Henry’s Permanent Crescent
Prince Henry was banished to a shack on the edge of the moon. With only a handful of tomato seeds, the first to take the moon’s nutrients, the prince was able to grow a garden by his thirtieth birthday.
The prince broke off pieces of the atmosphere and melted them inside a thermos to drink. He slept the days away and in the evening counted Saturn’s rings. An old memory of hand holding, war, and discovery, left his mind each day.
He no longer longed for love or worried about his father’s throne. All Henry knew was that his tomatoes had ripened at a pace too quick for him to eat. There was enough to feed what remained of Earth but whatever conscience he had for that was gone.
When Henry had preserved another lightyear’s harvest an egg shaped ship crashed onto the gallows, sending splinters left and right. A Venusian fell out of the ship, not used to the moon’s pull. It stood eight feet tall, with one hand missing, a rusty stump. In the midday starlight a brown ball pulsed in the center of its face like a star.
The Venusian cleared its throat and read from a parchment. “The Venusian-Earth Alliance sends orders from the Council that you fight in the global army against Mars. Your father and uncle have passed, making you the only able bodied royal left to…”
Used to light years of uninterrupted silence the prince scooped some dirt and plugged his ears, but the Venusian’s cries were impossible to silence. Henry stepped over what remained of the gallows and went into his shack to find them something to eat. He returned with two jars of Neptune dust and tomatoes.
The two ate lunch and drank the dust. Faint groans of approval hummed in the distance.
The Seventh World War was an endless procession of noise heard even at the height of the King’s towers. Those who remembered Henry’s father feared his passion. Even more, the King’s detractors feared his followers, adamant on the truth of his words
above all else. Uninterested in whether their truth shared the standards of the Venusians, humans, and other lifeforms.
The last of the dust digested, the Venusian felt the swelling in its body disappear. It dug its heels in the soil and watched the two circles float back into place.
Still cautious as a cat it studied the objects in the prince’s home. By the prince’s nod the Venusian held a star dial, one like its own, which was used to record the passage of time whenever Henry was in the mood.
The Venusian turned around and yelped, scaring the prince. Row after row of preserved tomatoes, space dust, and water lined a titanium wall across a makeshift bed.
Tomato stems floated around the shelves and the Venusian’s legs. The Venusian sniffed the stem and stuck its tongues out to taste before Henry swatted the stem away. His eyes put a plug in the Venusian’s protest as the stem sailed east to Chiron.
The Venusian tried to remember what the Council ordered from this sordid species. The parchment, now illegible to them both, floated out of the Venusian’s grasp and followed the stem.
Days, months, and years passed like the Venusian’s first night. Without the destruction typical of their species’ the two learned what had never been practiced. Without language, a catalogue of affirmations and refusals were born through the shaking and nodding of limbs and heads, and the contractions and dilations of pupils.
One day, tired of sleeping on Henry’s hard floor, the Venusian built its own
shack using the scraps from its ship. Constructing the house proved easy for the Venusian, as some of what its mind couldn’t recall its body still did. Despite how its habit of drinking Neptune dust had extended to enquiring other matter on neighbouring planets.
The scars on its face it wasn’t sure would heal, faded over time by using the tomatoes to massage its skin. This regimen paled the Venusian the same ashen shade as Henry. And like the prince, the Venusian’s feet were calloused from working in the garden. Gravity brought their spines up in two diamond arches. The Venusian discovered this pain subsided quickest with a vial of Jupiter.
—
On the side of the moon they never thought to travel, a poison made its way into the garden. Two roots had grown inwards, mangled together in a chain link of knots that crept into the centre of the mile long garden.
Vines punched angry holes through the leaves. The seeds in the heart of the tomatoes became unbearably bitter. Their tongues changed colours: the prince’s from pink to red, and the Venusian’s from purple to black. The flower bells on the tomatoes could no longer support the weight of its own petals.
Each day after gathering his share of the harvest, Prince Henry emerged from his home, knocked on the Venusian’s door, and pointed to the sky to say: something there caused this. The Venusian too was fearful, but shut its door in the prince's face and looked elsewhere for answers.
The Venusian started to sleep outside its shack beside the garden, now divided, thorns ready to defend its share of tomatoes until a cure was found.
The atmosphere descended like a foggy curtain that dimmed the little starlight there was left. In near total darkness the two kept their eyes to the ground, never looking up unless they felt the other walk to their side of the crescent.
Vines from the toxic plants grew as wide as ladders. In his old age Henry crawled on his belly for a tomato, then slithered back inside his shack to sleep.
Under clouds of fog the Venusian spent its days digging the ground to cut the knots in the roots, but only uncovered the same handful of soil. It began sucking the marrow from vines and leaves.
Each day threats by the Council to burn down the Venusian’s home, the blade slicing through its hand, a sign of commitment to the Council, all skimmed back up to the surface. The marrow from the stems rotted its teeth, tongue, and mind. When it ran out of dust and started spitting strips of flesh from its mouth, it decided something had to be done.
Through the fog which encased the air like something solid, the Venusian stalked the prince's home. It made a clicking sound and followed the echo to see, hoping it wouldn’t wake the prince.
Within seconds the Venusian heard the jars of Neptune, Jupiter, and Uranus. Unable to contain its excitement and hunger the Venusian opened the Neptune and drank, eyes closed, knocking the remaining jars to the ground.
When it finished the Neptune it moved onto the Jupiter, but the dust had already pooled around its feet in a wet, sticky puddle. The puddle gurgled hot foam that smelled like burning hair and eggs.
Still dazed from the Neptune, the Venusian stepped away from the mess and shook Henry from his sleep. With each passing second the foam boiled higher and higher until it rose into a fountain that melted the walls of Henry’s home like a candle.
Henry followed the Venusian’s wet footprints out of the shack. The eruption towered past the moon and broke through the atmosphere. The fountain burst into fireworks that gave them the first light in months.
Everything but the dust was greyscale. Red rings and sparks showered down from the discoloured sky. Henry looked up, opened his mouth, then closed it. The Venusian threw its head back and swallowed the rain.
On the other side of the moon an egg shaped ship crashed onto a gallows. What they thought was a comet went unnoticed until a blue flag inched over the horizon.
The flag was carried by a human walking alongside a rover. Driving the rover was a Martian, sitting ten feet tall, with red speckled skin and a stump just like the the Venusian.
The two neighbours stood feeling a mixture of confusion, fear, and anger. The Martian stopped the rover at the foot of the dead garden, where the human dropped to its knees and began tearing through the tomatoes, eating them without a wince.
As Henry walked over to stop him, the human hoisted the staff and pierced the prince’s heart. Henry fell on his hands. He crawled once more to the garden and reached for a tomato. As his blood spilled into the soil he picked one off its vine and looked at the Venusian, then up the sky, and closed his eyes.
Unsure of what to do, the Venusian took the tomato from the prince’s hand. The Martian kicked the human, who picked itself up and started digging. Fearing the brute Martian, the Venusian too got on its knees, and with one trembling hand started to dig.
