Your letter came at night. I had to clamber over my sister to get it.
For a moment she stirred, arms stiffening under the covers. Her eyelids were slightly parted, and I could see the whites of her eyes. But still she slumbered on.
I padded through the house, my feet thudding out a soft rhythm on the worn carpet. My parents were asleep; I could hear my father snoring loudly enough to rattle the dishes. It was my job to tidy up after dinner and I hadn’t done it. So our plates sat on the kitchen table, their surfaces slick with last night’s gravy, and there they shook. I put the kettle on.
Our kitchen doesn’t have curtains. It doesn’t have windows either, only a door that’s made of glass and looks like a window. It isn’t one. It’s a door really. There used to be curtains nonetheless, big blue ones on either side of the door pretending to be a window, but they aren’t there anymore. I accidentally set one of them on fire while I was trying to bake a three-layer chocolate cake for my sister’s birthday. So that was that. Good riddance, if you ask me. It makes no sense to put curtains on a door.
I didn’t know your letter was coming, of course. I just stood there and leaned against the hob while the kettle boiled, staring out the door-that-isn’t-a-window and thinking about curtains. The nights are long here and the moon is exceptionally bright, so you can see as far as you like. The dish gleamed faintly in the garden, its concave surface catching the moonlight so well that the light became liquid. My mother polishes that dish every morning until she sees her own face, flushed and determined, staring back at her. It takes her hours, seeing as that dish is wider than she is tall. But the days are long here too.
Then your letter came. The indicator light on the dish started tapping out a steady green DIT DIT DIT, so I left the kettle and let myself into the garden. By the time I got to the dish your letter was there, curling neatly out of the fax machine that we’d wired up to the receiver. It was hotter than the kettle had been and I nearly burned my fingers in my hurry.
You didn’t intend it for us. It was a reply to a plea for help from a dying planet somewhere, maybe one of the inner ones. Maybe it’s on the other side of the universe and you don’t know how to point a transmitter in the right direction.
There was a sudden gust of wind then and my eyes prickled with dust. There is always dust here, erupting up from the mines in great grey plumes of vaporised rock. The air is thick with it. It sticks to everything, so that by mid-afternoon my mother cannot see her reflection in the dish anymore, and by nighttime it has crept through the windows to leave streaks on the table, our pillows, us. My planet is rich in platinum; we call it silverstick on account of the dust. When my grandfather lived here, they mined it by hand. A lump of it still sits on our mantel, dusty and glistening. He used to joke that he had the most expensive set of lungs in the galaxy.
Nowadays it’s all done by machines, no wasting the stuff on mantels or bronchi. They dig it up and shoot it off towards the sun in pre-programmed rockets, bound for processing on the inner planets. The machines don’t ever stop, clicking and whirring and drilling constantly deep underground so the whole planet hums. This is why the dust never settles: it sticks and is jolted up again in perpetuity like an enormous disembodied yo-yo.
Only half the planet is still mined, though. The other half is mostly disused, emptied long ago and now used for burying things. Junk mostly, sent back from the inner planets on the pre-programmed rockets. Whatever was left of the kitchen curtains. My grandfather’s corpse lies there too, amid the dried-up seas of silverstick. I suppose that’s what’ll happen to our side eventually, once the deposits go. Junkyards spreading outwards like a weird disease.
I blinked out the dust and read the rest of your letter. You told me – not me but somebody, anyhow – how your planet was dying too, how you needed somebody to come knock some sense into you and stop a suicide. Well.
Sometimes I think about what my planet would be like if it were like yours, crawling with living things, roaring and cawing and trumpeting, stretching uncountable arms and legs and tentacles across every grey crevice. Imagine the mess.
I listened to your music too. Was it yours? It came about five minutes after the letter did, so really it could have been from anywhere. But I listened to it all the same, emptied from a tinny speaker onto the dusty air, like treacle onto stale bread. They were nice, the sounds of your planet, but chaotic too. All drums and strings and voices scrambling over each other until my ears were dizzy from it. Why don’t you listen to one sound at a time? Stupid question. I wonder if you hang curtains on your doors, in your lighthouse.
None of it matters anyways. You’re probably long gone. I don’t know where your Earth is, or how long your letter was buoyed along by the empty black to reach me. Things wash up here too, not really, they’re not solid things you can hold. Stray signals, lost letters, strange music. We get a few a week usually, none sometimes. You’re probably dead now, all of you, not just your little gasping deer. All the arms and legs and tentacles wrapping round your entire condemned planet, going slowly limp. A letter and the rusted waves of twenty-seven songs, going stale in the dusty air blanketing a dustier fax machine. All that’s left of you, perhaps. Go on, die if you like, but riddle me this: what was there to begin with? Another stupid question. You’ll never read this. I listen to your music again, once, twice, three times, until it seems part of the thrum of the ground, like the mining machines are waltzing somewhere below. It’s starting to grow on me, so I listen again, and I think of you, and I lie there in the dust until the kettle screams faintly and the sky starts to brown with the first weak traces of sun.
ARCHIVAL NOTES
The transmission above was detected at the Ozym 4 Archaeological Station in short-wavelength format in the yearspan 1324345. It was then transformed to written text using the Universal Rosetta Standard. Although its exact provenance and authorship remain unknown, this letter is believed to have originated on one of the outer resource-exporting planets of the Andias Solar System. To this day, it remains one of the best known examples of a complete written work produced in this galactic section. Over the centuries, a number of scholars have drawn parallels between this letter and the earlier Earthian publication known as ‘Songs of Cygnus’. Both transmissions were detected at Ozym 4, although separated by considerable time and distance. While the two cannot yet be definitively linked, this letter does appear to respond directly to the final outward transmission of ‘Songs of Cygnus’ (Pleiad et aliens, 821321). Consequently, this piece has come to be known colloquially as ‘Coda for Tim’. It is unknown whether Tim ever received the Coda; no further transmissions from Earth have been recorded at Ozym 4.
Like ships passing in the night. Haunting, when you think about it...