Space Yacht Cookout

“Waves” by Jocelyn Ulevicus

I

A shiny silver space yacht descends upon a purple water planet located a thousand billion miles from Earth, but the captain does not perform a routine scan before landing—“space yacht” denoting a billion-dollar, fully crewed floating and space-worthy yacht which owners typically rent out to other people throughout the year as a source of passive income. The crew carries on in a state of moderate bodily disorientation after the ship’s computer wakes them from hypersleep. They complete various duties which satisfy standard operating protocol and unofficial tasks delegated by the vessel’s exceedingly wealthy owner. A series of portholes fixed along the chrome hull provides the crew with a clear view of a gleaming purple sky reflected against the ripples of this uncharted planet’s entirely liquid-covered surface. The yacht owner’s future family watches the landscape from outside where they wait for the kitchen staff to serve lunch—"future family” denoting a mother, daughter, and son who exist hundreds or thousands of years in the future where they spend their family vacations travelling across the galaxy in a perpetual state of indifference.

While the future family waits for their lunch on the aft deck, the future mother repeatedly tosses a future softball to her daughter hoping she will send it flying over the yacht’s bridge—"future softball” denoting an overpriced softball which requires batteries. The future son concentrates as the future mother releases the ball, tossing it underhand toward the future daughter who strikes out again. The ball rolls along the wood-paneled deck and over the side where it drifts away from the yacht’s stern in the water’s lazy current, and then the future son sprints along the deck and dives over the edge into the water where flotation devices within his t-shirt sleeves gurgle and slurp as they automatically inflate. A beacon on the ball blinks at the future son and then deactivates as soon as his fingers squeeze around it and he spins around and holds up the ball for the future mother and future daughter to see before swimming back to them. He’s happy he does not need a spacesuit on this particular vacation as opposed to the many others which typically occur in vacuum.

If the future son could see anything through the murkiness beneath him, he would see something climbing up the massive chain leading all the way down to the space yacht’s anchor which has come to rest upon the eggs of an as of yet undiscovered aquatic species huddled together in a jagged nest made of bones planted in a field of bone-nests spread among the rocky seabed crags, a creature coming closer to investigate this strange floating shadow above which has reached down and crushed its unborn hatchlings.   

II

Meanwhile, the space yacht’s future co-pilot relaxes on the bridge with his feet propped up, the heels of his gleaming white uniform shoes resting on the edge of the console—"future co-pilot” denoting a spaceship’s co-pilot who presumably spends more time suspended in hypersleep than actually piloting a spacecraft. Because the ship’s captain has disappeared below deck to spend an hour napping in his quarters, the future co-pilot leaves open a large porthole behind him to ventilate the bridge of the smoke wafting from a very large future cannabis joint secured between his thumb and index finger—“future cannabis” denoting cannabis which is known to render its users trapped in a state of near catatonic introspection, although many users build up a decent tolerance. All the muscles in the future co-pilot’s body disengage after a few tokes and his arm slips over the side of his chair with the smoldering joint still secured in his fingers and at this point he begins to question the significance of his life while drooling on himself.

The lights and telltales on the main console pulsate like the stars and galaxies the future co-pilot recalls seeing in the three-dimensional deep-field models which first inspired him to pursue a career in outer space. He never would have anticipated as a child that he would one day find himself living as a sixty-five-year-old bachelor working on a boat owned by people young enough to be the children he has never fathered, or that when he wasn’t getting caught in the crossfire of said clients’ failing marriage he would be working alongside a captain who couldn’t even be bothered to complete a full scanning cycle of the planet’s seabed in accordance with interstellar maritime law who is too lazy to do anything but take a nap after already being asleep for six months.

The future co-pilot fears that the peak of his life’s achievements has already occurred at some point in his student years while studying at the space-pilot academy or maybe even one moment as a child when he used watercolors to paint a red barn and some rudimentary farm animals and his automated robot teacher pasted a Good Job! sticker upside down over one of the cows’ heads even though cows and barns have not existed for at least a thousand years.

The future co-pilot gets so stoned that he fails to detect another presence on the bridge, having neglected the possibility that any local wildlife might trace the scent of the future cannabis to the open porthole, and during the mere minutes it would have taken him to consider this risk and close the porthole the wildlife in question is already sliding through the opening. The future co-pilot does not notice the dripping or the slithery wetness of something organic slopping against the deck like a slice of raw meat and gathering itself up, nor does he hear the deep breathing of the thing behind him that slides nearer to the smoking joint to investigate the curious smell.

The future co-pilot drops the joint as he daydreams about painting farm animals and the burning end of it lands on the foot of the thing breathing next to him and a sharpness tears through the future co-pilot’s body and creates a whole mess of everything, but all he feels is some light pressure as most of his body sprays over the blinking monitors in a bloody mist. His remaining limbs twitch and drum against the glowing buttons on the main console and manually disable a significant amount of computer-operated ship functions, chiefly the automated fire suppression system.

III

The future mother decides she will let the future daughter swing and miss a couple more times or until the arrival of the food that her husband had promised would be served by this point, whichever of these comes first. The future daughter prepares for another throw and takes the stance of someone who has been coached rather than someone posing naturally, which is how the future mother imagines she herself must have looked at the age when she had first learned from her coaches all the techniques that lead to her success as a player in college before she tore her ACL, which is still a problem for future athletes who compete for billion-dollar contracts in the future unless they are able to afford robot legs.

The future mother gazes out at the water planet, which as far as she has observed does not contain a single landform, and she wonders what there is for her to do here other than drink or sleep until her husband’s extended time spent in his private quarters with some maid on the ship’s housekeeping staff comes to an end and he decides it’s time for them all to go back into hypersleep for the six-month journey back to Earth. If the future daughter can hit the softball far enough away just once, the future mother will have enough time to make herself a drink before the future son returns with the ball, or maybe she’ll even have enough time to head down and kick the door in on her husband in the middle of whatever it is he’s been doing below deck.

She knows that regardless of how many drinks she can make in the time it takes the future son to fetch the ball, it won’t be enough to distract her from the anxiety brought on when she’s required to feel grateful for something she never asked for given to her by someone who has spent his entire life inheriting things he can afford to give away. She’s been frequently reminded that not every future corporate executive can take time away from board meetings for a trillion-dollar vacation to a planet which might as well be their property considering it remains uncharted and unclaimed by any sovereign state or institution, and so she tosses the softball again.

The future daughter’s bat finally cracks against the ball, which sails over the bridge of the space yacht to the future mother’s amazement. The future son sprints along the side of the superstructure to the bow where he’ll make his trip to retrieve the softball and the future mother thinks she should stop him there because at any second someone may emerge from below to present trays of whatever type of food is supposed to constitute the meal at a quaint, traditional event once referred to as a cookout, which is what they’ve been told to get excited for, but she still lets the future son chase the ball and she turns around to see the future daughter gazing at the future bat as if what she had gripped in her hands up to that point had once been a completely different object, and the future mother is seeing her daughter as if she had been someone completely unrecognizable up until that very moment. A sense of true pride washes over the future mother, but she still wants to make herself a drink and so she walks off to the automated liquor cabinet to do so. 

IV

The lower deck houses the space yacht’s galley where the head chef is allowing the space yacht owner to observe her and the staff while they work, which would normally not be tolerated, but since she is preparing some long forgotten twentieth-century meal, she has no trade secrets to hide or any reason to feel pressured to perform at the level that would be expected by her buffoonish boss under normal circumstances. She’s been asked to make food that she has only read about in the outdated cookbook she managed to get her hands on only after the yacht owner purchased one from an antiques auction, and it all sounds revolting to her.

She’s been tasked with creating something called a hamburger, a beef patty compressed between two pieces of another construction called bread which is made from grain dough. According to the literature, this was a common item of food eaten by people during centuries-old festivals known as cookouts or picnics on special days called holidays when people with good, desirable jobs were not required to leave their homes, but perhaps the most peculiar of all is the curiosity referred to as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich prepared by the chef for the yacht owner’s children, one with the crust removed from the perimeter of its bread housing. The chef has managed to assemble each item of food in what she knows is a perfectly reasonable amount of time considering the obscurity of the task and the hassle in procuring obsolete kitchen implements such as butter knives. Also, she and her staff have managed to accomplish everything without making too much of a mess of their white uniforms which is always a point of contention with the yacht owner when he has nothing better to do than micromanage the people he pays to make his life easy.

The yacht owner insists that he be the one to use the tool to remove the crust from the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He holds the butter knife with both hands having only a tenuous grasp of its function and so he ends up ceremoniously turning the peanut butter and jelly sandwich into what the chef would term mildly an inedible disaster. The chef and the sous-chef and the apprentice wait in silence. Then the yacht owner scratches his head and demands before he storms out of the galley that the chef rebuild the food item again and cut the crust off herself, and the chef guesses when the yacht owner leaves that he’s keeping a not-so-secret appointment in his private cabin with one of the maids, which is at least the popular rumor amongst the crew, although no one really cares because they get paid.

The chef orders her apprentice to go right away to the storeroom and bring more cases of the synthetic material they had used to reproduce the original raw ingredients, but the apprentice stops short of the hatch through which the kitchen staff notices something approaching which is certainly not a person. They watch the figure climb through the galley hatch to reveal itself as a roughly six-foot tall animal with a dome-like head and two arms and a vague, fin-like base with which it propels itself and leaves behind a trail of the bright green gunk that its entire body looks to be composed of. And while the three of them stare in confusion trying to make out what exactly it is they are looking at in terms of the green sludge flowing down the body from the top of the creature’s head like a gooey waterfall or the way that two cavernous orifices open from its sides gasping for air like the jet intakes on a flying car, they don’t realize that the time they spend staring is more time given to this sludgefish and its ability to sense each person in the room and plan how to efficiently dispatch them while preventing itself the most harm.

The apprentice picks up a pan of hot grease to fling at the visitor, but two rope-like arms spring from the thing’s torso and from the end of each arm protrudes a row of talons dripping red with the blood of the future co-pilot whom no one yet knows has been eviscerated and the apprentice thinks in the instant before the razors swing down through his skull that the talons resemble those of the pictures and videos he’s seen of extinct birds of prey such as eagles or falcons or hawks or owls and after it’s all over the pan sails across the galley splashing grease against steel surfaces and onto the sous-chef’s face as the apprentice’s body lands on a lit stove and ignites. The head chef scrambles to grab one of the larger knives she had unpacked earlier and barely gets hold of one before the shrieking sous-chef pushes her into an area of the floor covered with grease and her feet slide out from under her and she tries to brace herself on the floor but the skin of her hand burns against the hot grease and she yanks her arm back reflexively as the sous-chef bumps into the burning apprentice and also catches on fire.

And then the sludgefish looming over the chef rears back its arms fully extending those barbed points without understanding that she has a weapon, but that doesn’t even matter because when the chef stabs the sludgefish there’s no pain, just the feeling of something being put inside and the chef releases her grip on the blade and watches it plunge the rest of the way into the translucent membrane where its blurred shape hovers suspended in green gel. The chef is lying on the deck and the last thing she sees is something she cannot describe, but the words melting face repeat in her head until there’s nothing left.

V

The future daughter has seen the future mother pour drinks from the robot machine on many occasions although she doesn’t know that what the future mother drinks is whiskey and not something sweet like sleep juice which would make sense seeing as most of the time the future mother pours drinks from the robot machine she falls asleep soon after. In this case the future mother has dialed into the robot machine to fill her glass three times since the future son jumped into the sea to retrieve the future softball and now she’s sprawled out over a future chaise lounge with a visor pulled down over her eyes while the future daughter waits for the future son to come back with the softball so she can show the future mother that she can hit the ball again. The fact that it’s taken the future son this long to retrieve the ball is proof that she hit it exactly right, and she wants to duplicate the achievement at least one more time, but then she begins to regret hitting the ball as far as she did because it gave the future mother all the time she needed to lie down and take a nap.

They forgot to bring more than one softball. It seems like they’re always forgetting something when they go on vacation whether it’s an extra softball or the right pair of space shoes or the future checkbook or the future son’s coat when they travel to boring cold planets. The future daughter wonders if they would all forget about the future son if he took too long to get the softball and she imagines a scenario where the space yacht departs with such urgency that everyone forgets that the future son has not yet climbed back aboard, but only a moment later the future son comes trotting across the deck holding the softball up in his hands and he calls out in triumph but the future daughter shushes him and points at the sleeping future mother.

They decide since their mother is asleep and because their father is below deck (and they’ve been instructed not to go below deck for any reason including number one or two) that they will practice hitting the softball on their own. The future daughter channels the future mother’s deep authoritative voice as she instructs the future son to throw the ball level with her waist, and she tries to look the ball into the bat like she’s supposed to when he throws it, but at the edge of her peripheral vision she sees the future mother sit up and she misses the ball again and glares down at the bat in her hands while the ball rolls across the deck and over the edge again, except this time it doesn’t splash into the water because something out of sight has caught it. The ball creeps down the skin of another climbing creature until the oozing membrane absorbs it completely. There is no taste to the ball, just the slight sense of something digesting inside. The future son charges at the hand railing and vaults himself over without noticing a claw swiping at his foot.

VI

The space yacht captain lies flat on his back so as not to wrinkle his uniform. He wants to close his eyes for just a few minutes before returning to the bridge to rejoin the future co-pilot at whatever point the yacht owner announces it’s time to go back into stasis for another six months, but it’s no use as the cheap bulkhead separating the captain’s and the yacht owner’s cabins has not blocked out the sound of ridiculously loud sex, which has kept him awake staring at the ceiling in despair. The space yacht captain doesn’t really care which of the maids it is with the yacht owner because he has no attachment to any of the crew. All that matters is that he’s decided—after calculating his true age when adding the cumulative years he’s spent in hypersleep to the years he’s spent awake, which is over two hundred—that after this voyage he will retire from space yacht captaining.

The lingering thought of his future retirement—"future retirement” denoting the point in a person’s life which supposedly occurs when they decide to stop working and spend the rest of their lives regretting the decision to stop working—is almost enough to distract him from the muffled crashing sound coming from the galley beneath his quarters, which normally would not be his problem but he knows that if something in the galley is delayed then the space yacht’s departure will also be delayed, so he gets up and leaves his cabin to investigate.

What the space yacht captain finds after stumbling down the smoke-filled stairwell and along the lower deck corridor is what may be the body of one of the workers from the kitchen whose name he has never bothered to learn, but it’s a bit difficult to discern because whatever it is that’s lying across the threshold of the hatch leading into the galley is charred black and on fire. The space yacht captain looks beyond the burning heap to see that the entire galley is on fire and so he shouts at the computer to activate the automated fire suppression system, then realizes that he should not have to manually activate an automated system, so he shouts at the computer to acknowledge him at all, but the computer is obviously broken which is a shock because computers never break in the future.

Another crash startles the space yacht captain and so he makes his way toward the noise, but before he reaches the end of the corridor the engine room hatch bursts open and out stumbles one of the chief engineers in her orange insulated jumpsuit with both arms clutching her abdomen, trying to secure the things that are supposed to be inside of her body but which now somehow have the facility to be outside of her body and her matted, blood-soaked hair obscures any of the typical human features which may or may not still be attached to her face. The captain doesn’t know her name either.

And then when he steps into the engine compartment which houses the two giant spaceship rocket engines, he finds the rest of the engineering staff torn apart and strewn about in pieces of varying size and texture. He can’t remember offhand how many engineering crewmembers are on the manifest and now they’re virtually impossible to count without referencing said manifest or perhaps a library of dental records.

One of the control panels in the corner buzzes and sputters and shoots out brilliant blue sparks and although the space yacht captain has not clicked through the annual digital slideshow certification in order to operate the engineering equipment, he assumes correctly that the sparks are indicative of something very bad. From across the room he can also see some type of gauge which is probably supposed to be green but is now blinking red and then the crackling flames and fizzling panels give way to a deep rasping in the shadows behind him and he turns to see a real-life monster dripping blood onto the deck with severed human parts such as fingers and bones stuck to its green mucoid body, sinking into the translucent surface of its skin, pieces of these meek lifeforms which live in the belly of the big floating shadow thing that crushed the hatchlings.

VII

The yacht owner stumbles out of his private quarters into the smoke-filled lower-deck corridor leaving behind a young member of the housekeeping staff whom he’ll probably never hire again because he almost never sees a reason to hire them again after one voyage. He coughs violently and feels his way along the bulkhead and up the stairs to the main airlock which leads outside where it takes his burning, watering eyes a moment to adjust to the purple light. He finds the future mother on the aft deck preoccupied with a bright green, man-sized animal dragging itself toward her and the future daughter.

The green glob thing reaches out at the future mother and future daughter, carrying embedded within itself the silhouette of the softball the yacht owner had purchased before their departure, and then from the gunky noodle arms emerge jagged barb claws, but as the yacht owner searches for something to use as a weapon the screams of the maid whom he thought he would never interact with again pierce through the crackling fire behind him, and he surmises while watching her emerge through the smoke in her partially-zipped form-fitting uniform that there must be another one of these things on board if she’s running away from something in such a boisterous commotion.

The yacht owner runs to the softball bat lying on the deck but the future mother reaches it first, ignoring him. She swings the bat into the side of the slugman where the material of its body grabs hold of the bat and closes in over it. The creature doubles over the wound while the future mother grabs the future daughter and runs to the edge of the yacht, and then just as the future mother tosses the screaming future daughter overboard the green glob fish-man is upon her with a downward swipe of claws wherein the resulting carnage hideously exposes the insides of her, sacks of spilling tissue spraying obscenely against the creature’s green gel skin and spattering tiny flecks of bone into the wide open eyes of the yacht owner.

The remains of the future mother fall to the deck and then all that’s left is the yacht owner and the globform thing, but there’s no time to react before the yacht owner’s leg is taken out from under him by the maid’s hand grabbing his ankle from behind as she tries to pull herself away from the grip of the second creature which has emerged from the main airlock and is in turn grabbing her by the ankle. The yacht owner tries to kick the maid’s hand away while she curses and drags him with her and he frantically tries to grab the hand railing as they’re pulled across the deck and closer to the main airlock and he manages to grip the frame of the airlock as the first monster crawls nearer to him dripping with the future mother’s blood, and he has just enough time left in his life to regret buying the space yacht in the first place and neglecting aspects of his existence that may have been worth not neglecting such as playing softball with the future children or a marriage that could have existed for more than just future tax advantages and then the monster is close enough to shear off the yacht owner’s forearms and the other monster drags him and the maid down into the inferno.

VIII

The future-children swim toward each other in the purple water while the green thing watches them. It grabs hold of the deck railing as it dissolves the future softball inside its body and seems to glare down at them in rage without any discernible facial features to evoke such an emotion. The bloody creature begins climbing over the railing, but from within the ship resounds an explosion that shoots a jet of flame from the main airlock which envelopes and vaporizes the monster into ashes. Then from the sides of the chrome-plated hull sprout each of the yacht’s giant spaceship rocket boosters, an incredible blaze roaring from them as they propel the ship forward through the water and then up into the purple sky. The space yacht’s anchor bursts through the ocean surface and swings from its giant chain like a pendulum before the whole ship explodes into a white flare with a devastating crack that echoes sharply over the open water leaving the ears of the future children ringing as they hug each other below the smoke trails of streaking spaceship shards flung across the sky, and when the ringing in their ears subsides the only sound is the splashing of pulverized space yacht raining down around them, sinking to the field of bone nests filled with those strange eggs, and as the creatures below the future children launch themselves from the abyss toward the water’s surface, the empty stomachs of the future son and future daughter gurgle in anticipation of the cookout they were originally promised—“cookout” denoting a traditional outdoor gathering in which various meats and side dishes are prepared and served to participants in observance of holidays typically held at the expense of people whose absence goes unnoticed by those in attendance.

About the author

John Milas is a writer from Illinois. His work appears in The Southampton Review, Superstition Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Learn more at johnmilas.com.

About the artist

Jocelyn Ulevicus is an American artist and writer with work forthcoming  or published in magazines such as the Free State Review, The Petigru  Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Humana Obscura amongst others. Working  from a female speculative perspective, themes of nature and the unseen;  and exit and entry are dominantly present in her work. Ulevicus is a  2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her in-progress memoir, The Birth of a  Tree was shortlisted for the 2019 Santa Fe Literary Award Program. She  currently resides in Amsterdam and is currently working on her first  book of poems.