The raging desert current blew through the Colliers’ geodesic tent’s fragile silicon film layer, ripping a gash of light into its dusky interiors. Sand and ash blasted through the hole in the tent panel and fell, soundless, like catkins, onto Lichong’s blanket. He sighed. It was no use pretending to be drowsy. He pulled himself out of the tattered cot and peered down at the light beside his feet, listening to the wind’s bellowing outside and the myriads of snores and mumbles of his workgroup beside him, deep in their slumbers.
Why can’t he sleep? It was the fourth time of the week that he’d woken up, tussling and turning from a dream he never seemed to recall. He stood, briskly wrapped himself in his old cherry-red puffer, fitted his head into a filter, and left the warm confines of his shelter.
The bone-chilling desert air found his exposed neck first, and for a second, he couldn’t tell if it was freezing cold or searing hot, but common sense told him it was the prior, and experience made him pull the rubber flap of the filter down his nape. He inspected the gash in the tent, at the broken threads around it from the two times where he had tried to sew it back together. If only his needlework was as proficient as mother’s, he would’ve made a strong enough stitch. But then again, his family practiced embroidery, not patchwork. He trotted out into the open bled, halfheartedly rubbing the rigid letters on his puffer’s left pocket. It spelled his name, “立春,” the first day of spring, a gift from mother on the parting day.
The twin moons of Hermes II were especially bright that night, and as Lichong strode to the top of the great dune overlooking their mining colony, he couldn’t help but wonder what his family was doing. His baby sister Guanxi would be…two, no, three by now. Soon, she’ll be old enough to swing on the tire swing father had fashioned for him when he was her age. His nephew, barely seven, would be wading through the shallow waters of the lotus pond by the county magistrate’s Siheyuan, catching tadpoles to feed the hens. Mother would be by the loom, and father would be…well, he’d be where he always was: atop the outcrop overlooking the entire village, peacefully watching over all of them. Lichong smiled, wondering if he still watched over him even now, twenty-five trillion miles away in the Alpha Centauri star system. That smile vanished as fast as the sand blowing across the dunes when the beeping of the activity monitor on his wrist pulled him back into reality. He switched it off, sighed, and craned his head to the sky again. The two moons had conjoined, the one closer to Hermes II blocking the second behind it. Yet the night remained just as bright, the sands bathed in the thin, silvery veil that seemed to have crept silently atop it.
“Ma, can you hear me?” he whispered despite the rising feeling of foolishness in his chest. Of course, she couldn’t hear him. Hell, with a single message from Earth requiring six whole months to reach Hermes II, he didn’t even know if she was still alive. If any of his family was, in fact, still alive. That was one of those thoughts he kept at the very back of his mind, always trying to forget but to no avail, like the nail poking out of the floorboards of the gymnasium where the lion dancers practiced. Unlike the dancers, he’d never managed to make peace with it.
“Oh, ma. Can you hear me?” he repeated, mouthing a silent prayer. He was an atheist, and he still is, but some time after his arrival on Hermes II, he realized that the only way to remain sane on this isolated piece of rock is to indulge in faith—blind faith. There was nothing much else he could do, anyway.
He sat down atop the dune and ran a hand through the fine sand. He scooped up a palmful and watched as the wind slowly blew more sand into the hole he made until it was filled. Then he opened his fingers and observed the same winds that had filled the hole carry the sand away—to fill other holes. He reached down, scooped up another fistful, and, nearly instinctively, threw it to his right. The gesture felt familiar. Ah, of course. A flash of pain coursed through his chest. He used to pull this prank all the time on mother. She hated it, getting the grit on her clothes, but allowed him to indulge in the stupid fun anyway. Then his nephew started doing it to him, and he had finally gotten a taste of his own medicine one day when he stormed home, a bucketful of grainy sand in his trousers with the little guy howling with laughter behind him. He had no doubt that if that little beach by the pond still existed, his baby sister would come to throw sand, too. It was almost like a ritualistic tradition in that sense. But now, sitting below the frigid moon with all the sand in the world under him, he had no one to throw it towards.
And even if he had someone—a friend he made in the colony, for instance—it wouldn’t be the same. He’s here, and they’re there. Trillions of miles away, on a planet in a solar system whose star he couldn’t even spot out of the thousands in this night sky.
He shivered, his open palm clenching into a fist, then into his puffer’s pocket, where his needle and thread resided. Lichong knew that sometime in the future, this moment would replay itself. And he would allow it to continue.
Zanchao Hao is an aspiring writer and high school student at United World College, Maastricht, He is the editor of the PVLSE teen magazine under Inkswell.