R.H. Walker, Author

(Cover image by Vicky Vale on Unsplash)

What a relief it is to be over with the semester! I have a semester wrap-up post coming soon to discuss what I’ve been learning in my creative writing degree, but in the meantime I thought it would be nice to clean up my slate a little.

Not all of my stories start with a title, but this one did, and everyone time I saw it floating in my notes app it invoked Southern Gothic images of ghosts creeping up on unsuspecting lovers, unable to hear the ghost’s unearthly moans and wails for the water rushing beneath their feet. Around the same time I was also reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and I found myself once again fascinated at how easily he was able to extract and interpolate the human condition onto Mars’s settlers. All of this was also happening around a time when true crime was once again experiencing a resurgence in popularity, and therefore a resurgence in discourse, which prompted me into thinking on my own relationship with the genre and how it might affect a place like the little Mars colony I had dreamed up in my head. I found myself pondering what the first murder in a new colony does to its population, and what it actually looks like to reckon with a violent and colonial history you are forced to inherit (something we’re not strangers to in the USA, unfortunately).

All of this cooked into a beautiful red soup in my brain, and this story was born.

As I prepare to post this to the blog I worry that this story isn’t done. It’s as done as I could make it back in 2024, and posting it now, even though I know I can do much better now, feels vulnerable. Unfortunately, that is largely the point of this blog: to continue to improve in my craft, and to do so in a public setting so that others can feel encouraged. I did start a rewrite of this back in February, and I may eventually come back to finish it, but there’s so much else I want to move onto. For now I think I need to release it to the winds, and let the vulnerability wash over me. The mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

Now, may I proudly present:

The Belle of Red River Crossing, by R.H. Walker

#

Humanity built Mars to be a utopia.

This, of course, was a lie. Not even a cleverly concealed one. Those with the money and power to build colonies were too attached to that power to build anything particularly radical. Not to mention that settling Mars in the first place was controversial, and morally dubious at best— scientists and philosophers globally argued against colonization at all. Preservation was one of the foremost scientific principles, after all. Colonizing Mars would require changing it beyond recognition. Would it even be Mars, at that point?

But the machine of progress wields funding like a mallet, and once the job was done the politicians and the marketers pried this new, unrecognizable place from the fingers of their weeping scientists. Come to Mars, the posters said. Build something new. Be a part of something better. Humanity’s second chance.

It is this Mars that called to Belle.

#

Hoshiko did not look up as the car bumped along the road. She was too fixated on her phone to feel the violent swaying from the sand-blasted asphalt.

A text from her brother, Daichi: Still running diagnostics on the outer rings. We’ll move on to the swizzler once we’re done.

The phone pinged again before she could respond. Did you really mean what you said earlier?

Hoshiko ignored this last text. She did not want to think about her meeting with the governing council right now. She put a little thumbs-up on his status update, then deliberately turned the ringer down.

It was a full time job, caring for Grandmother’s device. Equal parts genius invention and work of art, it comprised of two elements: first, the satellite-deployed bands that reinforced the atmosphere’s magnetic pattern. The second part was a miles-long track embedded deep in Mars’s crust, around which an enormous magnet traveled back and forth, manually agitating the planet’s molten, iron-rich outer core, to strengthen its gravitational pull. (A seven-year old Daichi was the one to dub this the “swizzler”).

There had been other inventions that helped, of course; the terraforming team had to regularly cleanse Mars’s soil of toxins and heavy metals, and reintroduce water to its new atmosphere. But the magnetosphere was the real key. It had kept them all alive for nearly a century now.

Which meant it was an absolute pain in the ass to maintain. Daichi got to sit pretty in the command center to coordinate diagnostics and repairs, leaving Hoshiko to drive out to the site to search for the source of the commotion, and also work herself into a stress headache. She tipped her head back and pinched at the bridge of her nose, trying to wish the throbbing away.

“You okay, Ms. Hoshiko?”

Hoshiko cracked an eye and met the driver’s gaze in the rear-view.

“What was that, Rodney?”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Fine. Thank you for asking.”

“Sure, sure. May I ask, what kind of drugs are you purchasing tonight?”

“I— what?”

“Sorry, miss, I was only trying to crack a joke. You seem stressed.”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes.” An awkward silence, as she debated telling him or not. “It’s another EMF spike. Nothing too dangerous, but we want to stop it as soon as possible. With how old the equipment is now, any damage to it . . .”

“I hear you loud and clear, miss. That would not be good.”

Another awkward beat passed, and this time Rodney filled the silence. “Do you think it might be ghosts?”

She met his eyes in the rear-view again, brow furrowed in confusion. “Ghosts?”

“Yeah, ghosts. Ghosts are supposed to be magnetic, you know. I watched a program on it when I was just a kid; people on Earth used to use all sorts of electro-frequency doohickeys to try and get a reaction. Though I suppose in Seitah, there’s really only one ghost it could be.”

Hoshiko felt a prickling at the back of her neck.

“It’s just a routine check,” she said, her tone firm. “I’m sure it’s just a normal flare. We’ll be home in no time.”

“Of course, miss.”

#

Records lost to time mean the details are unsure, but tradition holds that Belle arrived with the third wave. As she waited in the long, snaking line to board she looked up at the monitors, suspended from the hangar ceiling on long, thin struts, and saw Fukuda. Dr. Akane Fukuda, to be precise; the inventor of the ingenious multi-pronged magnetosphere that made colonization even possible. The loop greeted the colonists and talked them through what to expect, but also spoke of hope and progress. She believed more than anyone, it seemed, that they could treat Mars differently. Investigators would later ascertain that Belle took these words to heart, for she wrote them down on an index card, which she pasted onto the wall beside her bed in Seitah City.

Indeed, the investigators found that Belle lived this teaching to the letter. She threw herself into her new life right away, working and exploring Mars’s many sights with equal fervor. By all accounts she was friendly, personable, well-liked by everyone she met. Like everyone else she had chosen to come to Mars, and like everyone else she was now consumed in making it the best it could be.

Red River Crossing became her “spot”. She crossed this bridge every day to buy dinner, and she always stopped to hear the music. The buskers became her first friends on Mars, Ben the trombonist and Eric the guitarist and Austin the drummer. She liked to dance to the rhythms, and before long they were asking her opinions on their new “dusty jazz” beats. “Like the wind blowing across the dunes,” they told her. “Unpredictable, but mellow.”

“It’s perfect,” she told them warmly. “Mars’s first art form! How proud she must be of you.”

On those nights she often pulled the delinquent teens away from their graffiti and into her dances, and eventually the whole neighborhood came out each weekend, dancing and laughing and taking joy in their city. Belle liked everyone in Seitah, and everyone in Seitah liked her right back.

#

Rodney left Hoshiko beside a chain-link fence. Its silvery patina was patchy, worn away by the infamous Martian sandstorms. Warning and informational signs rattled in place, catching the chill wind and causing the fence to shake. He promised to stay until she returned, unless she didn’t return before morning, in which case he would call a search team. He said this all comfortingly, and Hoshiko, feeling not at all comforted, forced the gate latch up and slipped into the abandoned city.

She used her phone’s flashlight to light her path, and held her magnetometer in the other. Hoshiko moved slowly, sweeping the magnetometer’s probe in a wide arc in front of her, following wherever the signal showed the strongest. She proceeded this way for a long while, weaving first through a residential neighborhood, then the wildly-overgrown Red River Park.

Some twenty minutes of determined bushwhacking found her on the other side of the park, looking over the ruins of the downtown district. She stopped for a moment, both to catch her breath and take in the view. Seitah had been one of the first cities opened for colonists, and the architecture screamed of old Earth influence. They’d hoped to make everyone feel at home with an odd mix of architectural styles; Brooklyn-style brownstones and medieval timber-framed townhomes lined the riverfront, tall skyscrapers loomed in the distance to make up the business loop, and ornate Greek- and Roman-style buildings marked the various civil administrations. Hoshiko’s grandmother had once explained to her that this had been normal in cities on Earth, too. Life didn’t always have the luxury of deferring to history, and so they had constantly built over it. Hoshiko wondered if Mars would ever get that chance.

#

It didn’t take them long to realize that Belle was missing.

Her boss noticed first, when she didn’t arrive for work. She’d been such a model employee before that he shrugged it off, thinking she must be sick and that she deserved the break. After three days he called the colony policing force and asked them to check in on her. She was not at her apartment. The neighbors confided that she’d brought home a date a few days earlier. Perhaps she was with him, and had forgotten to call out? They tried to search for the man.

Nothing turned up. Belle still didn’t come to work.

A suitcase of blood-stained clothing washed up on the shores of the Red River a week later. Another week (and a dredge of the river) produced her body.

As they would have on Earth, Belle’s friends held candlelight vigils, and publicly pleaded with the police to find her killer. The politicians who had so sold the Utopian dream wanted answers. For their part the police, having dealt with nothing more than civil noise complaints in their three-year commission, were simply not prepared for a murder investigation. It is still hotly debated whether it was this incompetence, a lack of evidence, or perhaps the meddling of the media that prevented them from finding the truth.

#

As Hoshiko approached the city center, the strength of the signal improved markedly. She eventually pinpointed the source to a long, winding bridge over the river. When she had double-checked this, however, she only grew more frustrated.

She could not see anything that would be a source of electromagnetic energy, nor indeed anything that would draw magnetic energy to itself. Perhaps it was something in the bridge railing? Or maybe the remnants of a hydroelectric plant hidden beneath the water? Was there a way she could check? Maybe somebody still had blueprints she could reference. Or, wait, she’d seen a sign on the gate, something about an informational radio broadcast. Maybe it would have information. What frequency had they listed?

She opened the radio scanner on her phone and began to flick through the channels, listening carefully for the right frequency. There weren’t many radio channels active on Mars, it had been obscure even on Earth before they left, but they still proved useful on occasion.

“Hel-lo?”

Hoshiko jumped, but then chuckled to herself. If she swiped through the channels fast enough, the modulation sounded like someone was speaking to her. She tried again, and this time the static seemed to form the words “Your! Name.”

It reminded her of weekends spent at her grandmother’s home, where she and Daichi would tune the television to satellite channels from Earth. Often such broadcasts were so weak as to be only audio- or visual- only. They’d spent hours filling in the missing parts, making up the drama of a planet they were from, but had never seen.

For old time’s sake Hoshiko spun the radio dial one more time. This time in the modulation she thought she heard “Help? Me!”

A translucent hand reached over her shoulder.

Hoshiko screamed, and whirled around. There behind her, to her astonishment, was a woman. She wasn’t really a woman, though, that much was evident. She was not solid. Opaque, but still missing some quality of physicality. She was colorless too; not white, there was more to it than that. She was closer to a gray watercolor smear, or a blurry photo negative.

“What the— What’s happening? Who are you?”

The thing opened its mouth, but nothing came out.

“I’m serious. Your name, now, or I’ll . . .” Hoshiko trailed off. She was out here alone, save Rodney, and he was all the way back at the car.

The thing opened its mouth again, and still nothing happened. Hoshiko noticed that it made an unmistakable expression of frustration, then gestured at her phone. It took her a second to realize what it meant, and another few seconds to work up the courage to make her finger flick through the radio channels again.

“Name? Belle,” the static said.

“Oh my god,” Hoshiko breathed. “It really is you.”

Excitedly she— Belle— waved for Hoshiko to work the dial again. Hoshiko looked down at the phone, mind racing. Her grandmother, the great scientist Fukuda herself, had told stories of ghosts in her native Japan. The only way Hoshiko had been able to sleep after those particular stories was to assure herself that the ghosts were trapped on Earth. Silly, perhaps, to convince herself that ghosts were an earthly phenomena. Silly at all to even believe in ghosts, when she was the face of Mars’s preeminent science corporation.

No, that was right. She was a scientist. This was a new and unexplained phenomena, she didn’t just get to dismiss it as silliness. She had a responsibility to document it.

Squaring her shoulders, ears and eyes pricked for every detail, Hoshiko scrolled the channels once again.

“Your. Name!” the static crackled.

“My name is Hoshiko Fukuda. It is nice to meet you, Belle.”

“Fu-ku-da?” Each syllable was its own burst in the static, making the name sound choppy. “A-ka-ne?”

Hoshiko nodded. “Yes. Akane was my grandmother.”

“Wow!” Belle said through the static.

“Oh well.” Hoshiko shrugged the compliment off uncomfortably. “Belle? Your . . . Your case was a big deal in Mars history. There’s still so much we don’t know about it. Would you mind answering some questions?”

The ghost seemed to think about this for a while before pointing for Hoshiko to spin the dial again.

“Take. Turns?”

Hoshiko shrugged. “Okay. Sure. Do you want to go first?”

The phantom bobbed up and down, the first motion Hoshiko had noticed from her besides the pointing finger.

“Where! Friends?”

“Jumping right into it, huh?” Hoshiko gave a single dry chuckle. Luckily, as the head of the Fukuda Group, she was skilled in answering tough questions. “I’m not sure,” she said hesitantly. “Most everyone moved away after— well. And it’s been eighty-something years so they’re probably all . . .”

Hoshiko cursed herself as the ghost seemed to think this over. Belle didn’t seem particularly upset at the concept of her death, so why couldn’t Hoshiko just say it?
Belle gestured for her to work the radio again. “Why? Move!”

Hoshiko tilted her head, confused. “What do you mean?”

The ghost gestured to the city around it, though this seemed a great effort. “Seit-ah! Great. City? Why! Move.”

Hoshiko bit her lip, and looked down.

“I said before that your case . . . Well, it was a big deal in our history. A lot of people came to Mars to escape the worst of humanity, to try and be something better. Your death wasn’t just an awful tragedy, it was a sign that we had failed. Sometimes . . . Sometimes I wonder if they’re right.”

She looked back at the ghost, but it wasn’t moving. She spun the dial, letting the radio flick through its many channels again, but nothing.

“Right, I guess it’s my turn,” Hoshiko said. “There’s no tactful way to say this, but, Belle, do you remember who killed you?”

“Killed?” Belle asked, and with astonishment Hoshiko noted that the ghostly visage flinched. Did she not remember her own death?

Hoshiko swallowed the bile rising in her throat— no turning back now.

“Yes, Belle. I’m sorry you’re having to find out this way, but . . . You were murdered. You were Mars’s first murder, in fact.”

She spun the dial, but there was no answer. Then, to her astonishment, Belle’s ghost flickered out.

“Belle?” No response. Hoshiko looked down at the phone, debating what to do next, and flinched when the phone started buzzing in her hand. It was not Belle exacting vengeance on her, she realized with a sigh. It was just Daichi. She picked up, taking a deep breath to mask her nerves

“Almost had it,” Daichi said by way of greeting. “Gonna try it again, but if it still doesn’t work I’ve got a few more things I can try. How are things for you?”

“Uh.” Hoshiko didn’t know how to answer, so she pressed on. “Well, something is definitely happening out here.”

“Do you want to share with the class, or— Shit! Veronica, turn it back! It’s overheating! Yes it is, look at that gauge—”

The line went dead. He’d call back when the crisis resolved, but until then she was on her own.

#

The investigation fizzled out, then went cold altogether. Tensions in Seitah began to grow, and soon their violent crime rates began to rise. The once family-friendly city lost its families, and without a majority of its population the city fell into disrepair. It didn’t take long for the opportunists to swoop in after that. They bought up the cheap real estate and refurbished the city, all to cash in on the murder mania that had seized Mars’s collective imagination.

A horde of souvenir shops cropped up along Seitah’s once bustling streets, but it was Belle’s old apartment block that really shone. Looking over the river where they’d eventually found her body, it became a pilgrimage for all who had compared notes through the message boards. The man who eventually purchased the block cleared the candles from Belle’s room, placed there by her neighbors during the search, and staged it to look like a dramatic crime scene. Once the films— one dramatized, the other documentary— were released, the remainder of Belle’s belongings were auctioned off. As Belle’s macabre star grew, it seemed that everyone wanted a piece of Mars’s first murder.

One man was eventually accused, but the police had no good evidence with which to base an arrest. Belle’s former neighbors attempted to sue for emotional damages, but the case fizzled out before it even reached jury selection. Behind closed doors the politicians and scientists decried the loss of their Utopia, and did their best to remove Seitah from all mention. Everyone who had believed in Mars’s potential wanted to sweep this nastiness under the rug and look forward to the future. Humanity could be better. They had to be.

The tourism slowed, and soon even those most stalwart of holdouts moved on to other enterprises. Less than sixty years after Belle’s death, Seitah City lay fully abandoned, a quiet and unseemly monument to times both better and worse.

#

As Hoshiko moved to slip her phone back into her pocket, her magnetometer spun up again. With an urgency she would not have expected of herself, Hoshiko looked around— yes, there was Belle’s specter. Fainter than before, but still discernible. She stood at the railing a little ways off, her ghostly smear of a face turned towards the far shore.

Hoshiko brought her phone back out, and flicked through the radio app once again.

“Mur-der.” Belle seemed to turn the word over, try it on for size.

“I’m sorry,” Hoshiko said, hopelessly.

“Not. Your! Fault?”

This made Hoshiko give a tired, humorless chuckle. “I am sorry though. You believed in Mars, in humanity’s second chance. Instead, you were our worst failure.”

The ghost pondered this for several minutes, its wispy, featureless face turned up to the stars. Hoshiko eased herself to the ground and braced her back against the bridge railing.

“Look at that, a ghost! I was right after all.”

Hoshiko jerked her head up and saw Rodney, her driver, standing at the edge of the bridge.

#

Belle’s death was the first crack in Mars’s veneer, but it certainly wasn’t the last. And yet, as it does on Earth, life went on. Children were born. Art was made. Love and hope were found, and lost, and found again. Yet the echo of their failure was always at the back of their collective mind.

Hoshiko and Daichi were only eleven years old when they first visited Seitah, fading in its final death throes. Learning of Belle shook them— in preparing them for leadership of the Fukuda group, Akane had instilled in them a great belief in humanity’s potential. No matter what anyone else said, they were always to assume the best in people, to work to benefit them instead of exploiting them.

Nothing would ever challenge that believe harder than Seitah, with its blatant displays of cruelty and avarice. From then on their lives became circus acts— juggling the many decaying parts of the magnetosphere, balancing their hopes for humanity with objective observations of its imperfections, struggling under the knowledge that their failure could cost the life of every Martian citizen.

So when Daichi called Hoshiko in the middle of the night to beg her help in diagnosing a dangerously large EMF spike, after a dozen similar incidents over the past year, it should not have been a surprise that her first response was a snippy “why don’t we let it fail?”

#

“Rodney? What are you doing?”

“You were taking a while. Thought you might need help.” He shrugged.

“Ah.” Hoshiko almost did not want to provide an explanation, but . . . Well, he had guessed ghosts correctly. And she knew he was a good soul, as much as anyone can know another’s soul.

“What’s this I hear about humanity’s worst failure?” Rodney came to lean against the bridge railing on Belle’s other side.

Belle pointed at Hoshiko’s hand, and obediently she spun the radio dial.

“Me,” Belle buzzed. “Death. Mur-der.”

“Not you,” Hoshiko said fervently. “Humanity. We were supposed to leave violence behind. War, hunger, poverty—“

“Cap-it-al-is-m?” asked Belle, and despite the broken chatter of the radio there was a distinct note of sarcasm in the reply.

Rodney laughed. “Well, well. Sounds like the ghost’s a communist.”

Hoshiko laughed sheepishly, and rubbed at her neck. “Sounds a little silly coming from me, doesn’t it?”

“The acting head of one of Mars’s largest corporations? Heiress to the fortune built by the woman who made it possible for us all to live here? Yes, a little,” Rodney said. The ghost of Belle seemed to throw its head back in laughter.

“But . . . It’s true, isn’t it?” Hoshiko asked, fiddling with the magnetometer in her hand. “Everyone that came to Mars came for a second chance, then it only took one person to ruin everything.”

“Ruin everything.” Rodney cocked his head and looked thoughtfully out over the river. “I don’t know that there was much of anything to ruin in the first place. Was it not an act of violence to colonize Mars at all? We turned it from what it was to something habitable for us, and in the process we changed it forever.”

“Exactly,” Hoshiko pressed. “So, ethically, wouldn’t it be best for humanity to abandon the colonies altogether? To clean up our mess and go home?”

“Maybe,” Rodney conceded. “I think the answer to that question is just that we shouldn’t have come in the first place. But we’re here now. Whatever else has been done, it would be wrong to forcibly tear everyone from what they know.”

“So what, then?” Hoshiko asked, throwing her hands up. “Do I just keep going, knowing what’s been done, that I’m the keystone holding up a broken legacy?”
Rodney thought about it for a long while. Belle seemed to think about it too, casting her eyeless gaze over the water.

“I think you do what the rest of us do,” Rodney said eventually. “You do what you can to help, and when you’ve done what you can, you go out and you catch a show with your friends.”

“That’s it? There’s nothing more I can do?”

“Nothing more any of us can do. Of course, what you can do to help is going to be a little bigger than some people’s, since you have the means. But you’re still human, Miss Fukuda. You’re going to have to learn to take the bad with the good, like the rest of us.”

Belle perked up at this, and gestured for Hoshiko to spin the dial again.

“Not. Idee-al? But. Still, good. Friends! Food. Mu-sic? Scene-err-y. Love! Mars. Loved? Earth! Neith-er. Per-fect. But? Good. Even if—“

There was a small burst of static, and Belle flickered away again. Hoshiko blinked, and was surprised to feel a single tear spill over.

She looked down at the phone. A banner floated at the top, displaying a new message from Daichi. The repair was done, the problem solved. She could come home.

She looked to Rodney, who shrugged. With nothing else to do, she put the magnetosphere back in its case, toggled her flashlight, and together they began the long hike back to the car.

#

The next morning, as they sat waiting for a call in her office, Daichi flicked a spitwad at Hoshiko’s forehead.

“Ew! What was that for?”

“Quick, what are you thinking about? Right now?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Hoshiko, don’t be like that. You can tell me.”

“It’s seriously nothing. I’m just going over my points for the board.”

“Really? You aren’t secretly plotting the demise of everyone on Mars?”

She didn’t want to dignify him with a response, but as always, it proved impossible to hide the truth from him.

“I may have briefly considered it last night,” she said primly. “But in my defense, you woke me up. In the middle of the night. And made me hike across an abandoned city. In the middle of the night.”

“Hey, the command center is no cakewalk! At least you got some fresh air.” They shared a laugh at this, easy and comfortable.

Daichi turned towards the portrait of Akane on Hoshiko’s office wall then. “I’m serious, though. Are you okay? I know this job is a lot.”

“It is,” she agreed. “And . . . Perhaps I lost sight for a while. Long before last night, truth be told. I keep thinking of Grandmother, how much she believed in people. And how we don’t always live up to that.”

He nodded solemnly. “It’s hard to want to help humanity when we don’t always deserve it.”

“No,” she agreed. “But . . . I mean, I think that’s the point. I think that’s the lesson she wanted us to learn. That no matter how messy life gets, it’s worth preserving.”

“Shut up, you sound like a MarsNet PSA,” Daichi said, laughing. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Thanks. Me too.”

#

Some several billion years later, the Sun burned out.

Humanity had left Mars long ago, longer than even the planet remembered. Extinct or evolved or simply moved on, it didn’t matter. There was no one left to remember. The hollow shells of her buildings quickly obtained the flavor of her landscape. The magnetosphere had failed, and as quickly as it had flourished Mars once again dried out. The wind and sand brought everything humanity had built low, and after a few thousand years it looked exactly as it had when Sojourner sent her first photos home.

There was a flicker of movement over a dry wash. If anyone had been there to see it, they would have seen more ghosts flicker into sight, as though tuned to a bad radio channel. Men and women and children, coupled up or in small groups, all swaying to the same inaudible beat.

The Belle of Red River Crossing waltzed between them, dancing by herself, smiling as she turned her face to the sky. She adored the unity, the release of tension, that the other ghosts of Mars would join her in these last few moments to be happy.

It took 13 and a half minutes for the last of the Sun’s light to reach them. For one shining moment, before the light and the heat and the pressure ejected the planet from its orbit and into a dark and directionless careening . . . The people of Mars danced together.