illphated
On Sol 873, Commander Eliza Marek stood alone in the Martian base’s observatory, watching the storm roll over Olympus Mons. Dust whirled in slow, deliberate dances against the reinforced glass, painted gold by the setting twin suns. It was quiet. Not just the absence of voices, but the deep, humming silence that comes from being the only heartbeat on a planet.
Eliza’s fingers brushed across the cracked edge of a photograph taped to her workstation. It had frayed under solar radiation and time, the colors faded but the memory intact: her daughter, Ivy, age seven, grinning gap-to-gap, a popsicle melting down her chin. Her husband, Mateo, in a wide straw hat, laughing with his eyes. Earth looked impossibly blue behind them on the screen. Like a dream she used to live inside.
She hadn’t seen them in nearly three years. The last transmission took twelve minutes to arrive and twelve to return. Ivy had been practicing piano, missing more notes than she hit, but grinning the whole time. Mateo had just finished planting a garden. “Everything’s growing,” he’d said. “Even without you.”
That had gutted her in a way space never could.
Outside, the storm howled across the barren plains. The base, “Artemis-4,” creaked and sighed like an old ship adrift in a blood-colored sea. Inside, everything was orderly. Sterile. Safe. But not warm.
She wrote messages to them every night, even if the bandwidth was down. A little ritual. Some never made it, lost in the ionosphere or corrupted by cosmic rays. Still, she wrote.
Today’s message was simple.
“I saw clouds over the volcano today. They looked like Earth clouds. Isn’t that funny? I remembered when we laid on the hill by the lake and watched the sky turn orange. Ivy said the clouds looked like dinosaurs. You said they looked like tacos. I miss tacos. I miss you more.
Love always,
Mom.”
She uploaded the message, knowing it might never leave the base. But sending it made her feel closer.
Then, from the corner of the room, her console blinked. A green light.
Incoming Transmission.
It crackled alive with static, then a young voice, uncertain and sweet:
“Hi Mom. It’s Ivy. Dad says the tomatoes finally turned red. He says it’s your favorite color, and I said no, Mars is her favorite. But he says Earth is still in her heart. I think that’s true. Are you watching the clouds up there? I saw one shaped like a spaceship. I said it was you coming home.”
Eliza closed her eyes and let the words wash over her like warmth in the cold. Her heartbeat echoed louder than the storm.
She wasn’t really alone. Not entirely.
Not while love could still reach across the stars.