I Am a Martian by Karen Fischer

“You ain’t never shotgunned a beer before?”

S peered over at my averted eyes, but I didn’t answer his question because no, I had never shoved a key into the side of a beer can and chugged before. I had never even drank a beer before. V stared at me too. She was the third corner of the equilateral triangle surrounding the trunk of a car, her mouth slightly ajar, teeth hovering above her top lip. They were straight, a rare sight, and shone in the night. I had never seen someone with teeth so white. 

V had blonde hair and liked the color pink. I had found that her bedroom, her cell phone case, her bikinis, and her panties purchased with such abandon that most were plucked from her underwear drawer with the tags still on–all of it was hot pink. She preferred to only drink hard liquor, it had less calories, so this night was an exception. Her mother had bought her a brand new car once she got her driver’s license. Watching someone my age drive was foreign. I wondered how she ever learned. I liked watching her change lanes on the Severn River Bridge at twilight, the sky bruised where the sun had left it, an expanse of sailboats dotting the waves below as they exited the waterway to head towards shore.

The trunk of the car held a half empty thirty pack of Natural Light. Natty Light, it was reiterated to me. It was the cheapest permissible beer one could buy, the only cheaper being Natural Ice, but Natty Light was acceptable. Natty Ice was not. I didn’t know these lessons yet. They would become quiet knowledge, a way to sum up someone walking into a party. Depending on the beer they brought, you would know how much money they had. 

I chugged diligently from the side of the aluminum can. At one point, I asked V if she was too drunk to drive us home. She blinked. Though it must have been swift, it hung across her face: round, flat, like a plate. She half-smiled. “Three beers don’t do shit to me. I only get fucked up if I pound at least twelve.” The curtain of aloofness across her face somehow expressed that the night was wildly unremarkable for her. She would never remember this, but I would.

I did not understand the mechanics of the land I stood upon, that I was a forty five minute drive from the nucleus of power that dictated the world in which I lived. That nucleus determined the language I spoke and the inflection in the voices of V and S who wandered warm around me. The nucleus rewarded people like my father, home in his recliner after a long day at work. It celebrated him by dictating that those who worked beneath machines like he did were the lifeblood of the continent. V, on the other hand, was enshrined in mysterious abundance. I did not get a driver’s license for many years because, for my father, it was not worth teaching me how to propel a machine that he could never buy. If I was honest with myself, V had no business even spending time around me. It was only because she had just moved to town that she bothered in an attempt to make friends. 

S wore a white wife-beater and blasted the album I only associate with that spring and summer, a series of sweaty nights. We are not the same, I am a martian. He slipped up through the sun-roof of the car, pale freckled arms bright in the velveteen night. His concave torso and chest curved into an S. When he spoke, it sounded like a hiss, not like a cat but smooth, like the swish of the Atlantic Ocean when it slipped into darkness at night. Bass pounded from the car. I could hear little beyond it. Warm beer boiled in my throat. I watched S climb down from the sunroof to lean against the hood. When he did, he laid back like he was on a bed. He tilted his chin up towards the stars above as he puffed Newport one hundreds, long and thin, blowing smoke rings until they dissolved.

I remember feeling their lives, so many between the two of them, yet the life I was in was swishing back at me, diligent and measured as Atlantic waves. V with her top lip quivering over the bottom, the gap of her mouth, her teeth poking out. My hair had gone thick with the heat. A childish brand of self-consciousness mounted while standing over the trunk sober but, blissfully, it melted away as I kept drinking. 

Once, my mother told me about a patch of woods nearby that held quicksand. As a young girl, I daydreamed of seeking the muck, seeping into it, thrashing when the unknown was threatening to topple over me until I’d wilt. In formative years, one year felt so different from the next that I never forgot the contours of them. In adulthood, years crumple together like wads of wet paper. There are gaps where more memory should be. But starting with the trunk of the car, there were no gaps, just a surge forward. I wondered how I could ever bear the fact that there was never a rewind and always that continuance. There would never be a memory of the first time I drank a beer again. There would never be another single moment when the first friend drove a car. 

As I grow, I keep walling myself off in new places, foreign states, sinking into quicksand and waiting until the first thrash when breath is about to cease to wash off, wipe my hands clean, and begin the process again. I wish for two things. One. I want no one to know me. I want no one to remember. Two. I want to feel home, yet home is sinking, and I am embedded in the swamp. I suppose I always have been, long before the beer thickened in my belly and the bass pounded through my bones, into the trees, shifting the hovering river nearby. From the water, if one swam, maybe they passed by, saw the three of us, and shook their head, kids these days, before continuing onward, seeing what else the river had in store. 

Karen Fischer is a writer currently living in rural New Mexico. Her previous or forthcoming publications include Nowhere Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Entropy, and Ghost City Press, among others.

8 September 2022