Football on Mars by Marie Vibbert
You want to know why we stopped playing football on Mars? Let me tell you why we started.
Sequestered in our domes, in the close air of our own unwashed smell, we got hungry for the outdoors. Carefully stepping around too much equipment in too little space, we got hungry for violent impacts. There was always more time than entertainment back then.
I was on the geological survey, and I found this sulfur-limestone with a sweet, bright strike-mark like lemonade. I was never much of an artist, but I used it to make straight lines decorating around our site. Your gran got the idea to turn them into a field. We reinforced suit joints with tape and insulation padding. Your grandmother sewed a ball together from bits of scrap. We didn’t want to waste atmo on inflating it, so it was full of cut-up tube ends.
You oughta watch those first games, before we figured out how to catch in low gravity, a bunch of thin scientist geeks in cumbersome suits flailing about with the collective skill of a puppy in a paddling pool. Your gran was the only one of us who could stay upright from one end zone to the next. That’s why we made her our running back. Should have made her quarterback, but I was too full of myself in those days.
No, we didn’t stop because of him. The quartermaster never did like us tackling, sure. Made it hard to keep the suits in repair. Every now and then someone would get sky-bite and he’d be off on a tear to health and safety. We piled on more tape, covered it up and kept playing. We all had blue-black scars on our wrists and the quartermaster took to hiding the tape.
Your gran and I, one of us would distract him, the other pinch the tape. Sometimes we needed someone to sit out the whole game, pretending to have an inventory mix-up, just to keep him out of the way. That’s how I missed our first championship, even though I was the quarterback for the Eastern Crater Rim Easter Bunnies. We beat the Horticulture Dome Herding Cats 21-6.
No, we didn’t stop playing because they built the rec dome. Why would we stop because it got safer? You’re really hung up on this. If you want to start it up again, do it. I tried, but for years, it was like you couldn’t say the word “football.” They’d look at me like I was mangling a corpse, say, “Not you, of all people.”
It didn’t seem worth it. Though it was, for a moment. You should have seen her smile, when she made that last touchdown, the triumph and joy. She didn’t even notice the cracks in her faceplate until the battle between structure and pressure tipped. I can still hear the tink and ping of the shards in my nightmares.
Go on, already. Don’t waste time thinking about what we did and why, go do it yourself. Start again. We were chickenshit. So no, your gran wasn’t the reason we stopped playing football on Mars. She was the reason we started. All wild frontiers are pushed by people who run forward, grinning, never looking back.
