Pet Rocks

• 5 •

Picking up the box, that mirror finish of wood with the hole blown out, I turn it to find the clasp, and again I hear something move inside. I feel the clunk of something heavy hitting one wall of the box. I feel it vibrate slightly in my hand.

The clasp is really a series of four wood pegs, each bigger around than my finger. I push them in one at a time, and when I push the fourth, it causes the first three to slide back out flush with the box. I push the first three in again, but the lid won’t open. I reset them. Try the first two. Reset. The first and third. Reset. The middle two. Reset. Just the first. Reset. Just the second. And the lid pops open.

The thing inside shifts again. And then I hear someone say:

“Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick, took your goddamn time.”

There is a rock inside the box.

I look at the rock.

I feel like the rock is looking at me.

The rock shifts position ever so slightly.

“What?” it asks.

“Hello?” I say.

“Yeah, hello, what the hell took you so long? I was dying in here.”

“You’re… a rock,” I tell the rock.

“The fuck I am.”

I set the box back on the bench and rest on my heels, peering at the little thing. It’s gray with deep pockets of black, little fissures and cracks and pockmarks. One of the black spots is deep and might be an… eye? I’ve gone through countless flashcards of alien life for the army and NASA, and I’ve forgotten most of what I had to memorize to get through the tests, but I know there are shitloads of creatures that camouflage themselves either to not get stepped on or to kill the fuck out of those of us who step too close to them. Yet I’ve never seen a creature that looks so much like… a rock.

“What are you?” I ask.

“Well, since you’re obviously a human, you’d call me an Orvid. And since your accent places you from Earth, you’d obviously not give a fuck what I call myself in my own tongue, so why bother?”

“You’re a foul-mouthed thing,” I say.

“This is me shrugging like I give a shit,” the rock tells me.

“This is weird,” I say out loud, mostly to myself, but I guess partly to the rock. “I mean, a lot of my life has been really freaking kooky and batshit crazy, but this is fascinatingly weird.”

“Yeah, no shit. I’m on my way to a happy life in Oxford, and next thing I know I can’t breathe and some fruitloop is shrieking and shaking my happy little wooden home and giving me hell for my vocabulary. Jesus, man, I almost just died, and you’re thinking about yourself? What kind of special selfish are you?”

This brings me up short. My brain is still whirling with the idea that this rock-looking alien is actually alive, so I haven’t considered the fact that a clearly sentient being very nearly just died, and here I am worried about my own feelings.

“Damn,” I say. “Sorry. Totally. Are you okay? You need… like little pebbles to munch on or something?” I laugh.

“Fuck you,” the rock says. “What I need is some water.”

This is me, in a beacon, out on the edge of sector eight, so damn near the edge that I might as well be in sector nine, running the tap on my moisture reclaiminator, filling a plastic cup with water, then drizzling it on top of a rock in a smashed wooden box.

“Not on my fucking head!” the rock says.

I apologize but laugh. The rock has what sounds vaguely like a British accent, which makes everything it says funnier than it should.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Just a little puddle, man. And save me some time by putting me in it.”

I do this. It occurs to me that I haven’t called this in or checked with NASA about what I found. I go over to the QT to see if there are any messages. Nothing. That’s pretty damn curious. So I fire off a quick “55” to Houston, which is beacon code for “Everything here is hunky-dory, in case you were wondering.”

“Where are we?” the rock asks. And I realize that I need a name for the guy. And how really fucking cool it is to have some company other than my freaked-out OCD roommate.

“Beacon 23,” I say. “Sector eight. On the outer edge of the Iain Banks asteroid field, between the ore rim and—”

“Yeah, jeez, okay. The middle of nowhere, I get it. So when’s the next pickup?”

“The next what?”

“WHEN DO I GET HOME?” the rock shouts. It sounds like a little squeal more than a great roar, like a piece of chalk on a blackboard.

“The, uh, next supply shuttle will be in… I think three months?”

The rock stares at me.

Did he just shrug?

He looks exasperated.

A bubble forms on the surface of his little puddle.

I wonder if rocks can fart.

“I need to name you,” I tell the rock.

“The hell you do.”

“I’m thinking…”

“Already got a name,” the rock says.

“…oh, but that’s too obvious.” I laugh. I laugh hard. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in so long that all my emotional triggers, which have only known sobbing, mix some tears in with the laughter.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” the rock says.

“I’m going to call you…”

“I’VE GOT A NAME!”

“…Rocky.”

Rocky stares at me. It’s more of a glare, really. I start laughing again. Damn, it feels good.

“You’re the worst human I’ve ever met,” Rocky says.

I wipe the tears from my cheeks. “I think maybe when the supply shuttle comes, I’ll just keep you. Not tell the labcoats about you.”

“That’s called kidnapping, you sadistic ape.”

This makes me laugh some more. It’s the accent. It kills me.

“Are you stoned?” Rocky asks.

And this is too much. I double over and clutch my shins, there in the command pod, not a stitch of clothing on, laughing and crying and wheezing for breath, fearing I might not be able to stop, that I’ll die like this, die from so much joy and mirth, while debris from a destroyed cargo ship peppers the hull and cracks into the solar array, and ships full of people navigate through space at twenty times the speed of light, narrowly avoiding this great reef of drifting rocks, and all because I’m here, because I’m holding it together, this trained and hairless monkey in outer space.