BooksBarbecue
Back Dead Astronauts Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Epigraph
  4. 1. The Dream of the Blue Fox
  5. 1. THE DREAM OF THE BLUE FOX
  6. 2. THE THREE
  7. i.
  8. ii.
  9. iii.
  10. iv.
  11. v.
  12. vi.
  13. vii.
  14. viii.
  15. ix.
  16. x.
  17. xi.
  18. xii.
  19. xiii.
  20. xiv.
  21. xv.
  22. xvi.
  23. xvii.
  24. xviii.
  25. xix.
  26. xx.
  27. 3. Botch Behemoth
  28. 3. BOTCH BEHEMOTH
  29. 4. CAN’T REMEMBER
  30. 5. Leviathan
  31. 5. LEVIATHAN
  32. 6. THE BODY
  33. – 7 –
  34. 7. Corpse
  35. 7. CORPSE
  36. 8. The Dark Bird
  37. 8. THE DARK BIRD
  38. 9. CAN’T FORGET
  39. i.
  40. ii.
  41. iii.
  42. 10. The Dead Astronaut
  43. 10. THE DEAD ASTRONAUT
  44. 0. A Scrap of Paper Found in Chen’s Suit
  45. 0. A SCRAP OF PAPER FOUND IN CHEN’S SUIT
  46. Also by Jeff Vandermeer
  47. A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  48. Newsletter Sign-up

Grayson could not deny they lay peaceful among clumps of desert flowers and grasses. Some of which sprouted from those helmets.

Dead her.

Dead Moss.

Dead Chen.

“There is nothing we could have told you that would have made a difference,” the fox said. “Nothing at all.”

“You’re a monster just like the rest of them,” Grayson said.

v.4.0 Swift and fast. The blue fox became the rain. Became implosion. Became explosion. There was no air. No way to breathe without a helmet. There was light behind her eyes that was meant to be behind his eyes. There were thoughts that went hunting and hurtling through her, killing things she thought she knew or believed in. Loping forward to the next thing.
v.5.0 Hell of a nothing that prattled that pried and the fox’s face floated down upon her life like a sun and all else blankness and a voice came that she would not remember later—the words. And all she could do was fall to her knees, fall to the sand at the onslaught, and the fox hovering there, revealing himself to her. All of him.

She cried aloud at the miracle of it and the fear of it and the awe and the terror, and the fox could have held her in that moment forever if he’d liked. While all that was not her that she could not conceive of riddled her body and interrogated it and made of it a receptacle for a divine blue flame.

You have done enough and are done.

How could she stand against that fierce power? How could she not submit?

v.6.0

The universe spread out before her and her above and within it and the fox like a map, a compass.

The presence left her, the terrible blue star left her.

Now do you understand? Do you see?

But Grayson had no mouth to answer, no thing to say.

Do you see?

Can’t remember. Can’t forget. She saw the blue fox’s fate. How his part too would be tortuous. That he would relinquish so much. That, in the end, the blue fox must care nothing for his own life. That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.

The burning halo of the blue fox.

The drifting flare over the desert, lighting her way in the darkness.

A weight that was warm and thick and ferocious.

But when she lifted her head, the blue fox was gone. It was just her and the last of their supplies and she remembered only vaguely that she had met a fox.

Down so many pathways.

Down through the uncut grass.

Down the well-trodden path.

Down to the tunnel under the bridge.

Where the river had once run. Where there had once been a forest. She could see it all. And that was all.