“In your naivety,” she mutters, “you lackadaisically assumed doughnuts would be forever.”
I stand aside her, clutching my maple log and trying my best to look demur. She doesn’t buy it, not for a second.
“You’re trying to look demur.” She flashes me a trite smile with those perfect teeth before turning from me. “But, never mind that.”
We stand together, but not too together, on Airstrip One Point Five on that non-lithesome Planum Boreum where the beer is subzero and the women, more so. The air smells of that cold Martian cold you sometimes encounter in the old settlement “tin cans” that once served as domiciles.
On the wide expanse of the plateau behind us, her Starcraft “Nightingale” sits poised for its coming Trans-light jump when it’ll (and by extension, she’ll) be several kilo parsecs from this Red Planet.
And me.
“Doughnuts are my life’s work,” I say. “You, of all people, should be cognizant of that.”
I’m not angry, just continually contemplating how to get yeast to rise with this thin of an atmosphere.
She nods acknowledgement. “Indeed. But, I’m anything but a French Cruller.”
“Look,” I say, “Mars needs Donutland.”
From over her shoulder, she blows a kiss. “I’ve got to go.”
I realize she’s trying to get a rise out of me, yet I watch her as she walks away in her bulky jump suit, her helmet tucked under her arm as she climbs up the “Nightingale”’s access ladder, the whine of the Starcraft’s trans-light engines rising to a reverberating crescendo, the air filled with the dark smell of dark matter.
I look upward. Overhead, Phoebes hangs like an apple fritter.
Hatches sealed and for a brief moment, the “Nightingale” levitates above Airstrip One Point Five on the wide flat Planum Boreum and, with a certain anticlimacticness, her Starcraft portals in a flash, leaving nothing but the “boom” of the after wave that washes over me like a lost memory.
“That’s it then,” I mutter.
I inwardly smile. With her now gone, I won’t have to share my Bear Claw anymore.
Or put up with her snoring.
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