FALL 2025, SHORT STORY, 1000 WORDS
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I. Ruined
The dome’s interior is an endless summer sky. The eye is lured downward from the bright, cloudless horizon to the swaying bustle of wheat. The interminable fields themselves are intersected with soft, grassy paths, just wide enough for two to walk hand in hand. Merely by looking at the natural splendor rendered in vibrant blue, gold, and green, one could almost feel the welcome radiance of warm sunlight upon their skin.
The panorama’s seemingly boundless dimensions—its joyful openness—collapses only when the hole intrudes upon one’s vision. It appears like a circular splotch of black paint just above the miniscule, trembling heads of the lifelike wheat at the horizon. Dark, irregular cracks spread outward from the hole like seeking roots, penetrating the otherwise perfectly azure sky.
The hole belies the artificially eternal proportions of the sky and fields, cruelly collapsing the illusion that one is outside and free. If one turns their back on it, they are immersed in a ceaseless horizon stretching out before them, awash in bright, terrestrial grandeur. But facing the hole, the beholder is forced to register the cramped dimensions of the dome, the smallness and utter falseness of the scene, no matter how picturesque it may be. An open world becomes a broken screen.
Anybody gazing into the hole would soon discern that it is not perfectly black, as it may first appear. From time to time the soft gleam of a distant star revolves slowly through this unwelcome portal to the outer dark. The tips of wheat, though still made to sway and whisper pleasantly with a nonexistent breeze, are covered with barely perceptible frost. The summer’s warmth that once gently exuded from the inviting, soft soil has long since radiated out through the hole. Now the bright, sunny day is forever grasped by the invisible cold of infinite space.
II. Abandoned
The blue light slowly strobes, forming a small, delicate orb of visibility about the dormant station before gradually relenting to the insistent darkness of the surrounding sea. At the light’s nadir, there is brief moment of utter blackness before the glow returns once more to press futilely against the liquid void.
Endless waters stretch above, below, about the motionless station suspended in the benthic gloom. There is no visible marker to indicate the station’s bearings or even its orientation. It is impossible to tell in which direction sits the icebound surface or the barren seafloor, each unseen boundary being so unutterably distant as to be imaginary.
The station is composed of two bulges of thick glass connected by a short, opaque corridor. At the height of the blue light’s strobing, had some swimmer just outside the station been able to withstand the crushing deep, they would be able to peer through the glass and make out the bare traces of long-disused chairs, metallic instrument panels, food trays set in jumbled disorder.
There is no marine snow to flit past the station, no life to be revealed by the blue glow. The light illuminates only invisible waters. There will never be anything here but the slow waxing and waning of this light. For as long as the station retains power, the scene will be unchangeable, a perfectly recreated cycle of the paltry light’s growth and retreat. But when the light finally fails, long centuries from now, there will once more be no sanctuary from the absolute darkness of the currentless sea.
III. Emptied
Floating above the ice, the burgundy spacesuit is like a tiny drop of blood on the immense, broken skin of the moon. Were it not for the suit’s weightlessness, it would be possible to tell whether or not a body, living or dead, lies within it. But the suit has long been bereft of its former inhabitants.
The suit slumps forward in an attitude of resignation, arms raised slightly and preceding the gentle course of the body. Its golden faceplate reflects the slow trawl of blue-tinged chasms and crevasses as it steadily traverses the moon. The suit bears an antique momentum that will never abate, endlessly surveying the depths and rises of the icy expanse beneath it.
The detritus of a frenzied evacuation carried out centuries ago still floats above the suit in invisible stratifications. Blankets, handheld tools, and freeze-dried food packages trace their own sluggish orbits above the ice. Their tiny shadows sail unseen across the moon’s surface, speckling the frozen wasteland.
Solitary witness to the fragmented moon, the spacesuit is variously and irregularly encrusted with the ice-spray of cryo-volcanoes and gently thawed by the feeble rays of the distant sun. Its faceplate will gaze upon every inch of the surface many times over before the kin of its long-absent occupants may return. Meanwhile, it silently haunts this broken, vacant world.
IV. Unfinished
The silvery steps gleam harshly with the reflected light of the sun’s rise, an incongruous glare among the dull, dusty beige. They stand alone atop a plateau of rough-hewn, craggy rock. Each of the twelve steps is slightly narrower than the last, rising grandly upward and cutting into the soft black airlessness above.
As the sun passes in its course, the steps’ shadow expands and twists itself into an immense pyramid before dwindling into a thin, snakelike line. The meandering black inscribes itself into the indifferent dust and rock of the plateau before the light quits the surface. As the sun retires, the stairs are slowly bled of their splendor, blending into the small, leaden mesa about them.
It will never be remembered what absent monument or shrine these steps were meant to convey the moon’s pilgrims to. The stairway itself remains untrodden and forgotten, leading to nothing. And yet every few years, from the perspective of the first broad and shining step, the stairs’ zenith will perfectly frame the tilted visage of Saturn. It is as though, in this brief moment, one could mount these bright steps and effortlessly ascend, godlike, to take their place upon the ringed throne.
Scott Payne (he/him) is a lawyer and history nerd from Vancouver, British Columbia. He has short stories published and forthcoming with The Deadlands, Queen’s Quarterly, and Twenty Two Twenty Eight.