TRIAL AND ERROR | short stories + snippets

Best Friend Space Adventure: The Garden, pt 3

"They're salodops," Aff explains. "Insanely clever. Not only do they mate for life, they also live in small communities for generations and have even been studied to exhibit advanced trading behaviour. They can change their colour to blend into their environment.

"Interestingly, salodops have both an exo- and an endoskeleton. If they're attacked, they shed their exoskeleton and outer muscle, so that their endoskeleton becomes a temporary exoskeleton, and they bury themselves—what is now just the vital organs—into the sediment. They enter hibernation for three prime moons to build a new exoskeleton and then they're as good as new."

"Wow..."

Aff watches the salodops. "One day, when the Gauka Lake has been balanced to sustain life again, I'll free this village to live there."

They're silent for a moment. Then Caleb tells Aff about mantis shrimp and about octopus. They listen without blinking once.

"What I wanted to show you was this." Aff pulls a tomb from his bookshelf. They invite Caleb to sit on the edge of the bed, and he does so with silent gratitude. Despite gravity being lower, his leg has started to tire and ache by now.

Aff sits beside him with the book in their lap. It's called The Humans of Earth, they tell him. They open it to show him black and white photos of fashion and food and flowers. All the information in the book is at least a hundred years old, which Caleb informs them when Aff asks whether he wears clothing like that.

They seem slightly disappointed, though forget all about it when they find the image they were looking for. They point at it. "This is like your hat. Are you a cowboy?"

"No, I needed it for a performance once."

Aff gazes at him and the pink cowboy hat on his head. "Well, it's just so fabulous."

Caleb takes it off and holds it out to Aff. "Have it."

"No, no, no." They shift away on the bed, shaking their hands in rejection. "I couldn't take something so splendid–"

Caleb does not inform them that he bought it from Poundland and will be able to buy a new one whenever he wants to. It feels like it would make Aff feel criticised for their enjoyment of it.

"I want you to have it."

After a long moment of their eyes flicking between Caleb's face and the hat, they eventually take it. They take it in with sensors on their palms. With great care, they place it on their head, and then, in a flush, their blue skin turns entirely purple as their body ripples with excitement.

Aff stares at themself in a round mirror on the wardrobe door. Caleb says nothing, glad to watch the salodops in the aquarium, until their skin has morphed back into blue.

"You like Earth a lot," Caleb says.

Aff sinks into their shoulders. "Sorry. I don't mean to be off-putting with it. It's just something of a fascination of mine—it's so far away from other planets with life. Space there is so... austere. Your lifeforms and cultures are so untouched.

"There's so much we've lost here because of intergalactic existence. Don't get me wrong—so much we have learnt and gained too. But Earth is just so interesting."

They stare at the black and white photo of the cowboy still open on Caleb's lap.

Their gaze climbs up to meet Caleb's somewhat uncertainly. "You don't like it there?"

"It's fine." He shrugs. "But there's loads of bad stuff too. Like racism, and sexism, and transphobia, and homophobia, and ableism... It makes it really exhausting sometimes. It's not like we look at flowers and wear fun hats all day."