Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

I hate women. I really do. I guess that’s probably why I chose this life. Or maybe it’s as they say, it’s this life that chose me. I’d heard that up here in the colonies the women are obedient. That they do as they’re damn well told.

I’ve been here a month. Sold everything for a one way ticket to dig holes in a rock that just barely feels the warmth of our sun. I had to get away. Away from the screech of all those who wanted equality. What a fucking joke! Women, successful women at least, aren’t they just aping the attributes of men? Then, who better to do a man’s job than a man, am I right? And don’t get me started on those who’d have themselves butchered, baby killers when all they have to do is keep their bloodied legs shut. I am right.

It sickens me and I grew so tired, you know, of bearing the weight of this farce.

The population on the base is precisely controlled. Here a miner dies he is replaced. I’m the latest replacement. I love that every detail is regimented. Where even the women here agree to be sterilized. Most are old and haggard and don’t look like they could conceive a bright idea, let alone a child. But, then, there are those who came here as children and they, too, are sterilized when they come of age.

I met one. A stupid girl who came up to me at the Working Man’s Saloon. To her credit, she politely asked if it was all right if she spoke. I liked that. She brought me drinks all night. She whispered of how great it was to meet a fresh man. One who’d not been here long enough to get the dust in their blood and she told me that she’d love to swim naked in the deep blue pools of my eyes.

How easily she slipped into my bed. It was true what they said of this place. The women of the moons are only good for two things and I am yet to taste her cooking.

So young and beautiful, she is a precious commodity. Mine to have and do with as I please. She could’ve had anyone. But she chose me. She talked about books and she talked about art and she talked about how if she was down back on Earth that she had a plan to clean up its filth. She would write novels and she’d paint about the lush colours she had never once touched and people would love again the Earth… just shut up and lay still, you stupid, stupid girl.

That was a month ago. The night before my rotation down at the face of the core. All that is left of her now is this note on the screen and for the first time I taste the grit of this moon in my lungs.

A government shuttle took her away. Was it luck that deemed her that one in a million for who the sterilization did not take? Did she know that if pregnant the corporation would whisk her away, fly her and my child back down to Earth, to that place she so badly craved to be?

“Stupid…”, I say to the reflection in the screen in my tiny room on this malignant base on this foul lonely moon so very, very far from home.