A Crash (Flash Fiction)

(Inspired by the song Entendre, by Eluvium)

Bob walked, pausing occasionally to look back at the thin tendril of smoke fingering its way from his crashed life-pod into the alien sky.

He walked through rolling hills of dirt desolation. He weaved along the ridges of copper sand dunes. He cinched and squeezed his way between rocks so grand and black that the gloves of his white space suit looked like the paw prints of a snowy kitten against the surface of infinite time. He descended through the cracks of a forgotten and empty world and into geode caves of purple and gold and fiery red.

He emerged into a vast white flat. Salts crunched under the weight of his boots. Onyx crags of endless mountain ranges laid their bodies before him. The sky ripped by in layers of purple and blue. A vibrant pink moon gave the surface a flowery hue.

The oxygen in his suit depleted slowly, slowly, and Bob’s mind began to play fantastic tricks. He held his hands out and his children grabbed them with smiles. They ran and laughed across the endless flat, playing and jumping and falling to the ground to make snow angels. They sprinted ahead of him into golden fields of wheat dotted with familiar oaks. They rounded the tree again and again. He pushed them both on the rope swings that hung from the limbs. He clicked off the audio warnings of his suit without realizing. Their faces filled the clear glass of his view. He chased them and laughed his way across that salt flat until the horizon curved away to an aqua ocean. His smile grew broader as he saw his wife was there, too.

He took his children by the hands, all smiles and tears of joy, so happy to have not found an end that was alone, and traveled down to the water to join his wife’s side.