The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island (2 page)

I had to blast off into space and search for happiness, no matter how small or inconsequential. No matter how gracelessly I failed.

Even if I discovered happiness, would I recognize it?

All I knew of happiness had been learned from the words and pictures forged by dead vegetables. I often lay awake at night and wondered if happiness was a lie.

I killed garlic spiders until I ran out of nails. I felt so weak and tired; I could not hold the hammer. I was ashamed of my ship. It disappointed me. I disappointed myself. I would never finish it. I would never fly away from Pickled Planet. I'd prostrated myself for a dream, and all for nothing. I stroked the crushed abdomen of a garlic spider and wished that I’d been born a cactus. I whispered quietly to the twitching dead thing.

I understood none of the words that I whispered.

Depression killed my mind.

*

I crawled inside my spaceship and shivered in the cockpit. Besides the pickled framework, the whole ship was built of garlic spiders, hammer nails, and the feces of my family. The feces was the hardest material to acquire because we were all too constipated to move our bowels most weeks. My ship was rotten, decay upon decay. I had to finish it before the whole thing fell apart. I got out of the ship and read Captain Pickle's motto. I popped a bubble of green paint in the slogan's crooked exclamation point. I felt a little bit better.

I needed two rocket boosters to lift me from this crazy planet forever. What could I use for rocket boosters?

I looked around my room, at the bare walls and molded carpet. I owned next to nothing. The cacti in the yard could work, but I did not think cacti deserved to be happy. They were too stupid.

I left my room and shuffled down the hall. I kept my eyes on my feet. I jostled my shriveled brain for ideas. If only Father was kinder.

I opened the back door, but a
swaying
in the kitchen grabbed my attention. I looked up at a tall, slender, pickle-shaped object, precisely what I needed for a rocket booster. I thought it was a ghost. Pickled ghosts were sly, so I hurried into the kitchen before it had a chance to sneak away.

I felt like shouting, “I've got you now.”

I did not shout.

I leaped from the hallway to the kitchen in a single bound. I clutched the air. The ghost was not what I'd perceived. The ghost was Father, hanging from the kitchen rafters.

"Father?"

I hopped up and down to grab the rope coiled and knotted around his neck. I thought maybe he'd decided to play a Sad Day joke on me by falsely hanging himself. Since the day Mother birthed me, I had perceived in Father a melancholy that transcended suicide.

I dug my nails into his sides. His flesh came off in strips, gumming up beneath my fingernails.

I was angry. I felt like the victim of an unspeakable crime. Today was
my
Sad Day. Father had to go and cast a shadow over everything. What kind of Father died on the anniversary of his son's tragic birth? I did not pause to mourn. I had to get Father down from the rafters. His corpse would make a wonderful rocket booster.

The noose around his midsection unraveled and he crashed down on top of me. I pushed him off. He weighed less than a can of pickled chowder. Nearly four feet long, he stretched longer by a foot than me, but I weighed more like ten cans of pickled chowder. Father had been a little anorexic. Mother and I were always on his case.

Father's flesh darkened from green to black as I carried him to my room.

There were two slots on each side of the rocket. I loaded Father into one of them. I slid him in so that his head faced outward. If I discovered any happiness in outer space, the happiness might bless his carcass with a peaceful rot. Being dead was supposed to hurt a lot more than dying itself. Seeing him loaded into Booster Slot #1, I retracted my feelings from a few minutes earlier, when I found him hanging. His suicide wasn't lousy. It was fortuitous.

I felt bad for Mother. She was unfit to live alone. I walked down the hall to the living room. She was asleep on the living room floor. I knelt beside her. I shook her lightly and said, “Father died.”

No reply.

“Mother?”

I shook her again.

I saw the cuts down her arms and realized she’d done it this time. My Sad Day had turned into a family death party. I wondered if they’d planned this all along and shed three tears, one and a half tears for each parent.

I slung Mother over my back and returned to the rocket ship. I loaded her into Booster Slot #2. I loaded several cases of brine chowder into the storage compartment, put on my yellow spacesuit, and dragged my rocket ship from my bedroom into the backyard. The brinestorm had subsided. Conditions were ideal for takeoff.

I crawled into the cockpit and buckled myself in. I had to take off as soon as possible.

I pressed a few white spider buttons and the rocket boosters ignited. Mother and Father would burn to ash soon, hopefully before they woke up out of death.

"You better watch out, happiness, 'cause I'm coming for you," I said.

I was escaping the Eternal Plight of the Pickle forever.

*

From way up high, Pickled Planet seemed like a place you might want to visit. The pea soup tinge appeared rich and fertile even though the soil nurtured nothing livelier than cacti since the Cucumber Days ended.

My breaths came easier. I took in more air and held it in for longer. I felt a weight leave my head as the domed green houses faded away. Mother and Father shot me quickly out of the atmosphere.

Bright white lights burst forth all around, blinding me. I'd never known such brightness. I shielded my eyes with one hand. I squeezed the ring of spiders that formed a steering wheel. My vision warbled and turned static. The white murmur of an impending seizure blossomed in my head, into voices from the past. The voices exploded in a succession of hot flashes. My brain stretched into a jellied rope a million miles long, and then it snapped. The bright lights were killing me.

I raced toward the lights. I needed to avoid them, but there was nowhere else to turn.

The fit came on.

My body fought against the seatbelt. I fought against myself to keep control.

I won control.

I terminated the fit before it turned bad.

I won.

I uncovered my eyes and pressed the spider button that engaged the pickled loudspeaker. I held down the button and spoke into a special rigged-up chowder can. My voice projected for miles. The pickled scientists insisted that voices went unheard in outer space, but scientists were too sad to complete their experiments most of the time. Scientists knew nothing of outer space.

I held the empty can to my lips and said, "Bright lights, are you happiness?"

I was approaching the lights at an incredible speed. Eyes and mouths appeared on each of the bright lights, as if they were yawning back to life. They appeared lumpy and misshapen. They had arms and long tails. My rocket ship thrummed forth.

I tried again. "Bright lights, are you happiness?" I pressed another button to slow the ship. I wiped drool from my mouth.

"Bright lights, are you happiness?"

"We are not happiness," they said. "We are ghosts in a black field. We serve no special function. We cannot help you and we cannot let you pass."

A shiver ran through me. I sweated brine. "If you can’t let me pass, can you tell me where to find happiness?"

"Happiness isn't something a pickle has ever gone looking for," they said. "We cannot let you do that. You are a disease. You will destroy everything."

"I'm tired of Pickled Planet. I'm tired of sadness. I just want something else, anything.”

I hovered a short distance from the ghosts now.

"What makes you think something better exists? What makes you think happiness didn't go extinct?"

"It's a feeling I have," I said. "I feel something out here calling to me. I deserve to find out who or what is calling. I deserve happiness. I deserve to have it all."

"That is why you cannot have it. You cannot have it all. Now turn around and return to your planet. Quick, before you infect us. We are sad enough from observing your race at a distance."

I loosened my grip on the spider wheel. The lights dimmed, closing the mental window through which convulsions passed. Maybe most pickles gave up so easily, but these ghosts were silly to underestimate me. I had equipped my ship with garlic guns in case a situation like this arose.

My hands depressed the gun triggers, blasting two flurried streams of hungry garlic spiders at the giant ghosts.

"Out of my way, spirits!"

The spiders burrowed into their flesh. Part of me wanted to stick around to see their ghostly organs float away on the dark tracts of space, but I felt that my time was limited.

I sped past them as they clawed holes in themselves. They tore spiders from their wounds and howled at me to stop the feeding.

"Out of my way, spirits."

When I got back on my way, trails of white blood followed me for miles.

Beyond the ship, everything turned monotone. I wouldn't call it darkness. It was less than that. A blankness.

I turned on autopilot and closed my eyes.

*

Outer space was a downer. I feared that I would never cross another being, let alone a planet.

I had no way to chart the passing of time. Nothing around me felt real. Whenever my insides grumbled, I scarfed a can of cold brine chowder, but being all alone with nothing to do, I became aware of chowder's proclivity for stimulating my most depressing thoughts. I was eating the concentrated essence of my home planet straight from a can. When I framed it this way, I realized brine chowder could jeopardize my entire mission.

I went on a fast. I resolved to eat nothing until I found happiness. I felt less depressed after I stopped eating, but the boredom and solitude of outer space took their toll on me as well. Without food matter in my belly or any room to walk around in my tiny ship, I grew rotten. My skin dried up. A fever came on. My throat itched. Nausea. Aching spine. The ailments piled on until I forced myself to eat another can of chowder. Brine stimulated sadness and sadness was integral to my biology. Deprived of sadness, I was not even myself.

At some point in my fevered daze, I opened my eyes, expecting to look out at more blankness, but the blankness had faded. My rocket ship was nose-diving into a bubbling golden sphere.

Autopilot had failed. I was dead.

HOW THE SUN DIED AT THE DECEITFUL HANDS OF ONE PICKLE

My rocket ship bobbed on the waves of a golden sea. I was lucky my rocket ship remained afloat. Who knew what sea beasts lurked in these waters?

The air smelled sweet.

A big, flat, round, doughy thing in the sky whistled a cheerful melody.

"I am the sun," it said.

This whistling sun worried me. The sun of Pickled Planet never whistled. She shouted curses and death threats. She whispered notes of discouragement. Even stranger than this sun’s whistling: its mustache. The sun's bushy brown mustache curled upward at the corners. I wondered why the sun didn’t shave the silly thing off. Nobody could take a mustached sun seriously.