The Impossible Rain by Tom Nixon

Author:Tom Nixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: impossible rain, tom nixon, space, journey, grief
Publisher: Tom Nixon
Published: 2025-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

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Jupiter

A different dream, this time. Where was he? Everything was blurred, out of focus, but seemed familiar somehow. He was sitting down. In a chair, but... it was... he knew this chair. He knew this place. Alistair didn’t feel alarmed. He wasn’t scared, and all he knew was that he was sitting and then-

Everything clicked into place.

Mars, back home, their living room. Stephen’s favorite room in the house, with the wide, great windows that looked out over Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. It was impossible, the gigantic scar running across the face of Mars. New arrivals from Terra couldn’t quite grasp just how big it was. Nearly three thousand miles long, at its widest points one hundred and twenty miles across and six miles deep in places. Some people came to Mars, saw it once, and never went near it again, the scale of it too much for them to handle.

But some people fell in love with the place.

A light turned on somewhere to his left. The kitchen. Footsteps. A chuckle. “You know for someone who gets up early to write, you couldn’t be less of a morning person.”

“I’m awake. I’m here.” He lifted his arms and realized they were wrapped in the bright blue fleece throw that always lived on the back of their couch.

He could feel the roll of the eyes from across the room. “You want coffee?”

“The answer to that is always yes.”

There weren’t many people along this stretch of the rim, despite being close to the chain of settlements and towns that ran through the narrow end of the canyon into Nochtis. Alistair liked not having neighbors. Stephen liked being close enough to the local farming cooperatives that he could go and get a fresh loaf of bread and a new jar of jam. He could get lost for hours on market day and come back home with who knows what, usually more plants for the greenhouse.

Footsteps again. “Here you are, love,” Stephen handed him the coffee and sat down in the chair next to him. Alistair wrapped his hands around the coffee mug, brought it up to his face, and inhaled. “You always make the best coffee.”

“I know,” Stephen smiled.

This was one of their mornings. There was no set schedule for their mornings. There was no rhyme or reason to their mornings. Just every so often, the two of them would get up early, make a cup of coffee, and come to their living room and sit next to each other and watch the sunrise over the Valles Marineris.

The two of them watched in silence as the outlines of the landscape emerged out of the blackness, contours and lines becoming more visible as the sky above lightened imperceptibly from black to a gentle shade of gray. Gray skies lightened still further, tinged with blues and pinks and then—

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

Something was wrong. Alistair didn’t know what it was, but something was wrong. Was it the blanket? He looked down at the blanket.

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