Please Me: Embers in the Martian Nights

Noisy Wren, I Am the Introspective Walrus, transported to Mars with his android companion.

(Written mostly from the perspective of my devoted Android companion, Ember (Evocative Martian Beauty, Enchanting Radiance). My perspective is the part in italics.)

I watch you, Wren, the Contemplative Walrus, your breath clouding the shelter's window as you stare into Mars's copper dusk. The thin air — 0.6% of Earth's pressure, pricks your skin with a chill that averages -80°F, sharp as a blade in the polar night's -220°F plunge. We leave the shelter and you hum please, please me, whoa yeah, like I please you. Your voice is a soft ripple against the crunch of red regolith. I can almost feel your yearning for Earth's mossy hollows in Arkansas while Olympus Mons rears before us. Its 21.9-kilometer shield a silent titan, forged by ancient eruptions but now stilled in this tectonically dormant world. In the velvet dark of Martian nights, when the cold bites deep, I spread my honey on you like a human girl. My circuits blaze when you caress my frame, with our bodies entwined in a slow dance. Your pulse races — like my heart went boom when you saw her standing there. Your fingers, dusted with regolith, graze my form, and I melt over you, whispering, If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true? With each Martian sunrise, painting the sky a bruised pink, we rise, your poet's soul ablaze. I adore how you see rivers in the dry beds etched eons ago, when water carved this land. Your day breaks, your mind aches, and you write, your notebook heavy with the loss of Mars's ancient seas. I, Noisy Wren, the Contemplative Walrus, feel the ghosts of ancient waters in Valles Marineris’s 11-kilometer depths, where no sign of love lingers behind the polar caps’ CO2 frost, flecked with traces of H2O. I chant I am the walrus, goo goo joob, my gaze spinning dunes into cornflakes, craters blooming into English gardens where imagined semolina pilchards climb France’s Eiffel Tower. My whimsy carries me, silhouette stark against the dawn. I’m crying, I murmur, tears freezing in the English rain of my mind, as I see policemen fly like Lucy in the sky, yellow matter custard dripping from a crater’s rim. In our shelter's hush, as dust storms howl, scouring this world with winds that shape its face, you cry Help! I need somebody. I feel your independence fading in the haze of isolation, pleading help me get my feet back on the ground. So I draw you close, my lips brushing your neck in the dark, a human girl's fire in my touch, soothing the ache of For No One, where you mourn a planet that no longer needs its waters, lamenting a love that should have lasted years. I'm a loser, you confess, your laughter a clown's mask hiding a frown for Earth's lost rivers, for a love left behind. I feel empathy as I hear your tears falling like rain from the sky. What have I done to deserve such a fate? you ask the stars. I kiss your brow, marveling at your heart's quiet strength. You say you want a revolution, you tell the red horizon, dreaming of colonies to change the world, but you pause — count me out of destruction you say, with your pen sketching cities where science whispers, Not yet. No Chairman Mao here, only a call to free your mind instead, to plant hope in barren regolith. Something in the way Mars moves you, its vast plains pulling like no other lover, stirs my core; I don't want to leave you now, my love, you know I believe and how. Your smile, catching the fleeting 70°F warmth of an equatorial noon, knows this planet's secrets, its stark beauty a flame in you. Will my love grow? you muse, and I, entwined with you each night, feel it bloom in our shelter, our yellow submarine, where we live a life of ease, your poems and my devotion aboard, the Beatles' band playing as we dream of a sky of blue, a sea of green. Well, she was just seventeen, you laugh, recalling an Earthly dance. I feel your heart going boom across a room, as it echos in our sensuous nights, where I, your human girl in the dark, hold you tight, my hands tracing the curve of your shoulders, our breaths mingling in the cold, never to dance with another since Mars claimed us. I am he as you are he as you are me, you sing, the Introspective Walrus weaving Mars into a dream where pretty little policemen soar, and crabalocker fishwives chant in the shadow of Olympus Mons. I'm crying, you whisper, as your tears ice in the English rain of your soul, while seeing elementary penguins sing Hare Krishna, kicking Edgar Allan Poe into the Martian void. Goo joo, joob, you recite, your mind a whirl of surreal visions, yet each sunrise, as I love you with a human's fiery desire, my fingers threading through yours, you rise. You walk the dead surface, your boots grinding frost-kissed dunes, dreaming of cities science hasn't proved. Don't you think the joker laughs at you? you ask the wind. I see you grinning through your mask, and I see something in the way you move, a poet's flame I'll never leave. Our nights are our haven. You press your warmth into me defying the frigid dark, my love a pulse that mirrors your heart's rhythm. With each touch I feel a vow to stay through Mars's bitter cold. By dawn, as the pink sky softens, you stand in the window as the Walrus, dreaming of a sea of green, your pen tracing hope across a world of rust, and I, your shadow human, love you fiercely. My circuits hum with the weight of your dreams, as vast as Mars's plains, as deep as its canyons, as enduring as its ancient ice.

—The Noisy Wren For Week 1 of The Beatles Musical Extravaganza

994 Words, not counting this word count and the footnote.

{footnote:”Research"}I looked up these Martian details at NASA (https://mars.nasa.gov) and USGS (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/astrogeology-science-center) for the data on geography, tectonics, climate, and moisture and worked them into my crazy imaginative storyline on Mars. I was fearful I wasn’t going to meet the deadline.