Everything Beautiful is Far Away

The cave lip jutted out into the pale grey landscape. Above it, in the thin air of this distant moon, hung a big gas giant. It was the palest yellow, with furious red spirals occasionally blooming on the surface. From the cave, in the distance, Sarah could see her crashed ship. It had stopped spluttering and smoking a long time ago, and now stood half mast, its nose buried into the ashen surface. Over the years, she had moved all the contents she could from the ship to the cave, be they her biosphere which contained the plants she cared for, her robotic pet, or the cushion she’d brought from Earth.

She had always been a sentimentalist, and along with her electronic picture frame, she had some real photos. The colours used to be thick and oily, as if painted by a child, but they had long faded and she was left with the echoes of her loved ones, straining to be seen from the bleached paper. She sighed, as she tacked it back onto the soft compacted dust that made the cave.

It had been 6 years now. A long time to spend alone, she thought. Her SOS message would have reached earth, and they would be responding soon, and hopefully they’d have sent a rescue party. It took her 3 years to get here with her colleagues, travelling close to the speed of light. This would have all kinds of consequences, with time dilating this way and that, making the likelihood that all those involved in this expedition were old, or maybe dead. The human race could have wiped each other out in a nuclear holocaust or something for all she knew.

Would she rather of died in that manner, or on this god forsaken rock? She had cheery thoughts like this all the time. When she thought of her colleagues, she missed them awfully. She wished they were here with her.

But they all died in the crash, and nothing would bring them back.

Sometimes she would go for long walks, screaming all the air out of her lungs. The atmosphere was weak, and so as hard as she tried, it rarely was a noise above a resigned sigh. Everything sounded deadened, as if muffled by the down of a birds breast. The grey environment she could just about manage, but it was the near silence that hurt the most. When she wound up her music player, it sounded as if the music came from a memory. Reedy, and from years ago. When she would get to the top of a large crater, the atmosphere was thin as a postage stamp, and she’d stick her hand through it, into the void. It was so cold, and one time she lost a finger by leaving it there too long. She had the joy of fashioning a tourniquet from some ripped cloth, and then chopping it off with a shard of metal she had torn from her crashed ship. In the low gravity, her blood spurted out in thick, flabby arcs, splashing on to the dry ground which sucked it up like a sponge, leaving nothing but a dark claret smudge. Her finger, blackened by the cold, lay on the floor, a relic in this tomb.  

She looked over to the Bible she had brought on the trip, it was thin now, as she had ripped the pages, one at a time, to roll cigarettes with.

Exodus 22.18 : Thou shall not let a witch live

She inhaled as that sentiment became nothing more than the grey ash that was trampled under her feet. God wasn’t near this moon, near this planet, near this star, near Sarah. Someone once told her that if you feel like you are losing your soul, at least you still have some soul to lose. She thought impassively on this, every last bit of what could be called humanity had leached itself from her into the grey.

She sat in silence. Then she heard it. As if the voice was coming through the air and talking directly to her heart. The air was still on the moon, and as a result she knew it couldn’t be a trick of the wind.

Sarah

It said.

Sarah, this is earth. Everything has changed whilst you have been away. We can’t come and get you. We are so terribly sorry. In the ship there is a panel which says ‘open in case of emergency’ – you will find everything you need in there. We are so sorry, you are remembered here.

The message seemed to repeat endlessly, each time was like a dagger plunging into her stomach. Septic pain, followed by a draining of bile and low throb of sorrow.

She’d opened that panel the second day on the moon. It had a series of small vials that were to aid suicide in case of crash landings, or all the other things they couldn’t think of. She slumped to the floor, looking across to her radio, she picked it up and threw it from her. A lazy parabola was traced in the slight air as the voice died away into nothing, and she was wrapped in silence once again. Her robot dog, whose batteries were running very low, slowly ambled over to her. Even though it had no heartbeat, or soul, when it looked at her, she felt it needed her, and she collapsed to the floor of the cave, curling up, the dust forming a nest.

She didn’t cry, she had run out of tears a long time ago, she just sat in mute sorrow, staring forward at the crashed ship. She wished she’d never wanted to see the stars so much. The large planet sat bloated across the horizon, when in the distance, she thought, no, it couldn’t be, she thought she saw a lake.

She had seen things, a lot of things, whilst marooned so far from home. But nothing like this. The other hallucinations had been fleeting, as if seen from the corner of her eye, but this time it was solid. There, on the horizon, twixt sky and land, a pale lake of water sat, reflecting the yellow planet, and the darkness of space. She saw movement on the lake, but it was too far away to see what it was. She stood up, and like a cartoon from long ago, rubbed her eyes, and stared. She would have to go to it, so picking up one of the vials from the emergency panel, she left her cave.

The walk was long, but the one little thing she had left was the low gravity, so she jumped and flipped and tumbled to the lake. It grew wider on the horizon until she was at its shore. A mirror like surface, she saw the movement was swans that paddled about on this lake, ambivalent to everything, and not at all surprised or awed by being on a moon, many light years from where they should be.

In her hand she played with the vial, breaking the fragile glass nib at the top.

This had to be a lie, she thought as she looked at the birds who glided over the surface with not a care in the world.

She drank the vial, and a warm feeling filled her chest, followed by a hollow weight that caused her legs to buckle, and she smiled whilst slumping to her knees. It was a long time since her face had smiled, and her eyes prickled.

It had to be a lie, because everything beautiful was far away.

In the cave, a photo slowly peeled away from the wall, and floated like a feather to the floor.

- Anand