Excerpted from Every Other Universe, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
This planet is mine and I belong to this planet. I know because when the dirt hits my tongue I feel almost joy. The earth here tastes like blood, which I haven’t tasted in many years, but I remember it, I remember being a child and cutting myself on an open can my mother had left in the kitchen, so long ago the memory comes to me as if from underwater. I slid my thumb against the silver crease, and my skin forked and made a dripping. It was my first encounter with sincere pain, but I didn’t mind. I still don’t. It feels like stray teeth in my stomach, a hard, misplaced bite.
The medical team here, of which I am a part, is overstaffed. If there’s a hurt on you, we’ll find it, we’ll lay you horizontal on a clean white sheet and watch the monitors spasm green and black, we’ll dizzy you with painkillers. There’s nothing else for us to do. Pain has become almost absent from our planet. I miss it. I miss stomachaches and headaches, the way my mind would curve toward the small agonies, how the basket of my body carried my hurt everywhere I went. Now, people are dying without any hurt at all, vanishing in clean rooms that smell like lemons.
“The last thing we need is more pain,” says the head doctor, R, who is sixty and sick and will die on Mars.
Lately I’ve been craving ice. Not the dry ice we use that billows with gas, but ice the way it appeared on Earth, long icicles clinging to roofs, the skin of lakes, cubes dropped into drinks, over and over, as if it was such a simple thing—to leave water at the bottom of the glass.
This year marks my tenth on this planet. I came after medical school, so arduous it felt like a long birth of the mind, and that’s what I found myself craving afterwards—rebirth. This was when the colony initially exploded over Mars, and you could see those first buildings through a strong telescope—a zit of zinc and fiber. There was space fever in every country. It was easy to go, then, you only needed twenty-twenty vision and a belief in life. Earth was succumbing to waves and storms, and everything explorable had been explored. Mars was the answer, Mars was the hope.
Of course, this was before things got too bad. This was before Earth’s infrastructure crumbled and it became harder and harder for our countries to cobble together funding and jet fuel and proper training. Before the streets of our childhood grew grassless and brown, parking lots puckering like loose flaps of skin. Before I stopped hearing from my mother. Before we all stopped hearing from our mothers. Before we were left on our own, before the screens went black, before we started dying, back when we thought we’d see our families again. It’s been two hundred days since our last contact with Earth.
*
I’ve been dreaming of my mother. In my dreams, she isn’t happy. How could I be happy without you? she asked me once, when we learned that I was going to leave.
I ask F, the psychiatrist assigned to the medical team, why I’ve been having these dreams. He has a long mustache and a dead, rich father. He says that my mother is dead, and that her ghost is trying to tell me that she died in pain. At least that’s my translation of the phrase, “supernatural occurrence.” He’s not a great psychiatrist. His own father died only three years into our Mars Time, natural causes, and they told him in hard sentences full of facts. He spreads the grief they gave him, but for now he’s all we have.
*
Fifty days after we lost contact with Earth, astronauts began dying. First a few, then many. Their deaths were quiet, only a sudden limpness entering the body. Many of my friends are now gone. At first, we were afraid, but now we are just waiting to see: who will die next? Who will live? I didn’t know that dying could be so easy, as simple as giving up.
*
Yesterday, the annual shipment of maintenance supplies failed to arrive. This means that there’s no chance of fixing the glitching gravity, and that other systems will soon be at risk: oxygen, water purification, lighting. When we’re inside, we don’t have to wear the bulky gear required on the surface of Mars. We wear cotton shirts, loose pants, and translator devices hooked around our ears. We are from many lands, we speak many languages. This way, we can connect over something other than English. This way, we can hear each other the way we intended. C does not speak English at all, and I do not speak Brazilian Portuguese.
Together, C and I debate what will go first, the nature of our apocalypse. Without oxygen, we could survive three months, sucking air out of the emergency tanks we keep in the storage pod. If the lights fail, then we’d last longer, but despair is not to be scoffed at. Like heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms, despair, too, can turn off the switch to the body. For so many, it already has.
I worry more about the mental than the physical. I worry about what will happen when our translators turn off, and we’re cut off from the friends we’ve made over the years, each of us trapped in the cone of our sound. I wonder if I should start learning Portuguese, but we have so much time on our hands that it feels silly to even try and fill it up.
C says it doesn’t matter where we’re from. She says that our countries and childhoods are irrelevant now. She says it matters even less now that the ambassadors no longer visit us, in their white suits and military pins, to tell us that our nations are proud, or that we should smuggle information, or that we are insufficient, and are being recalled. We’re first generation Martians—that’s all.
I tell C I think that we can’t be first-generation Martians without the possibility of second-generation Martians. She asks me why I don’t think there will ever be second-generation Martians. I laughed at her, though she is serious.
As long as C doesn’t die, I think I’ll be okay. But she’ll be fine when I’m gone—she’s always been stronger.
*
The compound is an unimaginative shape, domes connected by small corridors into a large square. Each dome has a separate function. Many are dorms, beds bunked high, each with a small cavity for personal objects; toothbrushes, photographs, locks of hair from loved ones not touched in years. Others are cold, cooling electronics so that they hum smoothly, or preserving the few foods we have that aren’t powdered or goop. In other domes, the Botany department tills the iron-red soil and plants small seeds in the furrows, and on the eastern side we have a string of pods for the dead and dying. We put the bodies in the corner pod—eventually we’ll have to bury them outside. The first to die was an Outdoor Explorer. Generally considered the most glamorous astronauts, they’re the only ones who are able to really be on Mars, to feel the give and take of the red sands against their boots. But after that, the rest refused to leave the compound. Some of them even destroyed their suits, clawing at the delicate mechanisms until their hands were stained silver and blue.
I feel bad about the bodies. Even with the industrial cold, they’re beginning to stink of death, the same stench that flooded the house when our childhood dog died, and my mom was too sad to bury her for almost a week. In my childhood, I wanted to become a coroner, attracted to the beautiful women in lab coats in my mom’s crime dramas, women in smart ponytails who weren’t afraid of death or hurt or ghosts. Later, after a high school dissection, when I realized that there was nothing I hated more than the smell of death, I gave up that dream.
But I’m still not brave enough to put on those suits, step out on Mars. I haven’t yet been trained.
*
C thinks what’s happening to us is a unique scientific phenomenon, but I disagree. It’s ordinary to die from a broken heart. How many stories have we heard of old couples dying in the same week, untethered from their lives by the loss of the person who made it worth living? How many animals live fewer years in captivity, the cages choking them far more effectively than any wildlife predator? And haven’t we all felt that pang, that deep sharp ache of heartbreak, how it feels like someone has reached inside the chest cavity and twisted, turned something off? I can feel my own heart all the time now, the size and shape of a fist, punching my sternum with each rough beat. It throbs and gurgles, cloaked in blood and viscera, a constant threat inside my body: ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
*
We grew onions today for the first time. C plants seeds in wide swathes of Martian soil, deep in the greenhouse that hums like a large engine. She puts different chemicals and substances in the little divot where the roots meet the soil, fertilizers brought to her by the biomedical department. Most of the seedlings lie dead, their little bodies rotting where none of us can see. Some of them grow, but shrivel when they reach the air, as if growing at all was enough of a life for them. Some of them burst out of their confines, make heady spirals, plaster their leaves against the greenhouse like children’s faces at a storefront window.
Now that people are dying and cannot be saved, I have time on my hands. I spend long hours in the greenhouse with C, watching her prune and fuss. She let me cut an onion in half, one that was puckered and gray. I ran my hand down the cross-sectioned film. It’s been a long time since I touched something living that wasn’t C. Something that smells of must and mulch, something that will rot in the way that it was meant to.
Since Earth stopped speaking to us, we’ve been having meeting after meeting. Communicative Technology promising that they’ll work out the kinks. Intergalactic Relations pondering the Earth conflicts that could have led to our sudden onslaught of black screens. Medical promising longevity, Botany promising farming on Martian soil, Psychology promising everyone that everything will be okay.
All those people together. They remind me of trees. Their legs are carpeted with the slick polyester uniforms we all wear, but I know underneath is the gentle bark of skin and hair. Together, they stand as forests do, and their nervous swaying—it’s almost the wind. I wonder what the wind of Mars would feel like, if I stepped into the corridor and unhinged the airlock. Would it be sweet, like a blush, would it be worth death?
C doesn’t think that these malignant onions are fit for consumption. Under the microscope, their cells warp and darken. They have an evil look to them. Even if we could eat them, how long could a few grassy calories sustain us?
I steal dirt from the farm when C isn’t looking. It grits between my teeth and swells the pink of my tongue. It isn’t good for me. Sometimes, when I eat the dirt, I can’t speak for hours, because I’m afraid of unhinging my jaw so that others can see how it hurts me, how it brings the blood of my mouth to the tip of my tongue.
*
C asks me if I’m afraid of dying, and I say no, I’m afraid of ending. We’ve been in love for a very long time.
*
On my seventh birthday my mother bought me a telescope, and the two of us, without my father, drove an hour to where the city’s light hazed out, and a few strong stars peeked over the horizon. She showed me Orion, Cassandra, though she made up different names for them, Bangla names with funny stories. And then I looked through the telescope and found Mars.
That brilliant red glow. I had no idea of how textured the planet would be, full of toxic dirt and frozen ice capes. I only saw the glint of red in a telescope my mother had given me out of love. Me, also, I thought. I want to be red in the sky.
*
In the middle of the night, I walk down the corridor to the bathroom, where we shit into a shelf that dries our excrement. We take turns each morning emptying the drawers and delivering what’s shriveled inside to Botany, where it’s used as fertilizer.
In the corridor I see R, who should not be awake, and who is usually so scrupulous about his hours spent in the dark, as he states that disrupted circadian rhythms can increase risk of breast cancer—even in men. R always used to say that we have to be careful, because we are not where we are meant to be, which means that one day our bodies could revolt without warning.
R tells me in the dark that his sister has died. He’s limping and I’m excited, despite myself—I think this means that the Earth screens have come back. But R shakes his head.
He describes it like this: that in the middle of the night his femur snapped, not terribly loudly, and with no blood blooming under the skin. The break felt natural, but abrupt, like a word said in a quiet room. He looked at its rotten angle, felt the pain circumnavigating the rift of bone, and he knew that his sister was dead—he knew it, he knew it, he knew it. He says that it is possible to love someone so deeply that when they die, you have to die, too. I think to myself that I may have to assume head doctor responsibilities.
I take him to the infirmary. There’s no snapped femur, barely even a sprain. Still, I wrap bandages around his swollen skin, I tell him that everything will be okay, I let the skin on my hand graze the skin on his legs, like we are siblings or lovers.
“Is it broken?” he asks, and he has a strange sense of hope in his voice. I understand. The idea that our bodies are strong enough to tell us something. That no large thing could happen on Earth without our skin and bones knowing of it.
“It was,” I say carefully, “I fixed it.” And for the moment, he seems satisfied with this.
If my mother is dead, I haven’t yet felt it. I check all my bones to be sure.
*
From what is Earth’s November to what is Earth’s January, the winds come. We have few windows—a large one, globular, in the observatory, and several smaller portholes throughout, all reinforced, all terribly strong. Most of the year, though, we can’t see our planet. The red dirt masks each small window, and though the Explorers take the time to clean the eye of the observatory, the portholes are clumped with sediment.
I usually convince myself that I don’t mind this, that I like pretending that we are deep underground, with rock above our heads and no sky. But there’s a thrill when the winds come and scrape the compound clean, where in between the lashing red currents, I can see the blackness of the sky, as it looked on earth, and the foreverness of this reddish planet I have lived in for so many years. For four months, everything that settles on our windows is whipped off by the long arms of wind. Before the Outdoor Explorers refused to go outside, we could see them, too, tethered delicately to the outside frame.
*
Dinner comes in small foil packets, ashes that vaguely evoke a meal. We used to eat together, in the conference room, astronauts on every chair and table, some of us on the floor with our legs splayed out in comfortable V’s. We used to have rations, and a person who rationed, we used to eat everything even when we weren’t hungry, and grumble when we were.
We will run out of food at some point. We knew how much food we’d need to stay alive back when everyone was alive, but now that some of us are non-alive, no one can bear to do that grim math. It doesn’t matter, in any case. We’re going in one direction, to rescue or certain death. I’m not sure we will have the energy to survive long enough to die of starvation. I walk past the conference room, where people are playing cards as if nothing has happened, cramming lasagna dust and dumpling crumbles into their mouths. They invite me to join them, but I leave. I can’t remember their names. The longer I’m here, the longer I go without Earth, the more I seem to forget about Mars, the more I seem to remember about Earth. Who are these people who I know so well, whom I once walked with, laughed with, whom I still sleep in the same room with, our lungs the same canned air? I eat alone until I am almost split, empty cartons littered around me. Hours later, C will ask me how I could be so slobbish, so like everyone else—don’t I respect the mission? What mission, I’ll answer. And we’ll fight until dawn, but there is no dawn, just the inhale and exhale of these mechanical lights.
*
Even if we could breathe the Mars sky, it would kill us. Quickly first, then slowly. Olivine, pyroxene, feldspar. The shimmering dust in our lungs, squeezing into our capillaries, bursting them bright. And if we survived that, the mutations, the cancers, the cells switched on to multiply. When I look at the map of our solar system, which we have pinned on a wall in every room, the distance between Earth and Mars feels so small, as if I could step from one planet to another in my heavy, steel-toed boots. How did I get so far away? I trace the other planets with my fingers. Saturn. Jupiter. I could have gone farther, if I was born at a different time.
*
I step inside the airlock. I step out again. In the vacuum-sealed room, there is a door that requires two hands to open. There’s a small porthole, reinforced, through which—on clear days—a shred of the outside world is visible.
Protocol says you must be in a fully pressurized suit to even enter the airlock. Sometimes, when everyone else is asleep, I walk inside naked. The air in the chamber is designed to keep outside and inside separate. Within minutes it dries out my skin, so that when I run a finger down my leg I can feel [bits of?] my knees flake into my hands. It would not be difficult to open the airlock door.
And even though it isn’t logical, I think I feel the planet behind the door like a body breathing. I press myself against the locked wheel and feel the lungs of Mars against my exposed skin, I stuff my fingers into the vacuum-sealed cracks of the door, hoping for one long lick. If I opened, turned, twisted, then I would get what I wanted.
Would Mars really hurt me? This planet I have watched over since I was a child, whom I have chased, whom I have always wanted to be with, who speaks to me in its blood-laced silence, as if I were an old friend?
*
No one smells like a human on Mars. After sex I push my nose and mouth into C’s armpits, the crook of her thighs, I try to catch her breath as it leaves in a gasp. I miss the smell of people. But C, like all of us, follows regulation. When she exercises, she immediately wipes herself down with handkerchief-sized pads that lather slightly with soap. She brushes her teeth two times a day, flosses, swills her gums with mouthwash.
After she leaves the greenhouse, she cleans her nails out with a toothpick, so that when I put her fingers in my mouth I taste none of the dirt that tastes like blood. Since the screens went dark I’ve been washing myself less, which C does not approve of. I miss what people smell like.
*
Of course, C and I weren’t supposed to date, not really. It would distract from the mission. C and I were an open secret, now we are not a secret at all. Others hold hands, too. I caught two engineers fucking in the greenhouse, once, the red dirt sullying their clothes. Without Earth, there are no reasons to follow the rules. People who have wanted each other for years now have each other. There are no pregnancy tests on Mars. We’re all secretly wishing for a swelling to appear—some sign that we are still alive, something more than a dream abandoned.
I think of viruses once they leave the host, how they fade on a surface, still so full of angry life. I think of the microbes on my face and my stomach, which I feel responsible for carrying into the new day.
I love Mars, but I love no one on it but C. I didn’t come here with a head full of love. I came here because it was as away a place as I could imagine, and I came here to work. Now work is over, and I’ve been here too long for it to be an away.
If someone were to become pregnant, I wonder how we would raise the child. I wonder if we would let it die with us, or let it be the last. Mars has its own gravity, so even after the artificial gravity fails we don’t float. Instead, our steps become sweet and springy. At first, it was a great joy, and we hurtled through the hallways, each tiny flick of the ankle propelling us into the air. But as the fields failed more often, we became afraid of the lightness in our bodies, the strange sensation of being tugged upwards, of having a great gasp of air trapped in our skulls. It gave me headaches to feel so light, and often for hours I would puddle on the floor, waiting for the artificial lights, which were programmed to mimic the Earth’s days and nights, to dim and then flicker off.
Human bones are made for gravity. A child raised without a gravity field would become porous, her bones would hardly need to work. Then, if she ever returned to Earth, she’d become afraid of any sudden snap in her skeleton, which would have formed against the very idea of Earth.
*
The memories that come to me on Mars are always so strange, as if selected by a stranger. I keep thinking about how when I was a kid on Earth, my mother and I would go to the grocery store together and have contests to see who could find the most ridiculous object. Food was so much more sanitized and uniform than in the markets of Kolkata, where my mother grew up, but sometimes there’d be fruit shaped like stars, or chips flavored like pizza, or pizza layered with sardines that grew soggy in the microwave oven. We’d cook and eat these things with relish, as if we had hunted them ourselves.
*
I miss oranges. How they used to spray apart between my nails, coating my fingerprints with a sheen of oil that smelled good, then bad, then good again. I miss prying a tenderness out of the shell, de-wedging, pulling on the cartilaginous seam so that the husk fell away. I liked chewing on the bitter peel for hours, feeling my stomach wince when I swallowed. I liked when my mother apologized by bringing a plate of oranges to bed, how years later, when I had finished school, I would pick them up in the supermarket and think about her. That’s one thing there’s none of in Mars—things that remind you of other things, especially long-ago things that you haven’t thought of in years.
Once I asked C how she ate oranges, and she said she didn’t, but if she had to, she would cut the sphere into fourths, then eighths, and suck out the juice with her lips and tongue. We’re very different, C and I. We have no one else around love and not I chose you and you chose me love. But it’s love.
*
My mother left her mother. My grandmother left her mother. Each of them vanishing from the view of the other. Each of them saying goodbye. My mother crossing the wounded ocean, my grandmother, the city, to ensconce themselves in a husband’s strange home. My family is cursed with only daughters, which means that my family is cursed with leaving. I am the first not to be husbanded, and yet I cannot let go of leaving.
If I had a daughter, even here on Mars, I know she would find a way to leave me, too.
*
We, the astronauts, used to have our dramas, our arguments, our boardroom tensions. No longer. We became less We, until we were no one at all, until we were refracted humans, animals, organisms of Mars, no different from the tiny, squiggling bacteria the Mars rover brought back to Earth just a few years after the first Martian colony. Dying is a curious process. It means knowing the body so intimately that there’s no more room for the mind. It means shards of self are worn thin, then broken down, then discarded, until things like, “I’m an early riser,” and “I’m not a fan of loud talkers,” are known only as facts from a former life. I wish we could ask the dead what death is like, but their glass eyes, cloudy and still, speak no language of mine.
*
The last time I saw my mother, I couldn’t feel her arms around me. The day before, we had done all the Earth things we could. We’d gone to a roller coaster to feel wind in our hair. All I could hear when our cart hurtled over the steep incline was her scream in my ears. She held my hand in hers, and I could feel the indent of the rings she wore on every finger but the one for marriage. After the roller coaster, I watched her eat a hot dog and cotton candy—I was meant to keep my stomach empty before the launch. She had an ugly chew, wet and pulpy, like the sound of meat in a blender. It struck me that I had never seen her eat anything alone, though after school she would always make me spaghetti or fried fish and watch my expressions so closely it was like she was trying to read the writing in my eyes.
“What’re you doing?” I’d asked, unnerved.
“I’m making sure you like it.”
That last night I slept on the couch in her bedroom, so that we could hear each other breathing. She told me, come back. Come back, please. Of course, I’ll come back, I said over and over again, of course, of course. And each time I said it, the steely bridge separating us grew longer, because, in our family, every large promise comes with a small curse.
*
If it gets too bad, I think we should die outside. I think we should open the airlock and let the air sweep out of our lungs, feel the dirt between our toes as the heat rises from our bodies and vanishes. The last sound we hear will be the burst of our eardrums, and the last thing we feel will be the blood down our shoulders, but at least we’ll die on this planet we love, that we love but that we’ve never touched with the soft soles of our feet.
I’ve given my blood to R, but I didn’t tell C. He says that before the Earth went dark, he had secured confidential funding for human cloning. He says he can make another of me. The red liquid spiraled into the beak of the syringe, coming to rest in a long, U-shaped vial. Soon, he promises, soon, and though he has no lab, a sprained leg, and tendency to lie, and even though science on Earth has not gone so far, I look into his blown-out eyes and trust him. I give my blood to a man who says he can give me back to myself. Maybe this is what it takes to keep a daughter.
*
I miss trash piling, the smell of loss and decay and unwanting, the stink of walking through a sidewalk full of staccato black gum, feeling the stench in your hair for hours after. I have hair that can capture smell, even the smell of death, even the smell of night cold. I miss stepping on dog poop—fuck—and then having to scrape it out with a stick or a quarter or a straw. I miss the look of those mysterious black trash bags, how they could contain anything, how in the middle of the night sometimes they looked like people waiting in the dark for you, people who had thought about you all day long, and now in the night, waited.
I miss the rats that flashed fur through the piles, how when they scurried over feet it was a disaster for the feet but a regular day for the rat. Twitching noses. Whiskers that could see in the dark.
I miss cities. I miss noise.
*
In our free time, we come up with reasons.
Theory: Earth is in an unredeemable war, one with nukes, and almost everyone is dead. The signs were there for ages.
Theory: Political machinations and the decision to divest funds from Mars and related space projects. Too high of a cost to bring us all back.
Theory: Earth hates us.
Theory: Earth is afraid of us.
Theory: Supervolcano.
Theory: Earth is neither fearful or hateful, but it has begun to realize that we are something else, separate too long from the gravity we were born in, our bodies kept decades without sky or sea, that we are no longer of but from, and worse than from, we are, and it doesn’t make sense to protect anyone who is not of Earth—it’s hard enough to protect those who are.
*
We’re awoken one night to sirens, blues and reds that flash through the intestines of the space stations. There are only a few members of the security team left, but they usher us into one of the conference rooms, where we yawn sleepily and wait. We’ve lost our fear of death. We just want to go back to sleep. Hours pass, and we scoop spam out of jars and lick the fat off our fingers. A few people play cards. C and I sit side by side, not touching, united only in the fact that we aren’t everyone else.
Eventually, the security officer bursts through the door, lungs full of a secret. But she looks at all of our drowsy, our hopeless faces, and thinks better of whatever she’s about to say. She tells us we can go back to our cabins.
Later the rumors trickle. That someone, someone whom none of us quite knew, though we had memorized each other’s faces over time, had left through the airlock, had let Mars lick him to the bone, had died with a face full of red dirt, had died far uglier than I think he had meant to. My planet: how cruel she can be.
“Do you think it was on purpose?” I ask C.
“What else could it have been?” C asks back, tossing a bouncy ball that she had stolen from one of the maintenance engineers against the slanted walls of the green house.
“It could have been an accident,” I say, to which C smiles gently.
“We’re scientists,” she says, “we don’t make accidents.”
*
What a cruel thing it is to leave a mother who has already had so much leaving in her life, who has left her own mother, her brothers, her father, the smell of the place in which she grew up, who has come to a country with new, stranger smells, who has had her soul torn in two over the course of a plane ride that could not be reversed. Hasn’t she left enough?
*
Theory: God.
*
There is a part of me that thinks that those of us who will live, will live forever. That living, not dying, will be our punishment for failing to despair, despite the promises we’ve broken to those on Earth. This is cruelty: to live and to walk when you may never see your mother’s face again.
We had to be cruel to come so far.
Love doesn’t crumble or break. It erodes.
C says, “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”
C says, “I love you.”
C says, “Things will be better when we’re back on Earth.”
All of this is unlike her. I wonder if the translation devices are faltering already, and it’s true that her mouth seems to be moving more than the words that spit out at me. I wonder what is missed, what is lost in the air that circles between us, clean canned air that tastes of toothpaste and bitter glass.
“We’re going to be okay,” I say back to her, and the Portuguese from my translator sounds hopelessly short. She looks at me. She doesn’t believe.
*
It’s been so long, and I am still alive. I don’t live this life in a line anymore. I can’t tell the days from the days, the weeks from the weeks. I don’t do one thing, then another. I do everything at once. I don’t do anything at all. And though I miss my mother, I feel like I am already with her. People come to me in pieces. A face, an arm, a smile. Mars comes to me in pieces, too. I am in pieces, which does not mean that I am broken. It only means that I have lost track of time.
In another life, I can breathe space, and so can C, and so can my mother. We hold hands and weave between the asteroids. We swing by Mars, where the faces are starstruck and the buildings billow among beds of iron. Poor astronauts, we think, and smile soft. They must need all the love they can get.
Annesha Mitha is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. She’s a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her fiction, essays, and poetry can be found in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Northwest Review, Catapult, The Offing, and more. She is currently at work on a novel.
Read more from the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024 Finalists.
