A Kiss on Venus

by Mike Mayak

AUTHORS NOTE: The draws for the August 2023 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were A Science Fiction story, set in a cave, involving an umbrella. Here’s what I came up with. —-mike

We went to see the Air Caves on Venus in the off-season. Possibility of acidic rain but a lot less crowded. Drogma Stee and I held hands in the bus-shuttle drive from the spaceport on Venus. We’d only been officially boyfriends for three months but when the chance to go to Venus came up suddenly around Semester’s Break, we jumped at it. Seeing the Air Caves was a big deal. Everyone wanted to go. Nonetheless, neither the flight or the bus was very crowded.

The driver was talking about the thick Venusian atmosphere and how we all needed to have our helmets fastened during the short walk to the Air Caves. He explained how the largely carbon dioxide Venusian atmosphere had air pressures comparable to the bottom of Earth’s oceans.

“And I oughta know,” he said. “I grew up in one of those bottom-feeder cities they built on the floor of the Pacific.”

Some of us laughed.

“Hey, Lalo,” Drogma said. “Look over there!” He pointed out the window and I craned my neck out of the pressure suit. “I think I saw lightning!”

I stared at the Venusian landscape. Through the foggy atmosphere I could see distant hills, lumpy rock formations like frozen magma and the flat road that had been carved out of the magma.

“All right,” the driver said. As we rounded a corner. “Here we are.”

I could just make out a big hill and the mouth of a cave visible over the big, opaque tube leading to the cave. “Soyce Glass” they called the stuff. The driver backed the bus to the airlock and we put on our helmets and walked through the tube into the cave. Once inside the driver’s voice crackled through our headsets.

“All inside? Okay. Take off your helmets.”

The cave was roughly the size of a high school gym. There was a back section blocked off by a divider. The cave walls were a dark blue-black and the floor looked smooth.

The air was nice, fresh and cool.

The driver went into his spiel; how big the Air Cave is, how it goes back far and deep into the ground, how nobody is sure what makes the air.

“Maybe earlier inhabitants, earlier Venusians or visitors from another world.”

Drogma and I just breathed deep and took it all in.

“The most remarkable thing about this cave,” the driver said, “is what we call the Air Shield. The barrier at the mouth of the cave that prevents the oxygen from leaking out and the thick Venusian atmosphere from coming in. It even stops the rain.”

As if on cue, it started to pour outside. Big blue green drops of what probably wasn’t water.

“Folks, don’t panic,” the driver said. “It rains like that all the time during this season. Just stay in the cave and watch this.”

He reached over to the side of the cave where a tall umbrella leaned against the cave wall. The driver didn’t open it, he just stuck it outside the cave into the rain, to one side of the tube we’d walked through. After a moment, he pulled it back in.

The umbrella was smoking and shredded.

“That’s what Venusian rain does,” he said. “But we’re safe in here.”

Drogma was standing beside me grinning. The cave walls glistened in the distorted light through the cloud cover and the rain. The play of light on Drogma’s face highlighted the light brown hair that fell over his forehead with the gentle sound of rain as a backdrop.

On impulse, I kissed him. We’d kissed before, of course but never in a cave on Venus. We didn’t know it right then, but someone had taken a picture.

And that framed picture has been in every home Drogma and I ever shared, from that first one-room apartment to the awful space-trailer we had when we were working at the Lunar Warehouse, to the nice two story brick house back on Earth we lucked into and still call home.

Right next to the kissing picture is another one, taken in the same cave; two young men in pressure suits, arm-in-arm, waving at the camera, helmets on, grinning like idiots through the visors.

Drogma always says it looks like the cover of one of those ancient 20th-Century adventure books for boys they made 200 years ago. This picture we signed and dated: “Drogma Stee and Lalo Vaxx—Venus, June 2153.”

When we got married on an Earth beach, Venus was high above us in the evening sky.

—end—