By Jack Mint
I
Being the last surviving male on a planet populated only by women isn’t as great as it sounds. They poke and prod. Now I know what these gals felt like getting pawed by guys. Except there’s no more of them. Only me left. It’s what they say—the women of another planet.
At first, it was hazard suits and scientific.
“Please extend your right arm.”
“Which one?” I said to the head doctor. She stood with several other doctors holding clipboards and an army of nurses. Air flared the nostrils of the head doctor and she said, “your top one.”
I held it out and the doctors went into mad scribbles as hesitant nurses measured how long it was, the circumference of my fingers, wrist, forearm, upper arm. All the while the head doctor never took her eyes from me. The nurses retreat with their borrowed tailor strings and pulled back hair.
“Now your other arm.”
I stretched out my arm.
The head doctor sighed and a brief grey cloud animated the visor.
“No, the bottom arm on your right.”
The nurses were very reluctant to wrap the measuring tapes around the anterior arms. It used to be a real man had good, long and strong bottom arms. They had to be strong as, if not stronger than, our top arms. But nobody has muscular bottom arms anymore. Anybody that had those were dead. It’s just my rotten little arms left now.
They go on and measure every inch of my available body. I noticed they skirted around my underwear and I was thankful until a doctor put the clipboard in her armpit and then clamped her hands onto my buttocks. I jumped out of her way and the nurses fled, ruffling like geese. But the doctor had gotten what she wanted and transmitted the knowledge she had learned to the clipboard and to the other doctors.
“Subject has firm buttocks, which indicates he can stand and has the ability to walk significant distances.”
If only you knew the half of it, lady.
Maybe cowards do have the best butts around. We work our butts off just to try and save them. Well, not we, just me. I ran several miles away from my unit. I figured they were going to hunt me down and hang a noose around my neck but they had other things to worry about, like winning the war. I was miles away when the battle broke out. I rested my tired butt on a fallen tree and watched the slaughter.
Think of everyone you’ve ever loved being blown to pieces or shot. But then imagine the killers who came out of the atmosphere also suffering similar fates. Everyone dead, I mourned like most men do, but with all the enemy killed in action as well, who was I supposed to hate?
Myself?
II
A day after everything went quiet, I walked to the battlefield I was supposed to die in. So many explosions had occurred in that area, the elevation of that valley was three feet lower than before. The bodies and uniforms were indiscernible. It was like walking in macaroni salad.
A voice called out from the salad. It was a bloody enemy soldier. He waved me over.
“Get me some water,” every word was a hard-won gasp.
I didn’t move.
“Take me to the ship.”
“What ship?”
“The one behind you.”
The man had been looking at the ship ever since the battle was over. By some miracle it seemed like it could still fly. I turned back to the man and told him, No.
A red and white smile reeked out of his face. A cold only space could know emanated out of his eyes. “We won. None of you are left. Your women and children are melted and your army is vanquished. I may be the only one left, but my race still defeated yours.”
I looked over the broken body of this soldier. Flies festered on his severed ankle. He couldn’t swat them away because his back was broken, leaned against a destroyed machine. I knew he couldn’t feel the maggots dining through his flesh. He had won, alright.
~~~
“We did triumph,” said the lady in the highest seat. She had withered hair but the austere look of fine breeding. They figured out it was okay to breathe around me so no one in the capital had to wear hazard suits. She leaned forward so that I could better hear her words through the microphone.
“Our men triumphed, but here you are.”
I counted five hundred eyes looking at me. Two a piece in the head, just like the girls I used to know. But their eyes died millions of miles away from here. Here is a planet full of women really pissed off that the men didn’t come back. He said he was going off to fight. He said he was going to be back soon. Maybe he got sidetracked and went to fight some other planet? I stood on the center floor of a tribunal, a government house, where the seats were designed to fit lady butts.
The woman in the tallest seat demanded I recount what I saw. I told her about getting in the ship by myself. The controls weren’t too far different from our spacecraft so I ejected from the dead planet I grew up on and into the blue sky. Once the blue faded to black, the remnants of capital ships floated in the atmosphere. One was theirs, one was ours. Countless pieces of national pride and investment dangled on temporary strings in that space. It was only a matter of time before the firestorm from the sky would devastate the planet. But it never happened because no one was alive to witness it.
A scowl creased the woman’s face as she asked, “In both the land and space engagement, all lives were lost on both sides? No one survived?”
I would’ve pointed to myself and said, “I did,” but my hands were handcuffed behind my back and so were my baby bottom arms.
All these honorable women who upheld the government slouched in their chairs. All the women watching from the news cameras gasped in the streets. I started a planetwide mourning of devastating loss and irredeemable pain by shrugging my top shoulders.
And that’s when the clock started ticking.
III
They put me in the highest security prison. All other inmates and their faded tattoos, unkempt unibrows, and unshaved armpits were transferred to other places of incarceration. I was put in a glass habitat surrounded by guards who didn’t lose husbands but only lost a nephew or two. I still saw the white in their knuckles when they handed me my breakfast plate. Doctors even put a steel girdle around my hips so I couldn’t molest my genitalia.
Representatives of the tribunal kept me well informed, surprisingly enough. A television set on an iron arm was on the outside of my glass cube. It was outside in case it could fall and hit me over the head. I never did understand that logic. But on the screen, was all-day, all-night coverage of what the remaining women were going to do to continue their race.
Those idiot men had marched off to war toting their sons as tradition had demanded they do since any man could remember. Baby boys were up in that capital ship. Burned up, just like our babies. And the last tragedy heaped upon all these misfortunes were those stupid men who took off for this desperate fight without leaving any seeds behind. Confidence told those men that they would be back by the next breeding season. They had rushed out the door without hardly saying goodbye.
Riots burned up the television screen. A coat of dust developed on the inside from all the rocks being thrown at police and the clouds of dirt kicked up from women fleeing tanks. I never knew any type of female could act this way. One guard noticed my gaping mouth as I watched self-flagellations and censored suicide jumpers into traffic while I held a strawberry cupcake.
“Oh, you think this is bad?” said the officer.
“Just wait until breeding season comes and goes and none of those bitches got a bun in the oven.”
I asked then what “bitches” were and what she meant by “bun in the oven”.
A dark look crept over her face. She pointed at the center of her chest. “I’m a bitch.” she said.
“And if the Tribunal of the Wise Ones can’t figure out how to produce male children by themselves, you’re going to be a cut up bun in a hundred different ovens.”
That officer was transferred from caring for me. The new jailer never told me why.
Dread filled my bowels when I saw her walk in. She wasn’t very different than the parade of nurses and doctors and philosophers and news anchors and representatives who had visited my cell. Sensual feelings raised the hairs on my body much like when I saw the others, but without knowing how or why, I knew she was going to be the one.
She looked around my quarters. In my nervousness, I kicked a lonesome sock underneath the bed. The television’s muffled drone ceased and recoiled on its arm. The guards walked out of the room. Seeing them leave was like watching the neighborhood melt. I looked back at the woman standing in the middle of the room. She was doing something different than all the ladies.
She was gazing at me.
Beauty is something my ancestors didn’t really care to understand, but felt beauty to appreciate it. Not necessarily only seeing it. Beauty moves invisible and through the pores of our skin until it is all our minds can focus on. It’s the smell of wet sand in the desert after the grey rain passes. It’s the relentless call of the ocean tides managing their conflict with the land to maintain harmony. Beauty was this woman standing in my room.
This woman that looked exactly like my wife.
IV
Every hair on her head hung straight down like a black helmet. Her shoulders had the same angle leading to her delicate arms. She even clasped her hands in front of her hips like she used to do. She did it naturally, without even thinking about it. Were those hands in front of the sacred place that bore my daughter into the short life she was to live? Everything about the specter standing in front of me was my wife, except for the missing bottom arms.
The eyes! How did they know about her eyes? A cosmic blue that always reminded me of the distinct color between the rest of the wide sky and slumbering mountains. The gaze did not falter and I drew myself up from my chair to let the cereal bowl fall off my lap. Like moving through a snowdrift, I approached, earnest to see that one mishap, that one flicker of doubt that made this an act.
I was very close and the woman never removed her gaze. That nervous smile even peeped up at me long enough to open the memorial flood gates of our wedding day.
It was before the war. Before I was a coward and had a story to tell. Before everyone raised their goblets of wine and shouted happily, “if marriage be the end of love, then let marriage be the genesis of tolerance!”
A breeze floated by like a laughing child when I lifted her veil. A few black strands of her hair reached over to tickle the freckles on her cheeks. You could almost hear the disappointed hairs as her patient finger guided the rogues behind her ear. She looked at me and I saw her tears of joy.
A million lifetimes later in a maximum-security enclosure, my face collapsed into my hands and the guilty purge ejaculated from my body. It was if my soul slipped out of my eyes and spilled through my fingers. In a puddle would be the only thing I had ever known and the rest of my days would be in an empty husk of hollow bones. The first alien encounter actually happened to me when the woman touched my shoulder and asked, “is everything alright?” the look of concern almost genuine.
After a big unabashed slurping noise recoiled into my nose, I said, “By jolly, you even sound like her.”
We began to descend. I looked around through my glass cube and saw the walls going above our heads. We sank like an ice cube into a gelatin milk. The cell was now submerged into the floor and the world of women disappeared from our lofty, basement retreat. The white was so intense it removed the panel lines from the cube. The woman, me, the bed, the chair, and the overturned bowl of cereal sat upon an infinite expanse. You couldn’t see the milk anymore.
“Have a seat,” she said and motioned me towards the bed. She sat beside me and our butts drooped into the luxury mattress. A strange feeling of vertigo overtook me for a moment as I imagined sinking down into the bed past the covers like the cube did, but where would I go from there?
V
I was way out of my league. Trepidation electrocuted my spine and I couldn’t look at the woman/wife sitting on the bed. Was this what being dead was like? Seeing eternity spread out before you, but when you put your hand out, it flattened against a wall? How many secrets did they know?
“I wanted some privacy,” she spoke after what must have been a long silence. “I asked that they turn off all the security and monitoring equipment. But to be honest, there’s no way to tell if they did.”
I could tell when she wasn’t looking at me. Like a beam of light passing by. I glanced over and her cosmic blue eyes gazed at her outstretched fingers. A simple female thing to do, check if the paint job was right.
“What’s your name?”
“Constance—but everybody calls me Connie.” She added, as if it were an apology.
“Did you have a husband?”
“No. I am the second daughter of four girls and my father passed away before the End War. I only had a few cousins and nephews who died on your planet.”
Made sense. They wouldn’t send anybody in here with him if she had grievances like that jailer had against me. In the place of anger and hatred was the uncertainty of the future.
“Weren’t you worried I might do something to you? Hurt you?” I asked. Bravery came back into her countenance.
“There’s enough hurt to go around for centuries. If I could change the past, I would. But because I can’t, I must make something of a future. Who did you lose?”
“A wife and daughter. Your navy dumped a chemical agent on the cities. It melted the skin and muscles. Males past puberty were unaffected. Everyone else died in their homes or on the streets.”
The young woman gasped and covered her mouth. “I am so sorry.”
“I didn’t see it. I imagine if I did, I would have gone stark raving mad. But we were out on the frontlines when the news got to us. At first, we thought it was a ploy, a trick by the generals to stimulate our anger and bloodlust. But no more letters came in. No pictures or video chats. My daughter was two years old, and she had my nose.”
~~~
Connie’s hand reached past the arm of mine these women called, “the normal set”, and she closed her fingers into the tiny palm of my bottom arm.
“I was selected from the entire population. I didn’t have a choice. A part of me resented that I was led here like some mare, but I was still curious about who you were. I was curious because you knew that no one survived on your planet. Instead of remaining on your home planet you came here. In the capital, you called yourself a coward that escaped the End War. But it was unbelievably brave to come here and face us like a man. I’m not sure if you know this, but your race and mine were once a single race. Almost a million years ago, people that looked like me but also looked like you left their home planet. They say half came here, and the other half built colonies on your planet. Our DNA evolved to be different but there may be a shot to salvage a future despite all the terrible mistakes that were made. Only I want to make this your choice. You can say no.”
I shook my head and for the first time, touched a woman on this planet on purpose. Her cheek was warm and full of life amidst this blank white sea around us.
I said, “I’m not foolish enough to believe we have a choice. You didn’t have a choice. Neither do I. It just is. I don’t think it was bravery that made me board that ship to come here. I just had to. Fate rules the past. Fate rules the present as well. But like you said, there’s one shot at a future we might be proud enough to call our own.”
~~~
Connie came to visit my cell very often. We talked and touched and said nothing sometimes. Other women came that were even more beautiful than Connie. When they did walk into the cell, I stood in the corner and didn’t communicate. When they allowed Connie back in, I shared my dinner with her.
She grew bigger. She took my bottom arm and put it on her belly. With five times the sensitivity in that hand than the “normal set”, I could feel the rapid heartbeat, the swish of fluid, and finally, the world-shattering triumphant kick.
A week went by without a visit and I enquired of her health every hour. Sleep didn’t know me. I paced and paced, until the door opened and I flattened my face against the glass. Nurses in hazard suits pushed Connie in a wheelchair across the floor. She looked tired in her hospital gown but a big smile unfolded from her freckled face. The nurse noncommittedly slid the card key and opened the glass cell. Frowning officers kept me from rushing out and the nurse pushed the wheelchair into the cell and let it float to a stop.
I kneeled before her and with a timid hand I pulled back a fold of the blanket she held in her arms. A squinty, red-puckered face leaned into her breast. A mouth of healthy gums gaped open. Joy of ineffable gratitude washed over my spirit. I kissed Connie and the forehead of the child.
I pulled more of the wrapping from this gift and lost all my breath when I saw the baby had four arms. With a smile as beautiful as heaven, Connie whispered, “he has your nose.”
