoon clatters to the floor. Why do you show her to me? I know you are in my mind and you are welcome there, a calming presence. I know you have implanted thoughts to save me from the agony of saving you. This is too much. Of the visions you implant, this hurts the most. She is dead, sinking, gone.
I strike at the false vision and she recoils, so real. I bite and claw and punch, trying to free myself of the specter you present to me. Tears stream down my face, no longer in my control. They are not my tears, but those of my body, empty of what used to be me.
You test me and I know I have passed. She is not real. She is a test of my loyalty. The specter of Maya raises the harpoon. She cannot hurt me. She is dead. I give myself over to you and stop resisting. I lower my hands.
Pain sears through my body and darkness takes me, but I am not in your grasp.
“Wake up.”
You abandoned me.
“Wake up.”
I return, but I find you gone from me. Wires and tubes hang from my naked body and my thoughts are dull and weak. I reach for your comfort, but find only emptiness, the remainder of my being where once you lay.
“You left me.” The words are from my own lips, stretched and pained and joined by tears which are not my own. Maya stands above me, crying over my empty body.
“I’m right here,” she says, the death faded from her eyes. You left me, but she is here. Why do you still test me? She holds me, lifts my head from the table and embraces me.
“Maya,” I say, but she shushes me, checks the tubes which fill my body with strange liquids. They burn you from my body, designed to destroy every cell of your being and every nuance of your voice.
“You’re going to get better now,” she says, and I smile. Warm memories flood through me as sure as her voice. Her body pressed against my own, our fingers entwined, soft sighs escaping her lips.
She does not say what will happen to me. Our crew is dead, our ship infected. I killed them, infected them, spread you through their bodies. You fill the air around us, inoculate us with your presence.
Maya shifts her arm and I see her own intravenous tubes. I smile, knowing she will survive.
“You’re dead,” I say with defiance in my voice. “I watched you die.”
Confusion. Concern. I watch your eyes and they tell a story you cannot explain with all of your words. “I’m right here. Something happened on your last dive. You came back with it, some sort of parasite. You—“
“Burn my body,” I say. “The incinerator.”
“Incinerator?” Maya says. “What are you talking about?”
No incinerator. No dead Maya sinking further and further from my life. I know this world for what it is, and I smile in the light of truth.
I no longer black out. You no longer speak to me, but I know what I have lived. As I leave the medbay I am aware of every life I have destroyed. Every bone broken and throat crushed and infection spread to fertile bodies.
I feel the floor beneath my bare feet as I walk through our ship, so much emptier than before. I see all of this not as a memory but as life passing before me. I am here. I exist. The pressure pushes on our ship, our tiny home, and I make my way past diving suits and tanks and devices for grappling and taking samples. I ignore them all.
I leave Maya behind, knowing in my heart what is truth. The walls are thicker here, the great skin of our ship meant to withstand the pressures of an alien sea. Before me is a door, a great wheel set in its center that is meant to take two to open. I find that I am stronger—that you have made me stronger—and I open it myself, seal myself in the tiny room beyond.
I turn the lock on a thick door I have been through a hundred times, a great thing of steel and pressure-resistant glass. I feel every step as surely as I felt Maya’s death.
You test me still. I look out the window to the black depths and the tiny creatures which thrive in the pressure. I hear nothing behind me, but I am aware of her ghost. The lie of Maya shouts, but in turning I see only her mouth moving. I cannot hear her words beyond that glass barrier, but what would she say? She cries and pounds at the glass and all I see are her dead eyes as she descends into nothingness.
Maya is dead. I trust you.
I turn toward the second hatch and the crushing sea beyond.
I open the hatch, and I return.
© For You I Return by Addison Smith. 2023. All rights reserved.
