Free Red Desert - Point of No Return by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli Page A

French.
    I ended the
communication and stood there, staring at the phone, while my heart
broke into a thousand pieces.
     
     
    I don’t know how long
has passed since I fell. I wake abruptly from a dream. The sweet
melody that lulled me has disappeared. As I open my eyes, I’m
disoriented. I see a darkened sky crossed by some disturbance,
while the data displayed by the augmented reality blink so quickly
I can’t focus on them. With a great effort I put my right hand to
my helmet and deactivate it.
    I’m alive, I’m
breathing. My suit must be still intact. I can’t say the same about
my body. I’m full of aches and pains; this is perhaps a good sign.
If I didn’t feel anything, it’d mean I’m paralysed.
    I turn my head to try
and understand where I am. I’m lying on my back, on a horizontal
surface. I’m at the bottom of the steep slope I rolled down. There
are stones all around me.
    Maybe I leaned over
too much and the terrain collapsed. At least this way it became
less steep and slowed me down. I can see the point from which I’ve
fallen. It must be fifty metres. If I had been on Earth, I would
surely have died. The reduced gravity of Mars has saved me.
    Perhaps I can climb
back up. The rock face has plenty of handholds. I can make it.
    I push myself up into
a sitting position. I’m on a small ledge on the cliff. At few
metres away to my left is another precipice. I must move with
caution.
    I bend sideways,
trying to get to my knees so I can stand up, but immediately
realise something is not right. As soon as I try to move my legs, I
feel a stabbing pain in my right ankle. I manage to get up by
putting all my weight onto my left foot. I try to place my right
foot down, but it gives way and I fall to the ground again,
screaming.
    I cannot stand up. I’m
stuck.
    This means I can’t get
back to the rover, so I won’t be able to drive all night trying to
reach Station Alpha. I’ll die here.
    I thought that, when
this moment arrived, I’d be scared, but I was wrong. The awareness
of the absolute certainty of my death somehow calms me down.
There’s no more anxiety, because there’s nothing I can do.
    I’m immersed in a
deafening silence, only broken by the noise of my breath and the
beating of my heart, resounding in my ears. The day is coming to an
end. The sun is approaching the horizon. It will set in a little
while together with its warmth. I might still have four hours of
air, but the night will arrive soon. I won’t die of asphyxiation,
but of hypothermia. It’s in some way even better. It should be a
sweeter death.
    I try to resist the
temptation of letting my regrets defeat me. I might wonder why I’ve
ended up here, but I’m exactly where I desire to be. Honestly there
isn’t another place in the universe where I’d like to spend the
last hours of my life. I haven’t succeeded in getting what I
wanted, but I know I’ve tried until the end, in spite of my
mistakes.
    I linger to admire the
sky that’s turning from salmon to a dirty, pale blue, as the sun
drops into the canyon. Its light has become so feeble that I can
stare at it without being blinded. I begin to distinguish some
stars eastwards. Deimos, the farthest satellite, shines a little
bigger than a star just over my head, whilst Phobos seems to come
greeting it.
    As the solar disk
crosses the irregular horizon of Valles Marineris, there it is, a
little higher and westward. An azure star sparkling in the
twilight. Earth.
    All of a sudden I’m
crying and unable to control myself. I won’t see it anymore. I
won’t return home anymore. I’m so sad, and against my own will, I
regret everything. I regret having put this dream of exploring Mars
before my own happiness. Not having stopped to think, not for an
instant, about the many other choices I might have made. To have
wasted my life gnawed by the hatred of my father and the desire to
show the whole world I wasn’t a mistake, like he considered me to
be. To have escaped every