At the top of the dune, the dead astronaut trembles, stands tender and useless. Her rags are loose, torn and tearing and flapping in the wind. Teeters, wants to fall. Doesn’t.

Before her lies a thin strip of remembered beach, gold flecked with black, then a calm bay of still water, dark blue, strewn with kelp beds and deep rock pools.

Presented ethereal. Presented as naïve, with green eyes that blazed. Before that gaze the horizon is limitless again.

Yet: There is no sign of ruins. There is not, on this coast, the half-fallen arch of a marine park. No landmark she can recall.

Hesitation. Lingering regard on what is still distant through a preamble of sand and stickery plants.

Is that movement down on the rocks? She cannot spare the attention yet. She cannot afford the answer. Instead, she focuses on putting one foot after the other down the dune, bent at the knees.

One foot and then the next. Looking down at her ragged torn shoes held together with bloody bandages she took off a dead man.

Then she is on the beach, the rough gravel feel of this sand, so different from the smooth heat of the desert.

Now the dead astronaut must look up from her feet. Now she must face what isn’t there. What is there.

The tremor inside isn’t perceptible on the dead astronaut’s face. But it is seismic, and she is quivering in a way that she’s afraid she can’t stop.

A figure out in the tidal pools, faced away from her. Bending over in observation of something in those depths. The sun hides the figure, gives sanctuary against the dead astronaut’s parched gaze. She shields her eyes with a shaking hand. She still cannot tell.

It might be no one. No one she knew. It might not matter. Some trick, some final joke the blue fox was playing on her, all these years later. Something the fox wanted her to see through negation, through want, still wandering in the fox’s mind.

Would there be recognition or the awful blankness of deep space reflected back? Never left the moon base. Never took the chance to plunge back down to Earth, to seek out a happiness she never imagined would be open to her.

A trick of the light, and after she would wander down the coast, lost. She would wander until she fell and never rise again.

It takes her final courage to continue. To walk to the edge of the rocks, the figure still unaware. The dead astronaut staring at her reflection in the tidal pools, as if it might hurt to stare direct.