A Pocket Guide to Mars and Other Plant-Based Miracles
John was an old soul who had completed sixteen deliberate circles around the Sun, a milestone he celebrated by becoming a devout practitioner of his mother’s dietary faith: veganism. He didn’t just eat his vegetables; he pursued them with a competitive intensity. He drank her homemade carrot juice by the gallon, his mustache stained a permanent, sunset orange.
One afternoon, peering into the glass with the suspicion of a chemist, he asked, “Mom, if I drink too much of this, will I actually turn orange? And if I mix it with beet juice, do I get purple and orange stripes? Like a botanical tiger?”
She didn’t look up from her prep work. “No, sweetie. But your eyesight will improve so much you’ll finally be able to see that last smudge of carob cookie on your chin. You know, the one you’re planning to blame on the cat?”
John grinned, undeterred. “But Mom, if we are what we eat, then technically, I’m a vegetable.”
“No, sweetie,” she replied, her voice warm with
the patience of a woman who had won many such skirmishes. “Plant-based diets are ancient and vital. Spinach is loaded with iron, which makes you a boy of steel. Do you see the irony?”
John blinked. “I don’t think I know that word yet.”
“Leafy greens make you strong, John. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s the truth.”
“Mom, please,” he groaned, leaning against the counter. “Quit using those big words. I’m only in high school. My brain is still in the beta-testing phase.”
“Just because it doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” she said, tossing a handful of ginger into the pan. “My, you’re certainly inquisitive today.”
John took a beat, his eyes dancing. “Just fucking with your head, Mom.”
The spatula paused mid-air. “Please don’t use that word around me. ‘Messing’ with my head conveys the point quite nicely without the linguistic debris.”
“But the F-word is so much more piquant,” John countered, testing the syllables like a fine
wine.
She turned then, a half-smile tugging at her lips. “Son, clearly your vocabulary is much broader than you’ve been letting on. You do indeed have me in a state of piquant. There now, doesn’t that sound much more civilized?”
As she returned to sautéing tofu in the wok, the rhythmic hiss of the pan filled the kitchen. It was interrupted by the distinct, sharp crack-fizz of a pulling tab. She froze. John had just popped open a beer—the one she had promised him he could have once he hit sixteen, a legal allowance in New Mexico with parental consent.
“Please, don’t do that,” she sighed. “I know I promised, and I know it’s legal here at home, but do you really have to do it while I’m preparing all this life-giving food for you?”
John held the can aloft, looking genuinely puzzled. “How come? Is beer not vegan?”
She stopped, looked at the ceiling, and let out a breath. “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit.”
John scratched his head. “Mom, where on earth do people actually talk like that?”
“I’m not from Earth,” she said with a wink.
“I’m from that heavenly body called Venus, where all women originate. One day you’ll have a wife and you’ll be the one behind the wok. That’s the new wave, John. Watch and learn. Now, dig into your tofu and broccoli florets. It’s guaranteed to keep you trotting like a prize stallion in the horse show of life.”
John looked down at his plate, then back at her. “Mom, I’m not an actor, but am I doing okay? With the whole teenager thing?”
“You have the ‘bad boy’ role down pat,” she assured him. “If you were any badder, you’d be a shoe-in for James Dean in a remake of Rebel Without a Cause.”
“More like Rebel Without a Clue,” John muttered.
“You know exactly what you’re doing,” she countered softly. “But I know how to handle you.”
She watched him for a few minutes, noting how he mostly just rearranged the broccoli into a green fortress. Eventually, her maternal resolve cracked.
“You’ve hardly touched the veggies. I can’t have my son going to bed on an empty stomach. What do you actually want for supper?”
John didn’t hesitate. “We’ve had pizza the last
two nights. That sounds perfect to me.”
“Let’s mix it up,” she suggested. “How about lasagna?”
“Are we on an Italian week? This menu sounds like it was written by a Mafioso.”
“Maybe you could deliver pizza to help pay the bills then,” she joked, though there was a tired edge to her smile.
Life in their New Mexico apartment was a quiet rhythm of spice, stars, and stories. While the desert wind whispered against the glass, John’s mind was usually several million miles away.
Each month John anxiously awaits the new edition of Amazing Stories. He stays up late into the night under the sheets with a flashlight. He reads them cover to cover while his mother is fast asleep.
“Your dinner is currently entering its second ice age, John,” his mother said, leaning against the doorframe as he finally drifted into the kitchen. “You’re always the last one to the table. I’m starting to think you’re operating on Martian Standard Time.”
John chewed a piece of cold bread, looking
sheepish. “I didn’t realize it was that late, Mom. Honestly.”
She sighed, set down the dish towel, and pulled out the chair next to him. “First of all, don’t talk with your mouth full. I’ve told you that more times than there are stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.” She reached over, stroking the back of his hand with a sudden, grounding softness. “My son, my dear, ‘Boy of Steel’… how do you expect to make the grades for a decent life if you’re spending your nights under a duvet with a flashlight and sleeping through your first period?”
John dropped his fork with a clatter. “But Mom, Algebra is a desert. It’s a vast, beige wasteland of nothing.”
“And these ‘Amazing Stories’ are the oasis?” She smiled, though her eyes remained firm. “I know Catholic school can be a bit of a bear—believe me, I did my time in those pews—but you’re about to matriculate. You’re supposed to be launching into the world, not hiding from it in a pulp magazine.”
John looked up at the Warhol print on the wall, his eyes bright. “But they aren’t just stories, Mom.
They’re art. They’re what could be.”
John’s mother set the plate of cold lasagna down with the kind of deliberate, rhythmic clink that suggested a “Life Lesson” was currently pre-heating in her mind. She sat beside him, her presence filling the space with the scent of sautéed garlic and that unshakable, maternal gravity that could pull a wandering satellite back into orbit.
She reached out, her fingers gently smoothing the back of his hand—a peace offering before the tactical strike.
“John,” she began, her voice dropping into that velvet register of parental wisdom, “I say this with all the love of a woman who birthed you and subsequently survived your toddler years: Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop trying to learn the ‘ABCs’ of wooing women from a magazine about a Princess on Mars.”
John opened his mouth to defend the complex sociological structures of the Red Planet, but she raised a manicured finger, silencing him mid-rebuttal.
“Don’t give me that look. I’m sure Her Royal Highness Dejah Thoris is a marvel of four-armed diplomacy and gravity-defying brass bikinis, but trust your mother on this—Martian royalty is a terrible blueprint for New Mexican reality. Unless you plan on winning a bride through ritual combat in a gladiatorial arena, those pages aren’t giving you the field notes you actually need.”
She squeezed his hand, her eyes twinkling with a mix of mischief and genuine concern.
“Think ahead, my boy. One day, you’re going to want a bride. A real one. A living, breathing woman who exists in three dimensions and doesn’t require a pressurized helmet to share a conversation. And John…” she paused, leaning in as if sharing a high-level state secret, “at your age, certain… tectonic shifts begin to happen. The biology textbooks call it puberty; I call it the ‘Great Internal Upheaval.’ Your voice is currently auditioning for three different octaves, and your brain is being rewired by a committee of confused hormones. You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
John, caught between the desire to be a “bad boy” and the undeniable truth of his own awkward evolution, felt the heat rise in his cheeks. He couldn’t quite meet her gaze, so he simply gave a short, sharp nod—the universal teenage signal for ‘Message received, please stop talking about my hormones now.’
“Good,” she whispered, a triumphant, warm-hearted smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Now eat your tofu. If you can’t navigate a dinner plate, you’ll never navigate a first date.”
The tofu was cooling into a rubbery defiance on his plate, but John didn’t seem to notice. He was still vibrating from the static electricity of the pulp pages he’d been devouring under his covers. His mother, a woman who balanced the dietary rigors of a vegan monk with the sharp tongue of a courtroom fencer, leaned in.
“Alright, Scheherazade,” she said, resting her chin on her hand. “Tell me one of these stories. If they’re worth the bags under your eyes and the looming threat of an Algebra F, they must be Shakespearean. Or at least… piquant.”
John took a breath, his eyes momentarily losing focus on the kitchen’s Warhol print as they drifted toward the red deserts of his imagination.
“Okay,” John began, his voice dropping an octave into a serious, storyteller’s rasp. “There was this princess on Mars. Now, she was perfect—high-definition beauty, smarter than a supercomputer, and she lived in a palace made of glass and sighing wind. But she was sad. Not just ‘forgot-my-lunch’ sad, but a deep, cosmic blue that felt like the end of a long movie.”
His mother nodded, her expression softening from “skeptical parent” to “invested audience.”
“She traveled everywhere,” John continued, gesturing with a broccoli floret. “She trekked to the Shrine of the Ancient Ones, which is basically a tomb at the bottom of a frozen crater. She prayed until her knees ached and drank from the River Margum—which is supposed to taste like liquid starlight but mostly just tastes like iron. Nothing worked. The sadness stayed.”
“A classic existential crisis,” his mother whispered. “Go on.”
“So, she finds this medicine man in a dusty village. He gives her a glowing potion. He tells her, ‘Drink this, and you’ll be happy. But the moment you stop, the lights go out. The sadness comes back for its luggage.’ So, she drinks. She becomes the life of the party. She marries a neighboring prince, has the big royal wedding, and for years, everything is golden. Then, one morning, she wakes up and the ceiling is just… gray. She’s crying, and she doesn’t know why. The potion stopped working.”
His mother’s hand moved across the table, covering his. Her thumb traced his knuckles, a silent anchor.
“The Prince, who was a decent guy for a royal, sent her to a magician,” John said, his pace slowing. “The magician didn’t use a potion. He cast a spell. He told her, ‘As long as you stay within the borders of this kingdom, the spell holds. You’ll be happy. But you can never leave.’ And she didn’t. She stayed inside the walls, lived a long, prosperous life, and died without ever seeing what was on the other side of the hill.”
Silence settled over the kitchen, heavier than the steam from the teakettle. His mother didn’t jump in with a witty retort about the princess’s lack of fiber or the prince’s questionable problem-solving skills. She just looked at him—really looked at him.
“John,” she said, her voice losing its playful edge. “Are you sad?”
The transition from Martian royalty to 16-year-
old reality was jarring. John looked down at the table. “Sometimes.”
“Why, honey?”
“Because I’m alone,” he said. The words felt small, but they filled the room.
She squeezed his hand, her brow furrowed in that specific way mothers have when they’re trying to decode a soul. “But… you have me. You have this whole ‘Venusian-priestess-slash-badass-dad’ thing I’ve got going on.”
John rubbed his eyes, the exhaustion of his late-night reading finally catching up to him. “I know. It’s just… the story. She had to stay in the kingdom to be okay. Sometimes it feels like the kingdom is really small.”
She leaned in closer, the scent of sautéed garlic
and iron-willed maternal love radiating off her.
“Listen to me, John. There are no potions in Albuquerque. There are no magicians in this zip code, and if there were, they’d probably charge too much for a spell that doesn’t work. But that story? That’s golden wisdom, even if it came from a magazine with a bug-eyed monster on the cover.”
She paused, her eyes flashing with a mix of fierce
protection and intellectual fire.
“You don’t have to roam to the moons of Jupiter to find the ‘cure.’ Happiness isn’t a destination you reach by rocket ship; it’s something you cultivate in the garden of your own head. You seek joy in these fantasy worlds, and that’s fine—imagination is the tool that built the world. It’s what took us from caves to the moon. But don’t let the fiction make you forget the friction of real life.”
She smiled, a small, witty glint returning to her eyes. “Science is actually weirder than your stories, you know. Quantum physics makes Martian princesses look boring. Keep reading your pulps—I’ll stop calling them childish—but read the science too. Trust your mother; the truth is usually more ‘out there’ than the lie.”
John smirked, the tension breaking. “You’ve really been practicing this ‘solo parent’ monologue, haven’t you? Any woman can be a mom, but it takes a real badass to pull off the ‘Dad’ lecture too.”
“I’m just winging the ‘Pop’ side of my personality,” she winked, standing up to clear the plates. “I’m your priestess, John. No penance required. Your teacher may make you write ‘I will not tease Fae’ fifty times on the board, but if you tease me all you get is a short lecture followed by supper—just finish your broccoli, or I’ll be forced to use my own ‘piquant’ vocabulary.”
The street welcomes them with a blast of mariachi music so vibrant it feels like the brass section is trying to personally rearrange their internal organs. Under the ghost moon, the air is a thick, swirling soup of tequila fumes, pungent garlic, and onions strong enough to make a statue weep. People weave through the sidewalk like yarn in a frantic loom, a human tapestry of late-night cravings and sudden laughter.
John, possessing a swagger that suggests he invented the concept of walking, gazes at the señoritas sashaying by in jeans so tight they look painted on. His mother, ever the vigilant shepherd, doesn’t miss a beat. Her bony fingers grip his shoulders like talons, steering her wayward cub through the tide of humanity.
“Eyes on the prize, Casanova,” she murmurs, her voice cutting through the accordion trill. “The grocery store is that way. Your destiny involves
kale, not phone numbers.”
They step into the grocery store, where the air shifts to the scent of tamales steaming in banana leaves—a smell that carries the heavy, humid sweetness of a mother’s love on a summer night. John wanders down the aisles, his cockiness momentarily dampened by the sheer abundance of produce.
He stops at the bin of avocados. His hands reach out, tracing the pebbled, dark skin. There is something oddly familiar about the shape—the curve of the womb he once inhabited, the weight of a beginning. He imagines the green flesh beneath the skin as the placenta that nourished him when he was no larger than the pit resting at its center. For a fleeting, uncharacteristic second, the moment feels pregnant with a quiet, earthly divinity.
Then, he remembers he’s sixteen.
“These are ripe,” he says, regaining his cool and tossing one into the air. “Guacamole is the only reason I tolerate this vegetable lifestyle, Mom.”
“It’s a fruit, John,” she retorts, snatching a bag of organic beans. “And don’t play catch with the produce. You’re a ‘Rebel Without a Clue,’
remember? Not a juggler.”
As they trek back, her arms are laden with the brown paper weight of their survival. John strays into the crowd, checking out the scene like a hunter on the African savanna from the era before spoken language—all instinct, sharp eyes, and a desperate hope that someone noticed his new haircut.
The home greets them with the cooling breath of the desert. Sundown has transformed the alleyway into a gallery of haunted shadows. They stand together at the kitchen window, watching the yellow squares of light pop into existence in the neighbor’s apartments across the way. The hum of the city feels like a low-frequency pulse.
“Mom,” John says, his voice losing its edge of bravado. “Why did you choose this? Why the desert instead of staying in the Deep South where everything is… you know, green?”
The silence of the universe seems to settle into the kitchen. His mother sets the groceries down with a soft thud and leans against the counter.
“Your father chose New Mexico,” she says, her voice softening into a rare, unshielded honesty. “And honestly, you should be writing him a thank-you note. The ragweed in the subtropics played hell with your allergies. You spent three years looking like a very sad, very leaky faucet. But if you’re so desperate for a lush landscape, look at the ivy growing in that pot over there. It’s thriving on your sarcasm.”
“Mom, look out there,” he gestures to the horizon, where the dust and the dusk have merged into a monochromatic tan. “It’s all yellow. It’s just… dirt and old neon.”
Night steals into her soul, but she doesn’t look away. She reaches out and ruffles his hair, ignoring his indignant flinch.
“Son,” she says, her eyes reflecting the distant stars that the desert sky allows you to see. “You just have to look for the green. It isn’t going to jump out and introduce itself here. It’s out there, hiding just beyond the city in the quiet canyons where the deer come to drink. It’s in the hidden springs and the high mountain seeps.”
She smiles, a witty, weary, beautiful expression. “Life is a lot like this desert, John. Most people only see the sand. But if you’re smart—and I suspect you might be, despite your best efforts—
you’ll learn that the most vibrant things are the ones that know how to find water in the dark.”
John looks back out the window. He doesn’t see the deer yet, but for the first time, he isn’t just looking at the dirt.
This is an interesting conversation that a mother and son have over dinner. It is a sweet dynamic that he still confides in her about what he is doing in his life and the way she talks to him gives you how much she cares about him.
Much gratitude my friend. Yes the mother son conversations is indeed a sweet dynamic that leads to him sharing with her. Than you so much my friend. Deeply appreciated.
John