Where'd You Park Your Spaceship?, page 1
Where’d You Park
Your Spaceship?
An Interplanetary Tale of
Love, Loss, and Bread
Rob Bell

BackHouse Books
California, 2023
Copyright © 2023 BackHouse Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic and mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are product’s of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9869960-4-2
E-book ISBN: 979-8-9869960-5-9
First printing edition 2023
robbell.com
PART 1 THIS IS THE OUT
The earth didn’t make it.
It got BROWNBALLED.
Literally.
It turned brown.
Ma’am Kirti told us this as she paced back and forth in
front of our class, reminding us that to understand
BEGINNINGS we had to understand ENDINGS. It was
the first day of EARTH UNIT and right there, on the first
page of our textbook, was this picture of a BROWNBALL
floating in space.
That had apparently once been green.
And blue.
But was now brown.
How did she think we’d respond?
She said the word brown followed by the word ball to a
room full of-what were we at the time-eleven, twelve laps old?
We looked around at each other. Are we allowed to laugh
at this?
And then we did. We lost it.
BROWNBALL.
Could there be a more glorious word for a room full of
prepubescent boys?
This kid named Eppers raised his hand. Was this the only time?
Ma’am Kirti looked confused. The only time this happened
to the earth?
Eppers shook his head. No, did this happen to any planets
other than the-
And then we saw it. What he was doing. The trap he was
setting. And the best part? She didn’t see it. She actually
thought he was asking a question because he wanted to
know the answer. But we knew what he was doing-all earnest and serious-pretending like he cared. She considered his question. No, this is the only known case of a planet getting BROWNBALLED.
Boom. The room erupted. Again. The sheer, unadulterated
ecstasy of hearing our teacher say those two words over
and over. Brown. Ball.
Ma’am Kirti was an intense woman, all elbows and
angles, constantly moving around the room gesticulating
with great flourish, as if the sheer physicality of her
teaching was enough to convince us that this-whatever it
was she was talking about-THIS was the most compelling
subject in the universe. I have no idea how old she was-her
hair was white but not OLD WHITE-more like ELECTRIC
WHITE, MADE YOU WONDER IF IT WAS ON PURPOSE
WHITE-and she wore severely red lipstick and thick blue
glasses. Like if a clown had a mother. And she wore platform shoes that made this distinct clicking and clacking noise as she moved among us. It was the sound of learning.
Of course I’d seen that image before. That BROWNBALL
floating in space. It was everywhere. It still is. Public
buildings, stores, little plaques you come across in the
park. A constant reminder that THIS is what happens when
you don’t take care of things.
I remember so clearly sitting in that class, watching
Eppers ask her that question, all of us looking around at
each other like we shared an unspoken volcanic secret,
my body tensing in anticipation of the riotous explosion of
laughter that would soon be ours. It’s a strange and
elusive thing, memory. So bendy and stretchy. There are
entire years from my 20’s that I can barely recall and then
there’s that one day in that one class and that one kid
Eppers-he was something. He wore orange everyday. A sweater, a hat, socks-at least one item of orange clothing every single day. Sometimes he’d be wearing an orange tee
shirt under his jacket with the word ORANGE in big letters
across the front. Eppers was fully committed to the bit. Of
course the other lads caught on and endlessly shredded
him for it. One day at lunch a kid named Koolie Hilbers
asked him, What’s the deal with you and orange?
We all got quiet. This should be good. Eppers leaned over
his food and got really close to Koolie’s face and said,
I’ve proven I’m willing to kill for my tribe.
Please. We were merciless. He couldn’t live that one down.
Like he’d tried to flex and everybody saw right through it.
Plus. He didn’t have a dad. Every day when class was
over all the dads would be lined up on the berm out in
front of the school. Except for him. There was nobody
waiting for him. He’d walk home alone. He always said that his dad was traveling. That he was involved in something. That he wasn’t there after school because of matters he was attending to.
He actually said that.
Matters my father is attending to.
Super fishy and evasive.
Clearly lying.
Until one day we walked out and there, standing behind
the other dads, was this massive man. Just huge. Like
a cartoon had come to life. He had a giant beard that
appeared to be its own ecosystem connecting his face to
the rest of his body. And he was smoking a pipe. And he
had a dog-a large dog with white spots and a gray tongue
hanging out-in a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. And
he was using a steel pole as a walking stick. Absolutely
terrifying this man. And he was wearing an ORANGE jacket.
He made the other dads look like boys.
Like he was the father of the other dads.
And Eppers, he didn’t say a word. He casually walked up
to this man like he does this every day and hugged him.
WITH HIS ARMS. For a while. They just stood there
hugging each other. In public. In front of all of us. And then
they turned and walked home together. We stood there gobsmacked next to our tiny little dads.
That was the day everything changed for Eppers. Like a
switch had been flipped. He came to school the next day
transformed into EPPERS OUR FEARLESS LEADER.
So when he started asking Ma’am Kirti about what
happened to the earth and whether this was unique blah
blah blah we immediately knew something was up. He was
going somewhere with this. We were in the hands of a
master.
And then she said it: BROWNBALLED. And then she
delivered the coup de grace by uttering this sentence:
The EARTH is the only recorded instance of a BROWNBALLING.
We couldn’t get enough. She’d handed us the stickiest
phrase we could ever imagine and it just wouldn’t leave
our lips.
Ma’am Kirti went on to explain that farming did it.
Farming? Farmers? Farmers killed the earth?
So could you say that they were the original BROWNBALLERS?
Anything to get her to say it out loud.
On it went.
Forget what she was trying to teach us. BROWNBALL BROWNBALL BROWNBALL.
Although the farmer thing, that stuck. That was new. There were people called farmers then? We could not wrap our heads around that. Farmers-as opposed to other people? Because everybody grows food. That’s basic. It’s not like there are some people who do and some people who don’t. And yet, Ma’am Kirti insisted that was how the earth was arranged. A certain group of people grew the food that everybody else ate-everybody who didn’t grow food.
History.
EARTH UNIT.
So strange.
*
The plow.
That was the problem, according to Ma’am Kirti. I remember
that because it was on page 2 of our textbook. A picture of a plow. A curved metal blade used to carve up the surface of the earth so they could plant seeds. Over time, all that systematic slicing of the soil turned the ground to dust. Of course it would. And you can’t grow anything in dust. That dust began to affect the weather. The earth got drier. And hotter, obviously. And as the weather changed, everything changed.
Did nobody see that coming?
As a kid I sat there thinking
Am I missing something?
Romzi asked Ma’am Kirti
Were people less intelligent then?
She jumped on that one.
We don’t rank such things.
Right.
She went on. There
cut open the ground, but there weren’t that many of them.
And the people who were in charge of the earth only paid
the people who used plows.
When you’re a kid you barely know anything, but you
know that’s insane.
EARTH UNIT.
Of course they got BROWNBALLED.
They had it coming.
They deserved it.
*
My mother hit her head when I was 7. We were playing
Forky. You take a fork from the kitchen-the bigger, the better. One of those large wooden ones for salad? Perfect. You place a basket in the middle of the table. First person
places the fork in front of them, handle towards the
basket, and then you slam your forehead down on the
tongs of the fork. That’s the trick of it. You hit it just right,
the fork flies up in the air, hopefully does a flip or two, and
then lands in the basket.
Score.
You get a point.
See what I mean?
The best. I loved that game.
The three of us would play every night after dinner. Round
after round. My mother was so good at Forky. The challenge wasn’t just to score, but to hit the fork with your forehead without your forehead hitting the table too hard. Which is what happened. I didn’t catch it. Neither did my dad.
Until later that evening, when my mother was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, leaning up against the stove. She asked me, Is plaid a color?
Huh?
My dad came in. She pointed out the window. Yon, is clear a color?
My dad was thrown by that. He got down on the floor with her. What do you mean?
Her eyes rolled back and then forward. She placed a hand
on his chest. Yon Chambroy Gru-Bares, tell me my love: Is warm a color?
When you’re seven, your mother is a rock. The calm,
enduring presence that holds your world together. A sun by which all the other planets warm themselves.
Her not making sense? Devastating.
Why is she calling my dad by his full name? Why does she
keep asking these questions that don’t have answers?
What is happening?
She asked me to sit on her lap, there on the floor in front
of the stove. She held me close. And then she turned my
shoulders so that we were face to face. She looked me in
the eyes and said, Heen, my love, is night a color?
We took her to the THRIVAL in our CIRCLE that night.
They put us in an examination room. People came and went, checking on her, doing tests. Lots of hushed voices. I heard the word concussion. A word you don’t understand when you’re 7.
She didn’t get better.
She made less and less sense.
At my 10th lap party all my friends sang me the usual
birth song.
How many laps have you done around the SUNS?
One?
MORE!!!!!
Two?
MORE!!!!!
Three?
MORE!!!!!…
While they were singing to me, I watched my mom sitting
in the corner, mumbling in an endless sing-song loop10,
10, 10, 10, 10, 10…
My friend Moogee Fallers asked me, What is the deal with
your mom?
I was so used to it by then.
I answered. She hit her head.
It wrecked my dad.
He’d bring home these thick binders he’d found at the
library. I called them his brain books. He’d pile them high
on the table, reading way into the night. As if he studied
enough he’d find some way to fix her. As if there was
some secret buried way down deep in one of those books,
a secret that if he just kept digging he’d eventually uncover
it and he could bring my mother back. That’s a very vivid
memory for me, saying goodnight to him in our dark house,
him all hunched over another tome, me putting myself to
bed. Sometimes, when I didn’t have school, he’d pack enough food for a day and we’d start walking, ending up at the house of somebody he’d heard about who had been through something similar. We would walk home so much slower than we walked there.
I’d seen pictures of people working on space stations, tethered to the side, fixing whatever needed fixing. It always used to give me a shudder. All that empty space around them, and only that little rope preventing them from floating away.
My mother wasn’t tethered.
And she floated away from us.
*
Sir Pong.
What a teacher.
We’d heard about him for years.
Everybody said Sir Pong was the best.
I learned so much from Ma’am Kirti, but Sir Pong, that
guy shaped me. On our first day, he announced EARTH UNIT 2. We opened our books to page 1. A picture of a sun. Not a particularly unusual or unique sun, just your average flaming hot yellow sphere. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen most of them. He told us that for almost the entire time people lived on earth they believed that the earth was the center of their solar system and everything revolved around it. Around them.
Seriously?
I raised my hand. Were their brains smaller than ours?
He’d heard that one before. No, not that we’re aware of.
He went on. A few hundred LAPS from the end, someone invented the telescope. Which showed them that their planet wasn’t the center, their sun was. Their planet, they
learned, was just one more ball orbiting a much larger
ball, inhabiting a galaxy filled with them.
What would that do to your brain?
He let the question hang there.
What would happen to your mind if you found out that the
entire way you understood the universe was wrong?
Sir Pong did this all the time. He taught us something,
and then he’d pause, and then he’d ask a question that
suddenly connected that world with our world.
One day he led us out into the field beside our school and then he told us to lay down and look up at the sky. I can picture us so clearly-13 boys, on our backs out there in the open. He told us to feel the surface of Lunlay beneath us, the gravity holding us there. His voice was so hypnotic.
He showed us how to become aware of the exact places
where our bodies made contact with our planet. He told
us to imagine ourselves lifting up, off the ground, away.
There were no tests in his class, only experiences.
He pointed out that we understood the sky to be up, and
the ground to be down.
Yes, that’s correct.
He then told us to picture ourselves lying on the ground on the exact opposite side of Lunlay. I’d never been to the other side of our planet. I’d seen pictures. Desolate, barren. Cold. I saw myself lying there in my school jacket, out in the midst of all that unexplored wild.
He told us to imagine ourselves there looking up at the
sky.
He asked us Which one is up?
Whoa.
Which UP is the true UP? The up in the sky you’re
imagining while you lay there on the ground on the exact
opposite side of Lunlay or the up that you can open your
eyes right now and see above you?
That hurt my brain.
Which up is the true up? he asked. Can they both be up and yet be in totally different directions?
Sir Pong.
What a teacher.
*
One morning I complained about having to wear my school
jacket. I hated wearing that jacket. It was gray with white piping around the edges and a crest on the front pocket.
I yanked it off and threw it on the floor.
And then continued eating my breakfast.
My dad calmly picked up my jacket, folded it neatly over
the back of my chair, and then pulled up a chair next to me.
