Ms. Frankenstein Hails from Apollo 18

A woman crash-lands on Earth from Mars, forever altering her life and the lives of a rural Michigan family

This story was nominated by Soft Star Magazine for the 2024 Pushcart Prize.

Quinn Clemens (he/they) is an autistic, nonbinary writer based in Michigan, currently studying at Kenyon College. He is interested in writing stories exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and feeling outside of this world.

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A woman fell from the sky and landed in a cornfield, her final cry for help only heard by Joann, an elderly woman knitting in a nearby barn.  Joann called her granddaughter, Ginny, and guided her to where she heard the scream, only to find the stranger’s crumbled body.  Her skull was shattered, her limbs distorted by the impact, and the cool autumn air stole any warmth from her naked flesh.  She had no hair, not even eyebrows.  The eye she had left intact was wide open and fogged over like an old marble.  Curiously, there was no blood.

“My goodness, what happened to this poor girl?” Joann gasped.  It had been a long time since she had seen a decimated body, but even throughout all her violent young years she’d never seen anything like this.  There was an unreality to it; it reminded her of Ginny’s science fiction movies that she’d taken a liking to when the girl moved in.  Ginny was twenty now of course, but she’d always be Joann’s little girl, smart and naive and innocent.

“It’s like she fell off a mountain,” Ginny noted.  There were no mountains there, not within the miles of farms and stripmalls. “I have no idea who she is.  She doesn’t look like anyone who lives around here either, she’s so much paler than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“Go fetch a wheelbarrow.  We should take her to town and see if anyone knows her,” Joann said, “I’ll wait here and scare off any crows.”

“Are you sure?  I don’t want to leave you alone out here,” Ginny murmured.

“I’ll be okay.  I won’t keel over if I’m alone for thirty minutes,” Joann said.  She waited by the stranger’s body while Ginny went away, and tried to mentally reconstruct what she would’ve looked like alive.  Her eye seemed to be green, but it was an unusually vibrant shade, perhaps unnaturally so.  She was the short and stocky sort, and her large arms would make her perfectly suited to working on a farm, Joann thought.

She remembered doing so herself before things got hectic in her adult life. In those days,she’d been mostly put in charge of the chickens.  She’d take their eggs, pitch any that shattered, chase the round, fluffy things back into their pens, etc.  She’d learned to slaughter them at twelve, an upsetting experience then, but now she laughed at her own foolishness when she looked back on it.  Where, exactly, had she thought the chicken she’d been eating was coming from?

Ginny came back with the wheelbarrow and they gathered up the pieces of the stranger’s body.  Joann was extra particular about making sure they got every little fragment of her bones.  There was something about the body that bothered her. It felt wrong in some ways.  They noticed the stranger’s skin was unusually tough,like leather, but attributed that to the fact she was dead.

Upon returning home, Ginny described the stranger’s features as best she could and posted them on the community Facebook page, hoping for a response.  She hadn’t thought it was a good idea, but did so at Joann’s urging.  They never got any responses, and Joann’s follower count mysteriously plummeted.

Overnight, Joann decided to try to repair the stranger’s body, in hopes of making her more identifiable.  There was still so much about the body that didn’t add up to her; it wasn’t like the bodies she had seen when she worked in the morgue.  She sewed together the stranger’s severed limbs and set twisted joints.  She pieced together fragments of bone like a jigsaw puzzle and wrapped the body in a warm blanket.  In the places she couldn’t mend torn skin, she added colorful plaid patches.

The last thing Joann expected was for the stranger to come back to life.  The fog disappeared from her eye, and it expanded to be as wide as the moon.  Her joints cracked as she regained feeling in her limbs, and she opened and closed her mouth like a nutcracker.  A blink, a sniff, some twitches.  She shed the blanket, revealing the tapestry of stitches, scars, and cloth embedded in her flesh.  Joann backed away, shocked at this strange Pinocchio she’d accidentally created.

“Where am I?” The stranger asked.

“By God, you woke up!  I’m so sorry dear, I thought you were… dead.  You’re in my home, it’s safe here,” Joann explained, trembling.  She was scared, but the eye staring into hers seemed human, so she did her best to mask her fear.  What a shock it would be to come back from the dead!

“I see.  And who are you?  State your name and rank,” the stranger said.

“Well, I’m Joann Brown.  I’m retired, so I don’t have a rank, though I’m not sure what you’re referring to by that.  I suppose I’m a grandma.” The stranger observed Joann like she was a rare bird.

“Wait… I was not aware there were other people on Mars” the stranger said.

“Mars?  This is Earth.  What— who exactly are you?” Joann asked.  Human, that’s a human.  A weird one, but a human, a girl, not a monster of any kind, she told herself.

“A Martian, in a way.  But my mind is human,” the stranger said.

“A Martian?  Well I suppose I gathered you were from Mars,” Joann said, feeling somewhat stupid. “Your body sure is different.  I put you together like some kind of… I don’t know, you were in pieces!”

“Earth is a considerably less rough environment.  I was designed to be easily repaired” the stranger said.

“Are you a robot of some kind?” Joann asked.

“No,” the stranger said, somewhat offended.

“Okay.  Then why are you here?  That was a violent landing you had.”

“I don’t know.  Memory’s hazy.  Something about cut funding.  The project was being discontinued, I’m the project.  Apollo 18, that’s what it was, it had to be abandoned,” the stranger said, her voice racing faster with every word.

“I hope that’s not the case, that simply seems too cruel,” Joann said softly, “it’s late, but I’ll see if I can fix you something.  You must be hungry…” she trailed off.  Nostalgic deja vu washed over her as she remembered taking in Ginny, helping those poor souls who got AIDS back in the day, and sheltering protestors during the Saginaw riots.

“I… thank you, I might be able to eat something small.”

“That’s good.  And before I forget, what’s your name dear?”

“Oh.  It’s Kya.”

• • •

Ginny wasn’t sure what to make of Kya, this moving porcelain doll of a woman who was now living and moving like she’d never been shattered.  She spoke rarely but pointedly, and sometimes Ginny wondered if she had a pullable string hidden somewhere on her body that would cycle her through the same phrases over and over again.  There was something off about the way she moved, and Ginny wasn’t sure if she even breathed.

And yet, she was drawn to the stranger.  Curiosity, she thought, would even kill Schrodinger’s cat.  She didn’t know what to do with Kya, or about her, perhaps more accurately.  Were they supposed to report her to the government or something?  But what would happen then, she wondered.  Based on all the movies she’d seen about aliens and monsters, nothing good.

So Kya remained.  Every day, Ginny went to a college full of blank faces and came home to one last empty visage.  Most of the time, Kya was silently watching the TV, sitting completely still.  Sometimes Ginny would try to ask her what she was watching, but Kya never could give a clear answer, almost like she wasn’t paying attention to the TV at all.

For a while, Kya had slept on the couch, perfectly content with the arrangement, but Joann brought out a cot and put it in Ginny’s room, insisting that ‘it just felt better.’ Ginny wanted to protest, but didn’t.

The first night they shared a room, Kya stripped down naked and laid on the cot without any covers or sheets.

“Um… do you need any pajamas?” Ginny asked, making a point not to look at her.  If she looked too closely she could spot the seams in the places where she’d fallen apart, and she couldn’t bear to look at the stitches.

“No.  It would be too hot for me,” Kya replied.

“Really?  It’s perfectly cool in here,” Ginny said.

“For you, yes.  But it was much colder on Mars, and my skin is thicker than yours,” Kya explained.

“Oh,” Ginny said. “Do you want me to get a fan?”

“No need.”

Ginny laid on her side, facing the wall.  When she fell asleep, she didn’t dream, but woke up every few hours or so.  When she was awake, she was seized with the sensation that someone was standing at the side of her bed, peering over her, but when she rolled over there was nobody, except a sleeping Kya.  She slept on her back, with her arms folded over her chest like a mummy.  Ginny sighed and went back to sleep.

She went to her advanced biology lecture the next day, and as she absentmindedly wrote her notes, she wondered how a body like Kya’s could exist.  There was no creature she knew of that could be reassembled like that, and she had no idea what kind of molecular makeup that would require.  Not to mention the lack of blood.  Bugs lacked blood too, obviously, but Kya was no bug, even though sometimes she twitched like a bee during a dissection.  For all Ginny cared, she could be made up of undiscovered deep-sea microbes that will replace humanity after global warming.  Maybe she’s, like, an android?  That would’ve made sense if any of her body parts had seemed mechanical, but neither Ginny nor Joann had noticed anything like that, and Joann insisted that Kya wasn’t a robot.  

Ginny tried to doodle a small picture of Kya in the margins of her notebook, but she wasn’t an artist.  She drew the eyes too big, and couldn’t remember the spots where her stitches and patches were.  She couldn’t depict the translucent quality of her skin, something only noticeable when she stood in the sun.  It reminded Ginny of bone china.  Maybe Kya’s skin was bone china, and she was made more of crushed animal bits than human DNA.  Was she smooth?  If Ginny ran a finger over her jaw, would she shudder, smile ruefully or contort herself away, bending herself like clay?

Ginny drove home, and when she went inside Kya was watching the TV again.  Ginny decided to change her usual question.

“Why are you always watching that?” she asked.  Kya looked around a little before answering.

“I’m not watching it.  I turn it on when I’m thinking so Joann doesn’t tell me not to stare out into space,” Kya said.  Ginny stopped herself from laughing.

“She used to say that to me every day,” she said.  What do you think about all the time would have been Ginny’s next question if she could work up the courage, but she wasn’t the type to work up courage like that all too often. “Would you rather do something else?” she asked instead. 

Kya hesitated before answering. “Sure.”

Joann’s house didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, but thankfully Ginny tracked down a deck of cards and taught Kya how to play crazy 8’s.  Kya drew cards with oddly slender fingers, and whenever she had a face card she looked at it for a while, admiring the art.

“Do you know why the king of hearts is stabbing himself?” she asked, startling Ginny.

“He’s not, I think it’s supposed to look like he’s drawing his sword from behind,” Ginny answered.

“I see.  That’s good,” Kya said.  She put down an eight and changed the suit to spades, forcing Ginny to draw several cards before she could make a move.  She played the queen of spades, and Kya placed the queen of hearts over it before also putting down the king of the same suit.  She then only had one card remaining.  Ginny had a hand of diamonds and clubs, so she wasn’t confident in her odds.  She put down the king of clubs.  Kya’s last card was an ace of the same suit.

“Curse my bad luck,” Ginny said.

“There is no such thing as luck, only probability,” Kya replied.  Ginny sighed.

“Well, do you think you could shuffle this deck to be in your favor without looking at the cards face up?” she retorted.  Kya was silent for a time, and Ginny momentarily worried that Kya was as fragile as the porcelain dolls she resembled.  Before she could apologize for snapping though, Kya smiled.

“You’re right.  I was taking this far too seriously,” she said, and started laughing.  Ginny was so caught off-guard that she started laughing too, and their laughter fed into each other’s laughter cyclically until both of them ran out of breath from the hysteria.

Later, Ginny went to the library and checked out Andy Weir’s The Martian, wondering if Kya would like it or not.  It was the only book about Mars she could think of where the Martians, so to speak, weren’t little green men or monstrous in other ways.  But would it bring up bad memories for Kya?  Ginny returned the book the next day without reading a word of it.

Needless to say Ginny’s jaw dropped when she saw that Joann had wordlessly put on Ridley Scott’s The Martian, the movie adaptation of the same book, while Ginny had been studying in her room.  Kya was watching it, sitting on the couch with crossed legs that Ginny’s eyes lingered on before she raised her gaze to Kya’s face, expecting the same blank look she had while lost in thought, but instead Ginny found Kya to be in rapt, silent focus.

Ginny sat beside Kya, cognizant of the scant distance between them as her grandmother sat in her rocking chair, doing that week’s crossword.  Ginny realized she’d walked in around the halfway point of the movie, so she couldn’t grasp the specifics other than that Mark Watney was stuck on Mars and some people on Earth were trying to save him.  She was tempted to ask what was going on, but Kya seemed so focused that Ginny bit her tongue.

It was when Mark Watney was finally rescued that Ginny noticed a shift in Kya’s demeanor.  She crossed her legs more tensely, tucking her left foot behind her right, and she kept looking at Joann, who’d fallen asleep in her chair.  Ginny almost flinched when Kya instead began to look at her, a stare so intense Ginny’s heart began to race as polar opposite emotions fettered her mind and body.  Warm in some places, cold in others.

“Um… do you… you… do you want me to turn it off?” Ginny stammered.

“No.  Leave it on,” Kya said, not once returning her eye to the screen, “I wasn’t alone on Mars.  But I was the only Martian.  They couldn’t replicate whatever experiment made me.  Nobody would have ever been sent to my rescue.”

“I’ve been cast away too,” Ginny blurted out.  You remind me of why every day.

She kept that part to herself.

“Why?  What do you mean?”

Ginny stood up and left the room.

• • •

Kya found that Ginny was simultaneously more absent and more present in her life than ever.  Ginny had begun to give her books and movies to enjoy, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, then several Frankenstein adaptations, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories, Ridley Scott’s Alien and other stories that Kya had lost track of.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had nearly split Kya apart with its tragedy, and then the movie adaptations were hilariously insulting.  To Ginny’s credit, she seemed to hold the same opinion.  The Dispossessed was dense but heartfelt, and Kya felt she wouldn’t fully understand it until a second reading.  Alien had terrified her and kept her up at night for several days; she'd only been able to fall asleep when Ginny had shown her an article about how the practical effects in the movie were done.  Bloodchild and Other Stories was difficult, unique, and perplexing, Kya was fascinated by its oddities.

Yet despite all these gifts, the two of them hardly spoke.  Something had changed, and Kya didn’t know what it was, she only thought of that time where they’d laughed and laughed and she’d felt like she was floating.

It was much warmer on Earth, even as autumn faded and winter approached.  Kya remained in a white summer dress that had used to belong to Joann when she was younger while her keepers both bundled up, covering themselves in more layers every day.  Joann put on the weather forecast and Ginny retrieved a large, thick scarf upon hearing that the temperatures would be dropping below freezing.  Of all the things Kya had ever yearned to see, snow was one of them.  Everything in the station she’d grown up in had been white, sterile and lifeless, and she wanted to know what a natural shade of white was like.

The fallen leaves were sometimes as red as the surface on Mars, and Kya felt wrong when she picked one up and it wasn’t the powdery stone she’d become accustomed to.  The people she found herself among were strange too; there were no hierarchies between them, and little in the way of spoken rules.  She would have assumed that Joann, the eldest, would be the one with the most authority, but she never wielded that kind of power, and the house ran on the mutual act of requesting things from each other when one person couldn’t do them.  This was the rhythm the Browns existed within, and Kya finally felt herself adjusting to it after a few weeks.  She just wished she knew how to enter it herself.

Ginny left behind her textbooks sometimes, usually when she went out in the late afternoon, and Kya found herself looking through them.  She was training to be a biologist, attentively, her books filled with underlines and notes in margins.  Kya read the notes in Ginny’s voice and read the actual text in Dr. Friedman’s gentle tones.  The head biologist had been the closest thing to a mother that Kya had, and she wondered what Ginny could be, this second biologist in her life.  Certainly not another mother. Kya didn’t need one anymore.

Kya turned off the TV and stood up, done with her mental labyrinth for the day.  She always ended up traveling towards the center of it, and she didn’t want to know what that was.

Joann came into the room as Kya was leaving.

“We’re having guests today.  Do you want to meet them?  It’ll be a few of my nieces and nephews, maybe some of their kids.  They don’t come all that often so I’m never sure how they’ll be, but I think you would get along with them,” she said.  Kya kneaded the words in her head, considering the possibilities carefully.  How would Joann and Ginny introduce her?  She wasn’t another family member, just someone they found.  From where, the nieces and nephews and children would ask, and Joann would say Mars and Ginny might say something else, or nothing at all.  And either they would laugh, assuming the response was a joke or they would think she’d gone senile.  The truth would be too absurd.

“No,” Kya answered.

“Oh, alright then,” Joann replied, “feel free to change your mind.  At least help me fix dinner before.”

Kya didn’t know much about cooking when she arrived on Earth.  On Mars, there had been dried rations and rudimentary beginnings of plant growth.  Nothing but water to drink.The food here had all been very overwhelming for Kya, who’d only eaten out of necessity before. Ginny sometimes brought home sharply salted snacks and tear-inducing sweets; now, Joann had a mix of spices and herbs to mix into a broth for the chicken to bathe in, and Kya hadn’t even had meat before.  

But she could mix things and cut vegetables, so it didn’t matter much that she didn’t know what half the ingredients were.  Joann was the director here, and Kya was glad to have someone to tell her what to do as the radio droned on.  There was an announcement of a grape festival, where everyone would bring their best grape-related recipes, and immediately afterwards was a radio show host talking about how guns save more lives than they take.  Joann turned it off, muttering about politics and a rotten world.

“Those guys haven’t seen bodies with bullets in ‘em, I’ll tell you that,” Joann said to nobody in particular.  Kya didn’t say anything back because she was in fact somebody in particular.

“Smells good,” Ginny said when she returned home.  When she walked into the kitchen and saw that Kya was helping out, she tilted her head briefly.

“Hello,” Kya tried.

“Oh.  Hi,” Ginny said.  It was the first thing she’d said to Kya in a few days, “I got you this from the library.  I’ll just put it in our room.” She didn’t elaborate what “this” was and went upstairs.

The guests arrived before Joann was done cooking, but that was okay because Ginny could take Kya’s spot.  Kya went outside, sitting under a tree out of view of the windows.  

She listened to the wind.  She crunched dead leaves in her fingers, letting go of the flakes and watching them drift in the air.  She heard laughter and chatter leaking from Joann’s house, but it didn’t stir her heart.  She didn’t hold a sense of profound loneliness, but instead solitude, something much different.  It was a nice solitude.

On Mars, at Apollo 18, Kya was never alone.  There were biologists and doctors running tests on her.  There were psychologists making sure she thought like a human and wondering if they could diagnose her with the same set of mental conditions.  There were agriculturists measuring nutrients in her blood to make sure she wouldn’t grow ill.  There were astronomers taking her outside to make sure she could handle the rocks and cliffs on Mars.  There were potters breaking off her hand and putting it back on again in the same way that the potters in Japan did Kintsugi, but without the gold to line the ceramic surface of her skin.  Now there was nobody.

Then there was Ginny, sighing.  She tugged at her scarf as she looked down at Kya.

“You’re in my spot,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Should I leave?” Kya asked.  Ginny shook her head and sat beside her as everyone inside kept talking without the two women.

“It’s not that I hate them.  I just hate it when they’re here,” Ginny confessed as if on trial.

“Why?”

“They mean well.  But they don’t do well with me,” Ginny said. “Maybe I’m just a bitch.” Kya knew that bitch meant female dog, but the sting in Ginny’s voice made it clear that wasn’t the meaning she utilized.

“I don’t think you’re a bitch,” Kya offered.  Ginny laughed again, but Kya didn’t join her this time.

“Thanks,” Ginny said, sobering herself up, “that kind of helps, actually.  It’s nice to hear.  From you, I mean.”

“I’m glad,” Kya said.  Ginny leaned against the tree, and in Kya’s mind she moved like water, like an animated movie using too many frames for one shot, and she wondered why in comparison she could only live in stop-motion herself.  Clouds were in the sky.  They were the sky, to be precise; they blocked out the sun and would block out the stars and Mars, leaving Earth as Kya’s only viewing pleasure.  The clouds were stained orange with a sunset nobody in Saginaw, Michigan could see.

“Do you miss it?”

“What?”

“Mars.  Do you miss Mars?” Ginny clarified.  The planet left behind, the only place Kya had been before.

“I don’t know,” Kya said, surprising herself.  She felt like she was supposed to miss it.  Mars had been her home one day and millions of miles away the next.  But she didn’t miss it, not really — perhaps the people there, but not the planet.  Ginny toyed with her hands.  Kya wondered if she was supposed to copy the motion of her fingers burying and reburying each other. “I think I would miss this place if I left.”

“Will you have to leave?  Since you were, uh.  On Apollo 18 or whatever number it was,” Ginny asked.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Not really.  No,” Ginny said, “it’d be weird without you.”

“I got the sense that my being here was much stranger,” Kya said.

“It is, I guess.  But not in a bad way.  It’d be weird in a bad way if you were gone now that I’ve gotten used to it being weird with you,” Ginny replied, turning her head towards Kya.  A snowflake fell between their faces.  More followed, embedding themselves in the blades of grass and the curls of Ginny’s brown hair.  Kya wished she had hair at that moment.  She wanted to run her fingers through Ginny’s hair to know what it felt like, though she’d felt hair before.  It was Ginny’s hair she wanted.  Instead she had to be content with watching the snowflakes melt on her sundress.

“Are you cold?” Ginny asked.

“A little.  Not enough to do anything about it,” Kya replied.

“Well, you can have this anyway,” Ginny said, taking off her scarf and wrapping it around Kya’s neck.  It was soft and smelled pleasant.  Kya felt Ginny’s breath on her face.  Ginny fastened the scarf over Kya’s chest and her hand brushed over her stomach and Kya remembered she had a stomach and a chest.

“Thank you,” Kya said.

“It’s nothing,” Ginny retreated back to her spot on the tree, which wasn’t all that far away.  The sun painted the clouds pink, then red, and then there weren’t colors anymore. “We should go back inside,” Ginny said. “We can go around to the side so they don’t see you.” The snow only existed where the light from inside illuminated it as they walked to the other side of the house, and then they went to their room.  Andy Weir’s The Martian was on Kya’s bed.

“It’s the book that the movie you liked was based on,” Ginny said, “I thought you might find it interesting.” She took her coat off, revealing a dim yellow hoodie.

“Thank you.  I’ll tell you what I think of it when I’m finished with it,” Kya said. “Say… why do you bring me all these things?” She remembered that she could be unsure.

“I’m trying to figure you out,” Ginny answered, “I’m not sure how else to.”

“What am I to you?” Ginny sat on Kya’s bed, crossing her legs.

“I dunno.  You’re just Kya to me.” I am only me.  Nothing more.  Kya took the scarf off and handed it back to Ginny, and when their hands touched she remembered she had hands.  When their eyes met she remembered she had an eye.  When Ginny stood up to come closer, she remembered she had legs.  When Ginny ran her thumb over her jaw, she remembered she had flesh.  When Kya closed the distance, she remembered she had lips.

That night Kya remembered she was herself, and she was Ginny, and she was Apollo 18, and she was the Martian, Andy Weir and Ridley Scott, she was pieced together by Joann, and she remembered, finally, that she had a real body.

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