She feels lost.

       Outside, she walks on the dusty ground in her bare feet, trying to distance herself from the lights of the city. Nagging worries about her children tug at her mind, but she puts them aside, giving her attention to the duty that is calling her. Up above, there is no moon. No starlight. She carries a Candle, the special device that brightens her way with strange blue light and functions to repel the alien air-predators on this planet. Back home, all we had to worry about was mosquitoes, she thinks, the words feeling sour in her mind.

       She misses the Earth. She misses it terribly. Of course, most people who remember living on Earth feel homesick for it, but she has always had a special connection to the planet. Her religion, after all, had aligned her with the planet’s cycles. Back on the Earth, she’d called herself a Wiccan: A modern-day practitioner of magick and a worshipper of the Lord and Lady, the Goddess and the Great Horned God. Now, lost on this dead planet, she is not sure what she is.

       The dust clings to her toes as she walks. Nature, she thinks. What is Nature to her in this place? She feels abandoned; she feels as if the divine presence she’d taken for granted back on Mother Earth has been left behind, back when she’d flown out of that comforting atmosphere in a starship so many years ago. She’d been excited to go but her soul had wanted to stay. If only she had known what she would be facing. She never would have gone.

       The children, she thinks. If she’d never left, she would not have had her children, Rory and Kyle, her sweet boys, her two pleasures in life. She’s never regretted becoming a mother, but she often wishes she’d never left the Earth, and she knows she never would have started a family if she hadn’t. Was she wishing, in a way, that her sons had never been born? Certainly not. She loves her boys, cherishes them. But sometimes she wonders if they are worth this anguish. She had been able to handle the pain involved in giving birth without drugs; she had been able to survive when both she and her husband had lost their jobs and ended up having to scrape for a living just to get by; she had survived her husband subsequently leaving her. But this isolation . . . she does not know if she can bear this. She doesn’t have a choice, however; she now does not have the resources to return to the Earth. She is marooned. On the holiday of Litha, the Midsummer, she is in a cold, dusty plain with no grass. Back home, the fields must now be lush with grass, the flowers everywhere, the air full of warmth and the Sun God’s joy, and the Mother Earth’s love. Fertility and celebration. Here there is nothing. Nothing.

       She has not been able to raise her boys in the tradition of Wicca like she’d always planned. What sense would it make to celebrate the cycle when this planet’s cycle was similar only in the length of its day and year? How could she have explained to her boys that they were celebrating the cycle of life when the seasons didn’t match, when none of the spices used in her rituals grew on the planet, when there wasn’t even a moon to provide light from the Goddess on the esbats?

       Not having a moon is almost a physical pain for her. And though she loves her sons, she had begun to feel detached from them when she’d realized they had never felt the love of the Goddess through a full moon, never felt the power of the God through an orange sun blazing in the sky, never become acquainted with Earth and Water and Fire and Air. Earth here is a chalky dust, not the rich brown that supports the growth of crops. Water is just a chemical combination, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, put together on the planet only for drinking and other essential purposes; her boys have never bathed in the ocean, never seen their reflections in anything but a mirror, never sucked on an icicle and had it turn into a delightful drink when applied to a warm tongue. The boys have never seen Fire; it is outlawed here. An element, outlawed! It is dangerous, “they” say. She cannot even own candles, except for this ridiculous gadget that doubles as alien bug spray. All heat is electric; her boys have never danced before the majesty of a balefire, or experienced the living flames on a burning piece of parchment paper as the sparks carry magick into the hands of the Lord and Lady. And Air . . . here, the air is dead. The wind spins but it does not howl, sing, or caress. It only moves.

       She still feels the need to honor her traditions. Though she is far from the planet that gave her life, she knows she is still an ember of its existence. She must give thanks for fertility even though she feels barren. She must express her joy at the impregnation of the Mother Goddess on Midsummer, she must greet the faeries, she must work her love magick. And though most of her sacred tools are no longer with her, she will imagine the way it used to be, and honor her tradition in her mind. She visualizes a black-handled knife appearing in her right hand. Without even a wand or a candle, she casts her circle.

       Damn, it’s dark out there, he thinks, deciding maybe he should call it a night. He gets out of his dusty vehicle, wiping sweat from his brow. The wind is cooler outside the cab. He looks at his machine, the Beauty, he calls her. Her tires and windshield are full of white powdery dirt, like she is wearing a veil. He looks up from his cab to the sky.

       Because he is alone and lonely, he can’t help but think of Janice. His eyes scan for their wishing star, but of course he can’t find it. You’re on another planet, asshole, he reminds himself. This world doesn’t even face the right way to see that star, not to mention that the atmosphere is so full of inky dark gases that most light can’t even get through. He closes his eyes and sees their star in his mind, then envisions her. Putting out his arms, he imagines he is holding her, then he puckers his lips to kiss the air. He hears her laugh in his mind, her hand against his cheek, her joking complaint that he needs to shave. He opens his eyes and brushes his own hand over his chin. He needs a shave all right.

       Back on Earth, it would have been dinnertime about now. He remembers his children. Kendra, Delilah, and Jilly: Three girls, all bony little chatterboxes. They used to fight all the time over who got to choose her dinner roll first and then who got to use the special fancy spoon to eat her corn. And he and Janice used to smile and laugh, enjoying the bickering even though it hurt their ears when it got too loud. It was almost as if they had known their time together was limited, as if they’d purposely squeezed every second for its enjoyment because they’d known it would soon end.

       He takes his gray handkerchief out of his pocket and hacks some white-speckled mucous into the rag. This planet’s dust seems to enjoy using his lungs as a motel. He shakes his head and rummages in the cab’s glove compartment for his water bottle. He drinks the sterile liquid, resisting the impulse to dump the whole thing over his head, to feel it soak his hair like rain. It wouldn’t feel like rain, he reminds himself. It has been a long time since he’s felt real rain, but he knows it never felt like this fake water. Still, the dry, white mask of alien dirt makes his pores crave any kind of moisture, even fake water. He knows he probably looks like a clown by now. He pours a small amount of liquid onto his handkerchief and mops his dry face. It is one of the most refreshing experiences he’s had in weeks. It feels like an angel kissing him all over with ice-cold, heavenly lips. He misses his real angel.

       But she is gone, not real anymore. Gone on to heaven, or the spirit world, or wherever good people go when they die. He hopes Janice and the girls are happy in their celestial abode, happier than he is in his. The Earth had swallowed them up in one gulp; an earthquake, one of the worst in decades, they’d said. The bodies of a lot of the victims had never been found; his wife and his three girls were four of the thousands presumed dead in the quake. Sometimes he wishes he could have been there, dying with them, or maybe even somehow saving them from being buried alive. He hopes that they died quickly; he still doesn’t even know how four of the most important people in his world lost their lives. He can’t bear the thought that they might have cried for days and died of hunger or internal injuries in a dark grave of natural disaster. He chooses to put his faith in the idea that they were immediately killed and felt no pain. But still, now he prays.

       He prays his wife can hear him, that his three children can feel how much he misses them. He tells his wife again, out loud, that he loves her, and that not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about her and the girls. He knows he is an incomplete man without them, and he loathes the planet Earth for making a meal of his true love. How dare that hunk of rock take away his reason for living? He’d been unable to stand on its face any longer once he’d found out for certain that it had taken his wife and children. He could not forgive the planet. He had left Earth as soon as he could, to become a miner on one of the outer belt worlds. He had heard this place was a miserable, featureless slab of stone covered in milky flakes; he’d known that this planet’s depression rate was the highest of all the planets civilized by man; he’d known that it was one of the hardest places in the galaxy to be happy. He hadn’t cared; to this day, he still doesn’t. Earth was too beautiful, and it would have reminded him of everything he’d lost. He would rather live someplace untouched by love, so that he didn’t spend every day in pain. He would rather live on a rock as hard as his heart. A soulless man deserves a soulless planet.

       He knows his mother still lives on Earth. It makes him hesitate as he mulls over his hatred and loss. Mother is eighty-six and bedridden but still extremely intelligent and alert. He can’t afford what it costs to keep in touch with her; even a letter costs too much in postage for him to manage on his meager salary, and ’Net access is totally out of the question. Somehow, in a way losing touch with her hurts him more than losing his family does. He thinks he feels this way because she is still alive, and though she is far away he can still reach her . . . yet he doesn’t. He can’t reach his wife except maybe in prayer, but he gets no answer that he can understand. He knows for a fact that his mother exists and thinks of him, and even though he’d like to think the same is true of his wife he cannot be sure, since she has passed on and he doesn’t know what she’s passed on to. He and his mother are alive, living, aging, learning, growing, changing, thinking. Thinking of each other, no doubt, at times. And he wonders suddenly if he will ever see his mother again. He thinks it is possible that the next contact he has with her will be in the form of a death notice sent from Earth. At least the administration still provides that service for free. He hacks up another wad of snow-colored phlegm. At this rate his mother is going to be the one getting the death notice about him.

       He finds his eyes are moist. Real men don’t cry, his mind scolds in a singsong, joking manner. He knows this is a cliché and that there is no reason he can’t cry, but these tears surprise him very much. He hasn’t cried, not once since his family died. It has always been like there is some kind of scar over his soul, preventing emotion from connecting to his tear ducts. But now, thinking about being separated forever from his mother . . . he experiences a rush of emotion.

       She used to pack cookies in his lunchbox, homemade ones. Sometimes, mixed in with a sandwich and the juice box, he would find a note from her: “I love you, just because.” She would swat his bottom when he refused to keep his voice down, then comfort him when he cried, with his feelings hurt much more than his backside. He would watch her do her hair in the mornings before they went to church, wonder about the different creams and colors she applied to her face. He would chuckle, hiding in her closet, when he heard her scream of dismay at stepping on the scale he’d rigged to read twenty pounds over. She had been infinitely critical of every girl he’d dated during high school, claiming none of them was good enough to suit her son. At his wedding, she’d been right there in the front pew, crying off some of the painted mask he’d grown up kissing. When he’d called her on the phone in the middle of the night begging for advice on how to calm a colicky baby, she had soothed him like he was the newborn. She was alive now, probably propped up in a bed reading a book or looking at an old photo album, or writing in her diary about her ungrateful son who’d skipped the planet, leaving his old mother to waste away on Earth.

       Now he wishes there were a way to reach across all distance, to reassure his mother that he thinks about her too, that he isn’t “ungrateful,” that if only he had the money he would rush right back to see her. Maybe he could forgive the Earth; it may have swallowed his family, but right now it preserves his mother. She had given him the life he had been so grateful to share with Janice and the girls. And the Earth, however indirectly, had given his mother life, had given them all life. He realizes for the first time that there had been no malice behind that earthquake; there had been no hungry mouth of dirt waiting to gobble his loved ones, any more than his own body acted out of hate when it destroyed its own cells. Processes, whatever their result, were natural, and as a cell of nature, he had a special function as well as a limited time to participate in the big picture. Here on this dustball planet, he felt he’d been taken out of nature’s plan entirely, and now he wanted back in.

       He misses Earth desperately now, as the tears continue to come. He misses its blue skies, its living wind, its variety of smells and foods and even its filth and overpopulation. He visualizes the Earth in his mind’s eye: First as the blue marble he remembers spying on the computerized window, then closer as the floating, cloud-dappled half-moon planet that is pictured on every space station postcard. He imagines zooming in, watching the world rush up around him, landing with his feet on the ground. Running to the nursing facility and visiting his mother, seeing her fuzzy white hair and soft blue eyes: A wrinkled, wingless angel in a white nightgown. Hugging her small body close to him and replying to the notes in the lunchboxes after all these years: “I love you too, Mom.”

       He lifts his face into the dead wind, letting it make his tears turn cool on his cheeks. He begins to walk out into the endless white plain, into the black, lifeless air. He flicks on his Candle and leaves the Beauty behind him for now, needing to be alone with his thoughts.

       Her magickal ritual finished, the candles in her mind going out, she relaxes and thanks the elements, bidding the Lord and Lady good night. Midsummer, she thinks again. As she pulls back the power of her circle, she thinks about the Earth and sighs.

       He watches the silhouette of the woman as she twirls about in an odd motion and then looks at the sky as if searching for stars. He lets her stand still for a long time before he approaches her. When she catches sight of him, reminding him of a startled deer, he sees the tears on her face. He wonders if she can see the tear-trails on his.

       “What’s wrong?” he asks her.

       She hesitates before replying, “I miss my Mother.”

       “That makes two of us.”

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