The Corner Shelf
Yejin Suh
On the third day of our expedition we stopped at the foot of a mammoth tree whose bark was cold to the touch though its fruit nearly pulsed between my fingers with hot, pliant warmth. I asked Head why one was frigid under my hands but the other wasn’t; she didn’t answer me. I didn’t think this planet beautiful, not really, with the tree trunks white and twisting like hardened clay, branches hanging heavy with waxy fruits tinged sickly pink, like the skin under my neck.
Every day Head recited three rules like a psalm which I’d learned by heart. They went like this:.
1. Do not share your legal names with each other.
I’d obeyed this for my own safety because my only other companion was a fine-haired woman my age who shook her head violently every once in a while, like she was trying to splatter something out of her mind, and retracing her steps. Her hands, soft, cracked, often drew towards her face. I thought she stepped into the ground too carefully, as if fearful of pressing too hard, eroding impermanent dirt. I wondered who she’d lost back home. I’d started to call her Jane Doe in my head: an anonymous name for a woman forgotten, or gone. But if she was Jane, I might as well have been John.
***
Modern Rome was one of my favorite galleries—a colossal, open Renaissance monstrosity, stripped down to coiling marble columns, hundreds of miniature paintings hung up on walls and propped up on the floor. Men in slim white trimmings, powdered, lounging about, discussing stocks. I almost never approached guests as they admired the art,, but a young man had lingered here for longer than usual. “I don’t know,” came the nonplussed, gritty voice. “I’ve always felt sort of… nervous around paintings, I guess.”
“Nervous?” I asked, and the young man turned around, and I realized he was not really a man at all, but a woman with dark hair cropped short.
“They’re fragile, you know? Could be thrown out a window or burnt up at any moment. And then look at that—decades of work, gone.”
“You could say that about anything man-made.”
“Not where I work,” she said. “The things we release into the Earth and mess around with stay there permanently—for the better or worse. Even when we’re all gone, it won’t burn up. It’ll still be there.”
“Well,” I said. “I like to think I’d stop anyone from lighting our gallery art on fire.”
“It would be so easy to.”
“Oh, so you’re an arsonist, Miss…?”
“Thea,” she said. “Biochemist. Arson is a side-gig.”
Only now, from a close distance, could I see the feminine slant of her face, the lips lined roughly with something rough like crimson wine; one of her eyes was milkier than the other. Later, I asked her what happened, and she told me, “Bad day at the lab.” And I saw her the next day in the gallery—and the day after that, and the next, and the next.
***
2. Do not touch live plant matter without provided protection.
3. Do not disrupt the environment in any way that could potentially throw the development and evolution of the planet’s biological processes out of natural rhythm.
This last rule was lengthy and prone to shattering. I say shattering and not breaking because it was disregarded in the most garish, unbelievable fashion on the day we arrived, as we stood, maw gaping, watching a bird of all things fly away, pitter-pat its wings. A little budgie, the kind only bred as sedentary, meek home decor. It’d snuck onto the ship before lift-off, survived the entire flight here, and fluttered away at the first sign of freedom. That foreign bird could wreak havoc on millions of years’ worth of this planet’s seasonal cycles. It never takes much to topple anything, not really.
Head had fumed, then gone totally still, like ice.
There were no slow, dripping sunsets here; the planet only tilted out of view of its two suns when the time came, so the sky darkened violently. The day before yesterday I’d noticed that two shadows trailed me in the daytime before rocking and slip-sliding into the dark. It would be night again, soon.
***
I met her closest friends, Atara and Julian, six months later, all of them quintessential scientists, sharp-boned and methodical. At our third dinner party, gathered around the glass dining table in her flat, I suddenly realized that neither Atara nor Julian had picked at me the way they usually did, like vultures on carrion.I looked up at Thea and her lip twitched once to tell me she’d noticed exactly what I had. That I’d been accepted as a new but unfailing presence. Later in the night I stopped just before turning the corner on my way back from the bathroom, stilling at their hushed voices. “I like him,” Atara admitted begrudgingly, in that impassive way she had, and Julian laughed and said, “He looks like he’ll stick,” to which Thea shushed them both, glassware clattering.
Too late I heard the soft pad of her footsteps approaching me. I put a finger to her lips, begging her not to reveal my eavesdropping. At the table the others chatted among themselves, and I tilted my face to hers in that cramped hallway, holding my breath, trying not to laugh out loud, this winged thing inside me trying to hurtle free.
Later, after we rented out a smaller place in the outskirts of the city, she suggested we build a bookshelf.
Retro now, sure, when every morsel of data was stuffed onto interstellar webs or holo-cards, but I agreed anyway. After we finished, the shelf wrapped around two corners of the apartment, a labyrinth spanning galaxies, a dark maze of antique hardcovers engraved in crimson, velvet-bound first editions, flimsy paperbacks centuries-old, preserved. Cut-glass figures hid behind corners; the occasional wintry plant peeked out between bookends. She would pull me close once and draw me up to the fourth shelf, at eye level nudge away a volume of Lovecraft and lift up Herbology in the Andromeda to reveal a small, clean-cut corner. We kept our ring there. “In the corner shelf,” Thea said to me, and I thought that looking right at her and nodding was like taking my entire hand and nestling it into a soft pocket, warm, inescapable, secure.
***
On the fourth day of our expedition Jane Doe said, in a quiet voice, “I’ve never been off-planet with no briefing.” I glanced at her, but her gaze flitted between branches and land. “Head won’t even tell us why we’re here.”
I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “At least the pay is good. And it’s not ugly here.”
I did think it was ugly here, but still better than home, with its damp cities overrun and constantly smoldering with smog, no illumination save for the holograms that blinked overhead advertising all sorts of cruel illusions. Stacked apartments like Brutalist fingers curling out of the ground, stopping at the palm, nicked by hovercar joyriders who’d flown too sharp around a corner. It bustled with people and alien visitors in a sick, lifeless brigade.
Here, at least, it was quiet.. Despite the unnatural colors of the flora and fauna, the atmosphere was still breathable. Untouched. The part that disturbed me was the river. It churned more than it flowed, transuding thick, mud-like sludge parallel to our trek. Clearly there was some kind of backlog.
Jane conceded, “It’s not ugly.” A pause. She said, “There’s little silver glints everywhere.”
“What?” I looked up carefully. She was talking about the small silver shards embedded in the trees, the ground. Mineral deposits, that sort of thing. “Yeah. They look like stars.”
She nodded, peering at me, “I heard once, about these sectors— that some of the planets have learned to camouflage.”
“Camouflage?”
“They reflect back whatever they see in the sky, so they can hide from passing ships. From a distance they just look like a part of space.”
“Like the planet’s alive,” I said, surprised by my own delighted laughter. My face ached with my smile. “That’s neat.”
***
We would go at each other in the evenings, as couples do, and things would be shattered, razed. And sometimes in the middle of the night she would roll over and reach for the glass on her bedside table, and I would hold her wrist, keep it immobile, and sometimes she would still, and shudder, and I would bring her to me, fit her in the curve of my body. To sob, drunk and untasting.
One night, she packed her things and left. I fumed first and then pressed my palms to my burning eyes.,I stood up, spine forced upwards like something crucified, to check the corner shelf.
The ring was there. It would always be there. Relief dampened me, a palpable sweat.
***
On the fifth day of our expedition, in the middle of a grueling hike, I paused to lean against a knuckle-ivory tree.
“I can’t be the only one.”
They stilled in their tracks, Jane staring back with uncertain eyes, pale. I said, “You must both feel it. Nauseous. Tired.”
“It’s the atmosphere,” Head said coolly. “It’s not as clean as the initial reports projected. We predicted a near match.”
“A match?”
“To Earth Prime. We were off. If we don’t fare any better by the end of today, we’ll cut it short and head back to the ship. I have the samples I need anyway. You’ll both be compensated the originally promised stipend.”
I nodded. I’d never seen her gathering any samples of anything. I watched the back of her head.
***
Later, the ring vanished, like a cheap magic trick.
I surveyed the apartment with resignation: the overturned glasses, broken plates, cold floors. No sleep that night, the worst kind of insomnia, and in the morning I went through the motions mechanically: making coffee, brushing my teeth, switching on the morning news. I sat like a zombie, staring at the wall, unseeing, cup steaming in my hands, thinking about it, knowing she had left for work, from wherever she was, two hours and three minutes ago. Until the voice emanating from the television seeped through the thick walls of my mind: … 47 dead this morning en route… the 82,744 from Avon to Greater Chrona. Officials report this as one of the worst…”
My cup shattered.
Thea’s train.
I hurtled from my seat, hands trembling so badly I couldn’t dial any number. I glanced at the screen: 6:45 AM. It was nearly nine now. The report wasn’t live. It had happened one—no, two hours ago—but she hadn’t called me, hadn’t texted, hadn’t—I spun, not caring to grab my coat, my keys—wrenching open my door—
***
On the sixth day of our expedition, after night swallowed us, we’d settled down for the night when Head’s tracker began to pulse softly with light. I cracked open an eyelid in mild interest. “What is that?” I asked. On my last trip, I remembered watching a forest flower on a moon, lined in creamy ridges, its venomous, crimson buds erupting in bioluminescent seeds that spiraled with the wind, burying themselves between every blade of grass, even under my shirt collar. The tracker had gone berserk.
“I thought there were no animals on this planet,” Jane frowned, sitting up. She fixed Head with an almost accusatory stare.
“Could be active flora,” I said. “Or little insects, something we missed.”
“Why would—”
At that moment an animal’s agonized cry, frighteningly loud, ripped through my ears. Screeching and rippling through the dark, the sound crawled towards us. I fought the urge to scrabble away from its source, to curl in on myself. The hairs on the back of my neck stood erect and I cried, “What is that?” because it sounded like a thing tortured, almost like a man screaming
I turned to my two companions, neither of whom looked anywhere near as astonished as me. Jane rose to her feet, eyes still fixated on Head, pallor illuminated by the light of the tracker, whose pulsing now signified that the source of the sound, whatever it was, was within a ten-foot radius of our encampment.. I opened my mouth again, nearly frozen with shock, and Jane snapped with all the force I didn’t know she could muster, “I knew it. We’ve been sent here to die, haven’t we?”
Head said nothing.
“What,” I rasped, my mouth dry.
She turned on me. “Look,” she said, ripping the tracker out of Head’s hands, flashing it over a swath of land in the distance. I saw it then—alive and half-decomposed. A mess of feathers, skin blackened and dripping, rotting, grotesque, a few curls of its blackened spine peeking through the dissolving flesh, stomach nearly bursting with loosened entrails. It shrieked again, horribly, clearly in terrible pain.
I realized—it was the bird from our ship.
“Everything’s fine,” Head said.
***
“You’re lying,” I said quietly. “You’re lying to me.”
Julian pursed his lips, knuckles tightening at the edge of his desk, face nearly trembling with rage. Then and there, I hated the sight of him. He clacked away in his fancy high-rise office cubicle, glass paneled-walls stretching over the city, while my insides unspooled from me. “I know,” he forced out, “that this is difficult for you, but frankly—”
“Where is she?”
People stared through the glass. “I work here. This is where I work.”
“Where is she?”
“Where,” Julian gritted out, “is who?”
“My wife. She’s at your place, isn’t she?”
He closed his eyes. “You—”
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Is she with you?”
He was silent, disbelieving. Boring a hole into his desk with his eyes. “Get out of my office.”
“She took it,” I snapped.
“What? Took what?”
“The ring. She took the ring. Our wedding ring, on the corner shelf. She took it. And the corner is dirty, now, it’s settled with dust, this layer of dust—she took it a while ago. She’s been planning this. She’s never taken that ring before.”
Julian ducked his head in silence.
“Fine, you don’t have to tell me if she’s with you,” I said. “Please just tell me she’s
alright. That she’s unhurt, and she’s sober, and she’s breathing. Please. I have to know.” I felt my anger dissipating. “Please. It looked—it looked so bad, on the news, and I still worry—I’m sorry, Julian, I won’t show up here again. I know you work here. I just wanted to know. I didn’t—”
Julian looked up at me, smudges under his eyes, violently purpled and waxy. There was a look in his eyes—“She’s fine. I promise. She’s fine.”
I took a breath.
“She’s alright,” he continued. “You’re alright, too.”
“Tell her to come back,” I said in a fragmented voice. “Tell her I’m sorry. I hate that the shelf is empty. It shouldn’t be. I check it every day.”
“I know,” he said.
***
“I don’t understand,” I said. Like a nuclear bombardment with no radioactivity, vessels sliding open, skin melting—no mauling, just the gradual, almost methodical sweep of death that, even as I watched, stripped it of flesh, letting bone seep into skin, its insides detangling and splitting. “I don’t understand.”
“What do you not understand?” Jane said, a torrent of fury, pacing. “You haven’t picked up on anything, have you? This planet—it’s—it’s just—”
“It’s carnivorous,” Head said.
“Carnivorous,” I repeated blankly.
“Dissolves its prey and soaks them into the river. Not a river at all—just a rolling sludge of flesh and bone and whatever else,” Jane said. “But it can’t digest tech, not completely, the steel and titanium bits, so it pops up everywhere. Little silver things in the trees, the ground. We’ve been here six days, and in a few more we’ll look like that.” She pointed to the bird. “It’s gotten our ship by now, hasn’t it?”
I stood, looking at the place through a new morbid, lens, running my knuckles up the tree. “The trunks are bone. White marrow, ossified. And what about—?”
I followed a low branch with my hands, let it drop to a hanging fruit—without hesitation I smashed it into the side of the tree, expecting a smattering of crushed fruit against it, but the thing split open. I held each half in a hand, carefully splitting it apart, warm and strange.
“The light,” I gasped. Jane directed it. Thick, pulsating, warm flesh in my hands, slowly stretching apart, inside the hollow skin of it, interconnected through veins and arteries that traveled up the length of the shell. I cried out, gagging, and dropped it. The thing pulsed as it hit the floor.
“We’ve been sent here to die,” Jane said.
I shuddered as I tried to calculate the sheer number of living organisms this place must’ve devoured to rise to such a level of self-sustainability. It had bent and twisted death itself, like a malleable thing, bent trees out of corpses and flowered fruit from flesh. The river must lead to an ocean—a vast pool of sludge, roiling with the stink of dissolving corpses. I stood now on an immense accumulation of carrion, of other living species, biotechnologies, all fallen prey to this unthinkable Venus flytrap of a planet.
“Give me your pack,” Jane called to Head. “Flag a ship—any, I don’t care, there has to be one passing. I know you’ve got comms tech in there. Give it—I’m not dying, not here, on this—this freak of nature, this—”
“Thea would love this,” I said suddenly. They both stared. Freak of nature. Thea would’ve called it beautiful. Permanent. But she thought the swelling and breathing of cells was beautiful, the shutdown of apoptosis, the simple burgeoning and splitting of a human zygote. Just a thing clawing at threads to survive, like we all did. “Hox genes,” she’d explained, face grave. “Like our genetic blueprints—mapping out people, birds, flowers. We’ve all got pre-planned instruction in us from birth.” Stupid, I’d thought. Not when life seemed a wild, unpredictable thing spanning galaxies.
“You’re out of your mind,” Jane said, voice laced with panic.
“I don’t think Head has any communications equipment. I think she’s here with the both of us, empty-handed.”
“Then we have to find another solution. Your—who’s Thea?”
“My wife.”
“Your wife—don’t you want to go home to her? You’re going to sit here and die?”
I looked down at my feet. Already the soles were wearing down, tattering—the acid of the ground potent enough to sink through thick gear. I muttered, “She’s already here.”
“What?”
I closed my eyes, sat down. “My wife’s already here.”
“You’re insane—”
“I’m not. She’s here. She’s been here since we came, and she’ll be here for the rest of it.” I curled my fingers into my pocket. I’d brought something; it burned to touch. “Just wait.”
***
“I feel awful. I feel sick. We shouldn’t have done it,” Julian drummed his fingers on the table
“What choice did we have?” Atara snapped. “Stop that.”
“He just—he didn’t have anyone, he didn’t—”
“He was coming to us every month.” She wrapped her fingers around a glass, pulsing and condensing into her palms, watching the mill of people. “To you, every week. Soon…”
“But that death trap—”
“It’s a death trap,” she admitted, “but she wouldn’t have thought so.”
Julian was silent, staring over Atara’s shoulder.
“He would,” Atara insisted. “If she was here, she’s there, too.”
Julian clenched his hands into fists, slowly let them go. “You’re right.” Sharp inhale. “I just… I miss her.”
Her gaze softened. “So do I.”
“They’re taking the case to court, you know. Faulty track lines or something.”
“I know.”
“I haven’t visited since—I haven’t visited. Haven’t even left flowers, or just stopped by. I’m a coward, like that.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“He would always say,” Julian swallowed, “He would always talk about the ring. Their ring.”
“The corner shelf.”
“Yeah. The corner shelf.”
“Where is it?”
“The ring?” He leaned back, exhaling. “I don’t know.”
He said, “It’s better this way. Right?”
***
On the twelfth day of our expedition, I was alone. I felt my bones opening up into skin, my blood vessels splitting open. Faintly, I could feel Thea’s breath on me from behind, lingering, gesturing, as the strands of my genetic code braided through the planet’s, like vines. Waiting for me. I felt her all around me: in the layers of my skin, my heaving bones, the stretching tendons of my heart. I let her come.
about the writer
Yejin Suh is an aspiring writer from New Jersey whose work appears or is forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Half Mystic, and Blue Marble Review. She has been recognized by YoungArts, The New York Times, and UK Poetry Society, among others. She loves speculative fiction and hopes to foster emerging writers' love for it through her publication Wintermute Lit.