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A green star rose in the east. As his eyes gazed upon the sky, a word came to Mr. Bittering’s lips. “Earth… earth.” He repeated it, the word brought him comfort. His home he will never go back to. With the news of the atom bomb hitting New York, he was going take things into his own hands. He started towards the rocket scraps and kicked a scrap piece of metal, pain shooting up his foot like a fork in an outlet.
Mr. Bittering paused after gathering himself, his body bent down to flip over the metal. It was a control panel, still sparking with life.
- - -
“BANG” The hammer coming in contact with the rockets frame rang through the metal shop, a bell in the empty Martian dessert. As the last few humans… If you could call them that anymore, left the man-made town to live in the alien made marble hilltops, Mr. Bittering continued the work on the rocket. Ever since everyone around him started to change, this motivation had died. The only spark still remaining in his is due to the control panel, still intact. It’s wires multicolored arteries keeping him moving.
After Mr. Bittering’s wife and kids up and left him, he was left alone with the rocket and the memories he had of them on earth. “WHAM” He tossed the hammer onto the table and sighed, his feet dragging across the sawdust covered floor. His feet creating a tidal wave of wood scraps as Mr. Bittering made his way to the control panel.
His silver fingers wrapped around the inner wires colored red and blue. His wife, his partner til’ they part. All the memories he had of her and his kids ment nothing to them? They couldn’t just stay? The next thing he knew, he was holding a green wire. Before he could process what he did, blue light filled the workshop.
“What the…”
With the new technology Mr. Bittering happened to come across during his mental tantrum, he was working on the frame all day and night. From when the green star rose to when it set. The Martian city in the hilltops, filled with the people he loved most who had practically betrayed him, kept his frustration fresh and boiling. His hand stained the same silver as the skin of the rocket wrapped around the hammer. The Martian winds howled through the empty desert and made the foundation of the shop shudder. The hammer shook along with his own hand, drowsiness had almost fully engulfed his mind. But he can’t stop working, the Martian chemicals might fully change him over night while he slept. Then he might become an alien like the rest…
As the green alien star reached the middle of the dust covered sky, Mr Bittering decided to head out to the creek to wash himself off. As he dipped his hand into the water, the metallic flakes floated off his hand without needing to scrub. They danced like ballerinas, reflecting the green star’s light overhead. Tiny fragments of a broken reality, washing away in the tide to be forgotten forever. Oh, how he envied those metal flakes. Martian winds picked up, bringing the smell of new beginnings down onto the mainland from the hilltops. What’s the point anymore? He’s the only real human left, no one else will need to get back to earth.
Mr. Bittering drew his hand out of the water, the last metal fragments had sunk to the bottom of the creek. The rockets took years to make with a team, there’s no telling how long it would take for him to make one. Maybe then he’ll be able to join his wife and make new memories. Maybe his own reality may piece back together after he lay himself down into the alien ways. Dust painted his face as if to cover up his uniqueness from the rest of the land. Mr. Bittering pulled his knees up to his face and sighed. Oh how he had missed Cora. A sniffle was audible from the dust covered man as he sat and sat, from green star rise, to green star set.
He hadn’t known how long it had been since he gave up, his perception of time had gone astray. The wind’s howling had run his ears deaf. He had let the martian planet take him in as a fossil, perhaps for future scientists to find. His bones were clay, and the planet was a child. Morphing him into a paleontologist’s relic that will fit best for its landscape. The creek before Mr. Bittering had long since dried out, the metal flakes once from his hands had become tarnished in the time they spent underwater. Almost like him in a way, a human forced on a planet with rough winds that had shaped him into a new entity. Not human, nor martian. And by the creek he stayed, for what felt like a millennium.
- - -
“… Are you listening lieutenant?” The lieutenant snapped his eyes from what looked like a metal shop, the harsh winds weathering the outer shell. “Sir, pardon me. But shouldn’t we do some more exploration before renaming?” He walked toward the map pinned onto the table and continued speaking,
“There’s more on this planet than what I had found. This is a big planet sir, and if we keep searching, we might find traces of some old records.”The man infront of him pondered for a moment, his hands ruffling through this hair.
“We can’t spend too much time on this alien planet, our mission is to-“ The lieutenant cut him off
“Sir, I am aware of what our mission is. It’s just,” His eyes move to the metal shop once more, and then to what once was a creek full of water according to the mars scan ten years ago. “I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something we aren’t getting, something that’s hidden in the dust and mountains…” The man infront of him sighed, backing away from the map. “Fine, once our men come back from the mountains, you may direct them to dig deeper into this planet.”
The once empty desert was swarming with earthmen trying to find something hidden in the rocks. They had already found evidence of an earth man trying to build a rocket with the remaining scraps of an old one. Next to the frame they found a green wire that seemed to have been ripped out of a rocket control panel. The lieutenant was standing in what used to be the creek, the rocks crunched beneath his boots. His eyes wandered to little specks of metal on the ground. Must’ve sank in the creek he thought. But metal scraps don’t just magically appear in water.
His pace quickened, following the trail of where the flakes’ source was. He was met with a pile of dirt he had first mistaken for a hill. His gloved hand raised to the dirt and brushed some off. Under the disguise of a Martian hill, the lieutenant had found a man. A human man, one that had not been taken out by the supposed plague. The fossil was so well preserved, it was almost like the human sat there and weathered on purpose.
Back on earth, the lieutenant was praised for his historical find on mars. The fossil was soon named “mankind’s mars fossil.” The fossil was soon to be identified as Harry Bittering, who was a part of the first group of human life to stay stationary on mars to be protected from the atom war. To this day, his fossil remains in the Space History Museum in New York as an extraordinary discovery. People come from all over the world to see the man who had survived then fossilized on mars.