‘I find it so hard to look at him, but I do it all the time… Beauty is pain, and he is the most painful of all… There’s no way for him to know the truth of my heart even if I spoke it plainly… If I killed myself on his doorstep, perhaps he could rip me open and see my hearts’ desires. But he wouldn’t know where to look and, by that point, it would be too late.’

I read the words in my bunk mate’s diary, and not for the first time, I see love in its true, abject form. It brings out grotesque desperation in humans. They sacrifice themselves and their worth for the fleeting attention of another. I hope I’m never so pathetic. I envy their shamelessness.

I slide the diary back under her bed and retreat into my bunk. The next day I repeat the words to the visitors. Two women.

They take me home.

They have decked their house with plants. Breasts protrude from each plant pot; broken-spined books line the shelves, and colourful flags adorn the walls. A record player spins lethargically in the hallway while a pop song plays with a squeaky-clean quality. It’s a home that reminds me of the old world.

The lady with dreadlocks offers me wine. I accept. We play a game of cards. It’s called ‘Old Maid’, the premise being that the person who ends up with the leftover queen is labelled the ‘Old Maid’. It’s a fun game at first. The wine makes them witty. The fake redhead pretends to remove a card from behind my ear. But as the game proceeds and the threat of becoming the Old Maid becomes more imminent, the fluffy drunken haze dissipates. They spend long minutes carefully choosing their cards and offer their hands with stiff fingers. I observe the colour that drains back into their faces every time they choose a card that isn’t a queen. The woman with dreads wins. She puts her final pair down and smiles at the ceiling. Her partner releases a comic groan but falls too quickly into silence for us to take her lightheartedness seriously. She stares me down. I look at her with the doe-eyes I’d practised with the last man, but she continues to perceive me as a threat. She puts down her last cards with a flourish, springing from her seat in ecstasy. They both point fingers at me.

“Old Maid! Old Maid!” they chant in a condemning chorus.

I hold my hands up, leaning back with a beaten smile, but this only invites them towards me. They prod at my chest and pinch my cheeks and ruffle my hair.

“Old Maid! Young Maid! Old Young Maid!”

They call me what I am. They seal my fate in their accusation. They don’t know I hid the remaining queen so they couldn’t take her from me. I take pleasure in their thrill at avoiding being the Old Maid. In this new world, there is nothing worse.

They have celebratory drinks. They don’t offer me any. They slide into bed on either side of me and fall asleep. The one with dreadlocks wraps herself around my arms. The fake redhead rests an assertive leg over my body. I stare at the ceiling. Ivy has crawled across it. It looks so pretty one might forget that it is a weed.
Barbara Streisand croons through muffled speakers. ‘People…people who need people…are the luckiest people in the world.’ It’s a cruel alarm, the rudest awakening. The scintillating white lights alert me that I am back in my bunkbed in The Pool. I should have seen it coming the moment they failed to offer me wine after the card game. For a second, I allow myself to mourn the love I might have had. I reflect on my performance- perhaps I wasn’t funny, clever, or alluring enough. The lesbian couple didn’t want me, just like the bald man before them and the pretty boy before him. I sit up, rubbing sleep from my eyes and steeling myself for another day of suitors. I did not survive this long by dwelling on what might have been.

In the showers, I see my bunkmate. Her eyes thin when she spots me.

“You read my diary.”

I shrug.

“That’s not fair. Use your own material.”

I would have heeded her instruction had I any material of my own. However, my chances of wooing a suitor hinge on how well I mirror the feelings of those who feel. I say nothing and enter the shower.

While I am scrubbing every morsel of my body, Barbara Streisand is interrupted by the merry jingle heralding the daily announcement. The thirty of us in the showers fall silent. The water holds its breath. A crackling male voice filters through the speakers, reading off today’s numbers.
“17…83…111…130…292…342…356…412….438…450.”

The jingle sounds again, and Streisand’s belting continues, ‘...A feeling deep in your soul says you were half, now you’re whole…’

Trembling, I let the hot water calm my nerves. I’m safe. The showers resurrect around me. Life carries on as it always has. And yet, beneath the rumblings of conversation and the cascading of water, I hear a strangely human sound. I press my ear to the wall on my left. In the neighbouring cubicle is the unmistakable sound of sobbing- guttural sobs that grow louder until they drown out every other sound. I crouch on the floor and peer under the wall, but I only see two wide feet.

Seconds pass as we await the inevitable. Then, the door at the far end of the communal bathroom bangs open and a troop of important-looking feet march inside. I follow the trajectory of clicking white boots as they head towards my neighbour. The wide-footed boy has backed into the corner of the cubicle. He is screaming now, his raking wails echoing across the room. The white boots kick down his cubicle door.

“Get your towel.”

“No, no…please…please-”

The blubbering boy does as he’s told. His naked feet splatter across the bathroom floor as the white boots herd him away.

That evening, as the suitors browse The Pool, I go for something a little more pathetic. My eyes are wide and watery. My cheeks are flushed. My lips tremble. When an older man looks at me with aching pity but tries to walk past, I grab his sleeve and say:

“No, no…please…please-”

His home is intensely beige. It’s bare aside from a few essentials and some family photos where he is standing beside two children with toothy grins and a pretty, blonde woman.

He offers me coffee or tea. I choose tea. We sit across the table from each other in yawning silence.

“What’s your name?” he asks finally.

I know my number will not satisfy him, and giving him my old-world name would feel too intimate, so I make one up.

“Esme.”

“Pretty. How old are you?”

“Twenty,” I say.

He rubs his forehead. “Christ. You’re a child.” The concept of childhood feels as far away as the old world, but I smile sadly, unsure how he expects me to react.

“How did you end up here?”

“I got on a spaceship, same as you.” I come across as blunter than I had hoped. Luckily, he smiles. I am struck by how handsome he is, with speckles of silver in his dark hair and speckles of gold in his hazel eyes. If I were a loving girl, I could learn to love him.

“I mean, what was your life like before this?”

I shrug with discomfort. No suitor has ever shown such interest in me. “I was at university studying Biology. When the rain stopped, I worked at a water treatment plant to earn money for a ticket and my family’s survival.”

“Where are your family now?”

“They died in the drought.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“What about yours?” I say, testing the waters.

His hazel eyes glaze over in pain. “Their spaceship never arrived on Venus 2.” I had heard about that- a few spaceships had gone missing in the early stages of the evacuation.

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well…” He sips on his coffee. “I didn’t want to do this, but they keep banging on about repopulation and ‘restoring the family structure’. I’m afraid I will lose the house and get put in The Pool if I don’t take someone in.”

His honesty is encouraging. “That’s a coincidence- I didn’t want to do this either.” His eyes refocus; he chuckles.

“Should we have something a little stronger?” I nod; he produces some whisky from his cupboard.

Over the evening, I speak more than I have since landing on this godforsaken planet. We talk about our old-world lives. He met his wife one summer at a resort. They got to talking because they both had Northern accents. They sang karaoke together, a love song. I talk about how I was an only child and had no friends in school. He tells me about how he went to watch his daughters play in hockey matches, and he would let them pick something from the bakery on the walk home. I tell him about how my dad walked out when I was twelve years- old. He tells me about the last time it ever snowed, and his family won a snowman-making competition in the park. I talk about the last time it ever snowed, and we had no heating. My mum slipped on ice and broke her arm.

As night falls, he rests his head on my chest, and I caress his salt-and-pepper hair. He accidentally calls me Sarah, and a stray tear dampens my skin.

‘But first be a person who needs people, people who need people….’ Fluorescent white light threatens to pierce through my eyelids; I squeeze them shut. I already know where I am. I get up and go to the cafeteria for breakfast, trying to act normal. And yet, as I pour milk into my cereal, a cavernous wound opens inside me, ripping my heart from seam to seam. I find my seat and notice a middle-aged woman sitting in my bunkmate’s space.

“Where’s 222?” I ask. She shrugs.

“I’m 222 now. I guess she found a partner.”

The boy sitting opposite me chimes in. “That tall guy who came yesterday must have kept her. Lucky.”

I return to my cereal, but my appetite, like all things, has abandoned me. It is a new sensation: revealing myself to another. I give him a taste of me, unsweetened and undiluted, and he spits me out again. It is not a sensation I would recommend. Hatred fills the fragments of my heart. I hate the false human connections manufactured in this place and I hate the real ones even more.

The cheery jingle replaces Streisand’s warbling. The first number read is 223. I hear nothing after that. The white boots come to get me, and I do not resist.

The spaceship is sleek, dark and quiet except for the occasional whimper. We hurtle through the stars away from Venus 2, and a part of me is glad to leave the planet behind. The planet of love, where Love is the loyal agent of Fear, and we avoid Solitude like a beggar on the street.

After four months aboard the ship, we finally spot Earth. In our excitement, we forget that society has discarded us, forget the likelihood of our imminent death. We rush to the windows, crowding together to watch as our sandy brown home races towards us. Leached of all blue and green, it shouldn’t be so beautiful-but it is, oh it is!