Orange dust and crimson sand flew across the open expanse of land, stretching all the way to the horizon in every direction, and the sky directly above, painting a soft and delicate cerulean, gave the scene an atmosphere of peace. The stars had just begun to reveal their beauty as the sun set. The ground had been disturbed in a certain area, which formed a crater, and small pieces of burned and charred white-painted metal scattered the terrain. A small flag of thirteen stripes and fifty stars drooped in the windless environment on the edge of the crater, the pole firmly planted in the ground. Three mounds of stones lay next to each other in a line, and the remains of plaques had been placed in front of them. The man, hunched over with bloodshot eyes, observed and recorded what he saw from the safety of his makeshift command module with a pen and a small notebook in hand, but only one thing was written inside; Why him? His left arm hung limply at his side, swollen and broken beyond repair. His ribcage tore at his chest, begging to be rested. What remained of the command module now served as his home, the holes patched with smaller pieces of metal and duct tape scrounged from the crash, the internal oxygen tanks barely keeping him alive. In the far corner, his space suit sat on the floor, now useless as it had run out of air in its tanks. A sheet of paper had been pinned to the wall, a childish drawing of a nearly bald man with eyes as bright as the stars carefully drawn on it. Around the small space were three more, but each one had a different style of drawing and featured a different person. 

   The man stared into the sunset, unsure if he would wake up the next morning. He turned his head away from the alien beauty of the light and looked back inside the cramped space. The ceiling of the command module was low enough where he had to duck. He’d already removed the useless control panels and gadgets, seeing as he did not plan on going anywhere anytime soon. The floor, littered with debris and broken plexiglass from the windows, had been mostly been swept into a corner. Some shirts and pants, poorly sewn together, formed his bed. The window he had been looking out of was the only one still fully intact, though it had a few cracks on the outer layer. The only other source of light he had, a flashlight that he’d dug up from the crash, had barely any battery power left. The other available space in the command module had been used as a workspace. A laptop, barely functioning, sat in the center, loose papers of garbled words and math equations scribbled on them lying around it.  

   He’d sealed the door to the command module, afraid of any leaks, and had covered the whole thing in duct tape. The sun had finished setting, casting everything left to see outside in total darkness. The man turned on the flashlight and placed it upright in the center of the cramped space. He then looked back out of the window and began to feel panic taking hold. He was the only one left. The mission was a failure. Crazed thoughts spun around in his head, some with more power than others. “What if the door blew off? What if I lost control of my mind and went insane? What if I ran out of food? Out of air?” Images of fire, and faces filled with fear crowded his vision. A voice called out to him, but he could not understand the words. The yellow ejection handles seemed to glow with fury, daring him to pull on them. Screaming. The smell of burning flesh. A whoosh of air. A white blanket of fabric above his head, unfurling and flapping in the wind. He sat down, on the verge of tears. He yelled at the top of his lungs, not caring how loud he screamed. No one was there to hear it. He yelled until his lungs could not get enough air, and he finally stopped. The thought, no, reality, of being totally alone terrified him. The memories flooded through his brain, images of people smiling, laughing. A little girl running around in a yard of vibrant green grass, an even smaller dog running next to her. The honk of a car’s horn. The squeal of tires, the sounds of shoes pounding on the sidewalk, knowing it was too late. A thud and a crack. Red, too much of it. The thoughts swirled around in his head, overwhelming and retreating in perfect harmony, taking and releasing his mind equally. After a few minutes of anguish, he suddenly felt a disturbing wave of calm take hold. The command module had silenced, and the stillness in the air almost equaled that of the outside. With a frenzied glance around the room and a few breaths, he closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, and carefully lay down on his bed. “What calmed you down?”, the man thought aloud in a rough and scratchy voice. “What memory gave you that resolve?” He thought the hardest he had all day to find that memory, searching through every minefield in his brain, diving into every ocean in his consciousness, just so that he could find it. Then it came to him, and although fuzzy, it still brought a bittersweet smile to his face and a tear to his eye. Laughter. Summer air. A hospital bed. The beeping of a heart rate monitor. Peace. A woman next to him crying. A familiar little girl laying on the bed. No, not the right one, where was it? Three people, faces blurred but recognizable at the same time. Water. A pool. One of the people inviting him into the water. Three other spacesuits climbing into their coffin. No, where had it gone? A bridge. The same woman from the hospital, her hair covering her face in the wind. His hand reaching out towards her. A quickly fading scream, lost to the roar of the river below. Ah, there it was. A hospital bed, but this one different from the last. The sounds of cicadas chirping in the night. The woman from the bridge, cradling a red-faced newborn baby in her arms. The child handed over to him, cooing as she slept. A small kiss on her forehead. As he began to drift off to sleep, the man thought he heard noises but dismissed them as tricks of his fatigued mind. But, as he slept, the tape around the hatch slowly began to peel off. The pressure inside the command module had begun to push air out of the damaged pod and into the night, causing stress on the door. A single screw began to strain under the immense forces acting on it. The computer, unable to do anything to alert the life form inside, had a complete system failure; it shut down, and worsened the problem by pumping more oxygen into the cramped space.

   The man awoke in a cold sweat and ice on the window. He groggily got to his feet, his body sore but his broken bones no longer screaming at him. The heat reading inside the command module was only at 10%. His broken arm had frozen to his side. He spun around, trying his best not to fall over. He cleared the ice from the window and looked outside. The sun had just begun to rise in the distance, which was strange. “Shouldn’t it have risen on the other side?”, the man thought to himself. He turned to the door and saw that the tape had vanished. He stumbled over to it and cautiously opened it. He stepped outside, surprised to find that it was the perfect temperature. He looked out into the horizon and saw that the ship waited in silence for him. He started walking towards it, taking slow and deliberate steps. He saw three shadowed figures standing near the ladder of the ship, waiting in perfect stillness. 

   The red sand and dust laid quiet, a delicate breeze in the air. He stopped several meters away from the ship, the shadow shrouding the command module in darkness. He turned back to the ship and then, around him in fast-motion, saw a colony being built. It started off as a small tent, big enough for four people, then transformed into a larger one, eventually becoming a small structure. The ship sank into the ground, and the three figures disappeared. Around the small structure more buildings rose from the ground, their beams and huge windows rising towards the heavens. The original structure slowly started to decay, but it never went away completely. Overhead, the buildings continued to rise, and more of them grew like trees all around him. A huge dome began to cover the city, and the ground underneath his feet turned from a harsh blood red to the gentle green of grass. The man then began to rise with the buildings, eventually rising above them and continuing towards the sky. Across the surface, more domes and cities appeared, and all of the ground covered itself in grassy fields of jade and lakes of turquoise, the domes disappearing and the cities growing larger until they joined together to form one giant metropolis. After some time, he felt small prickles, like the fingers of  children, on his hand, which made him smile. Then, ever so slowly, the ground opened up to complete blackness, and the man slowly fell inside it, but he was not afraid.

   Outside of the man’s head, the command module had gone completely dark and quiet except for his irregular breathing, the flashlight already out of battery. A smile, fevered and hopeful, had spread across his face. He wrapped his arms around an imagination, giggling with the figure. The temperature had dropped below freezing, and the oxygen generator had overloaded. The small screw, connecting one of the hinges of the hatch, broke from the amount of stress. The hatch, now under too much stress and seizing the opportunity left by the screw, blew open, and everything inside the command module was sent out into the once calm night in a sudden burst of air. The man’s smile, still plastered to his face, fought past the cold when his body froze over the next morning.