Then they would strip the jalopy and push it and join it to the others, this spider bite of a city sprawling out of those first crude jalopies to crash-land, and Haziq might sleep, fitfully, in the dormitory with all the others, and then, perhaps, Mei could be buried. Or left to the Martian winds.
She imagines the wind howling through the canyons of the Valles Marineris. Imagines the snow falling, kissing her face. Imagines the howling winds stripping her of skin and polishing her bones, imagines herself scattered at last, every tiny bit of her blown apart and spread across the planet.
And she imagines jalopies like meteorites coming down. Imagines the music the planet makes, if only you could hear it. And she closes her eyes and she smiles.
“I hope it’s you…”
“Sign here, initial here, and here, and here.”
The jalopyman is young and friendly, and she knows his face if not his name. He says, perhaps in surprise or in genuine interest, for they never, usually, ask, “Are you sure you want to do it?”
And Eliza signs, and she nods, quickly, like a bird. And she pushes the pen back at him, as if to stop from changing her mind.
“I hope it’s you…”
“Mei? Is that you? Is that you?”
But there is no one there, nothing but a scratchy echo on the radio; like the sound of desert winds.
About the Author
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), and of The Violent Century (2013) in addition to many other works. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by The Guardian and The Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Lavie Tidhar
Art copyright © 2016 by Richie Pope