January 30, 2018

PodCastle 507: The Rocket Farmer

56 minutes

* Author : Julie C. Day

* Narrator : Lisa Hicks

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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Previous published in Interzone 271.

Rated PG-13. Take cover: contains more than 5 F-bombs.

Sarnai

I sit at my kitchen table and watch as my soon-to-be ex-husband, David, assembles cardboard boxes and labels each one in neat block letters. This is David’s third packing weekend and once again our daughter has made herself scarce; Sophie has no problem with late-at-night drunk mom or lonely stoned dad, but watching us sort through the flotsam of our former marriage — it’s too much.

“What’s up with those burn marks on the driveway?” David says. “I can set up the fire pit if you want.”

“No. Thanks.” Burn marks? I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not that I’m going to admit that particular fact, or any of the other “wrongness” that has invaded my life. These days I wake up sweat-soaked each morning from the same dream: a rocket-launch conflagration — my charred body no longer screaming beneath the flames. The dream is bad enough, but there are other more corporeal sources of anxiety: Sophie’s almost complete silence. The way she locks herself in the shed for hours at a time.

David bends his head as he frames another box, intent on overlapping the flaps, then pauses.

“Hey.” I hesitate. “Did you see the mourning doves at the bottom of the yard?”

“I can’t find the fucking packing tape.” David glances in my direction. “Wait, what? Mourning doves?”

“Tape’s to the left of the box. The birds are missing chunks of feathers. Looks like someone maybe pulled them out.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounds too tight. “Poor bastards. I don’t think they can fly.”

David holds the tape as though momentarily unsure of its use. “Didn’t see them.” He seals the bottom of the newly folded box, then begins wrapping one of his mother’s rose-infested china plates in newspaper. “Not sure what you want me to do.”

“It’s fine. I’ll handle it. I can set out some bird food or something.” I take a sip of my coffee, consider how wrecked my face looks in the bright morning light. “Well put together” is not a phrase anyone would ever apply to me. An aging soon-to-be divorcée, an Asian-American, a transplanted Floridian, those are my special labels. Along with rocket farmer, though that is a label I keep to myself.

“When’s the last time you bothered to clean up, Sarnai? This place stinks.” I watch David’s gaze take in the dirty dishes, the toppling stacks of mail, laundry, and God-knows-what-else.

“The house smells just fine,” I reply, and I realize that I’m lying. Underneath the coffee grounds and the overfull compost bin, there’s something new and yet all too familiar; the house smells of Florida sunshine and car exhaust. More than that, it smells of my father’s fields of aluminum and titanium, his barrels of carbon fibers and all those fuels: ammonium perchlorate, kerosene, gunpowder. Lord, I’m such a fool.

For weeks now, Sophie’s hands and arms have been pockmarked with angry, red scars, the same marks I got as a kid working in Dad’s hidden rocket field. It’s not just the scars. There was a flush on Sophie’s face last night when she’d told me — weeks too late — about Sam Pesce’s “slanty-eyed Chinaman” comment.

“But Mom, we’re Mongolian,” Sophie said, as though the real problem was the boy’s grasp of geography.

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