She found the ripped note in his old coat. The end of a message, it simply read in his usual scrawl: “Mars, if you can.”
She had never known her dad to be philosophical but there was a comfort in those words those days after his death. Why shoot for the moon?
No, you should shoot for Mars, if you can.
Those words became her mantra as she aced flight school and joined the Space Agency.
Twenty years earlier, in the recycling bin lay the rest of the discarded note.
“Can you get me some chocolate?”
“Mars, if you can.”
Max Turner is a gay trans man, he writes speculative and science fiction, fantasy furry fiction, many sub-genres of horror and LGBTQ+ romance and erotica and combinations thereof. www.maxturneruk.com