NEW HOLE

During her second week on Mars, Grace developed a new orifice. It was in her cleavage and hurt when she put on her push-up bras. The part between the cups, with the bow, pressed into it and the friction made it seep with a gamey, purple substance. She squeezed it out and rolled it between her fingers. It felt like jam.

This wasn’t in the pamphlets, she thought.

But when she told her Martian husband, he laughed. “You’re growing!” he said.

At night, he spooned her in bed, reaching his arm around to massage the new hole as she watched the twin moons rise over the dusty red mountains. It didn’t hurt, exactly. But it didn’t feel good, either.

“The best way I can describe it,” she said to her sister on her weekly call to Earth, “is like someone cleaning your belly button with a q-tip. Like, if they were too aggro, it would hurt, but most of the time it’s fine. They just have to be gentle.”

“Wow, way to sell the place,” said her sister.

“Everything else they say is true. He totally dotes on me. In case you’re ever curious about being a Martian mail-order bride.”

“I’ll pass,” her sister said.

He massaged the secretions into jars that he kept along the windowsill. They glowed maroon when the sunlight hit them, and she could see the seeds inside. She imagined it tasted like raspberry jam, but was too scared to eat it. 

When she first noticed the hole, it was a bit larger than a blackhead. Now, it was large enough for her to slip a finger inside.

“Very good,” her husband said as he studied the jars, and wrote something in his notebook. Grace’s Martian wasn’t that good, so she couldn’t read it. The infomercials told her to listen to Martian tapes as she slept to learn the language, but she had been too lazy, and now all she knew was how to ask for the bathroom. 

One week he left for his overseer job at the mines, and her hole grew swollen, heavy, like her boobs before she got her period. She had trouble sleeping because panicked mewling emanated from it, like kittens. She tried massaging out the goo herself, but her fingers were sticky, clumsy. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and the mewling was louder, inside her head. 

“Are you enjoying your time without Mr. Martian?” asked her sister. “What’s his name again?”

“My Martian is so shit,” said Grace. “I can’t say his name. When I try, it sounds like I’m being waterboarded.”

“Totally.”

“I kinda miss him,” Grace said. “Is that crazy?”

She was in teen beauty pageants growing up and prided herself on not being as fucked up as the others, with their twitchy, bony fingers and gray eyes. But it was only on Mars that she let herself eat until she was full.

When he came home, he knelt to hug her, and Grace’s hole pulsed with her heartbeat. He lit a candle next to their bed—“I read about Earthwomans. I do you a romance.”

He sang to the hole in Martian and a tiny finger sprouted from it, tentatively, arching towards the light.