When the sun sets, the ground glows red. If you close your eyes, you can still see the flaming, vermillion landscape that stretches on, ablaze in silent fury, choked in layers of opaque skies. Unseen, invisible things gleam in the far distance, and eerie warbles fill the still air. There is a curious book on the ground, its pages are tattered and worn, yellowing and ragged and threadbare at the edges. 

It is held in the peculiar hands of an almost insubstantial child, his foot planted firmly in the ground, his eyes attentive, the strange language in the book wandering far beyond the dusty planet he stands on.

***

A manual is carefully unfolded by the boy. The lid of a tightly closed container opens, letting a small, circular lense fall plummet into the Martian dust. Something, a spring, perhaps, recoils, bringing a whirlwind of fine powder. He coughs, a sliver of heat rushing upward from his lungs to dissolve and disperse in the open air.

The boy gingerly picks up the new lense and slackens the hold on the old one on his telescope, which he calls a Seeing Glass. The old lense gives way, and the boy fastens the new one in place. He steps back, expectant for something to fall out of place, but nothing happens. It is a monument of stillness in the ever-changing landscape.

Satisfied, the boy peers through the half-orb and resumes tuning the knobs. It feels as if he is on the verge of discovering something, a misty, azure awareness slowly emerging from a sea of red.

Time passes. His fingers move in a perpetual motion, adjusting and narrowing and widening. And suddenly he stills. Through the glassy, pellucid scope of his Seeing Glass, a blue orb appears in his vision, floating in an empty void of inky silk. It is blue. It is lapis, cerulean, azure, turquoise, cobalt, and sapphire. It is an opposite of where he lives. It is beautiful. 

The boy wonders if it is lonely. Time is at a standstill as rusty dust picks up around him, swirls around his feet and drifts down back to the ground as if it is tired. He wants to feel the blue orb in his hands, he wants to eat it up with his eyes, to store it into his memory, forever. 

But he has only a pencil that will color in gray. Gray, he thinks, the color things become once they forget who they are. But this planet is much like that. Though the red is crimson and scarlet and brown, the people have been stained a gray that will never be erased.

He cannot ever go there. This is his only home. There is no life on the blue planet, that the only source of civilization is separated from the rest of the universe by a red sky and red ground and red sun, filled with never ending dust and bitter cold. The boy does not want to believe his father, whose words seem as he does not believe them himself. A longing older than time surges, overflows like a tidal wave within his chest. He wants to go somewhere else, someplace where things are better, somewhere the world is no longer a desert the color of blood everywhere he goes.

A ringing, reverberating sound of a gong interrupts his thoughts, the burdened stare at the blue orb, plaguing his very existence. He takes one last longing look in the Seeing Glass and walks down a long, winding path to a tiny metal box embedded in the Martian dust. A small man with streaks of gray hair sitting inside, adjusting his glasses and writing down calculations on a piece of paper greets him with a small mumble. His eyes are tired, always tired, tired and weary and fatigued, a dull light emitting from them.

He speaks to his father, at first hesitantly, meeting those weary, weary eyes but the father is reluctant to change his mind about what the boy saw. As he speaks, the boy becomes more and more, in fervour and intensity, his passion burning like a fire the planet has never seen, even though it is nothing but red. But the old man looks at the boy sadly, knowing the past of everything the boy saw, a forbidden past that everyone and no one should know.

The boy knows too much for such a small person. But he wants to, he longs to, he wants to swallow the comprehension of a dream he has neve dreamt, dug up from the ruins of ancient cities, something that he has never known his whole life. Over everything, he wants the truth.

Bit by bit, the boy begins to feel distant. Alone. Isolated. He feels as if he is the only one who does not belong here. So he begins to go on long walks, each one longer than the last, until at last he comes across a metal capsule the size of his metal hut, maybe a little smaller. It is half buried in the red ground, and it is stained a permanent burnt sienna from centuries and centuries ago.

The boy does not move. He does not utter a sound. He simply stares at the capsule, wondering where it came from, what it was for, and why it was there.

That night he does not go home. His skin is coated with a fine layer of dust, making him look alien. But he knows he cannot be more alien, more Martian than he already is. Once in a while he hears the calls of his father, but he pushes them far, far away, into the corner of his mind, thinking that if the father, if the rest of the planet is going to let him wander without truth, he is better off anyways.

He studies the capsule, until at last he cannot fathom anymore, and suddenly the cover stands ajar with a pop and slowly rises up, revealing a compact space with a bundle of cloth, a few tools, and a closed, rusting metal box. The boy smiles, his hands shaking as he opens the metal box with ease, the lid popping open and then breaking into three pieces, then peers inside.

There is a curious contraption in the shape of a circle, with small black marks every few degrees, and two long metal hands, one shorter than the other, frozen in a time before his. There is glass covering this, and the outside is painted a dark purple, a color he has rarely seen. The boy carefully lifts the object up in his hands and studies it closer. Then he looks at what else is inside of the box, and finds a picture of the blue orb.

The blue orb. The one he saw through his Seeing Glass. In fascination and amazement the boy picks it up in his hands, and runs his fingers over the creases and grooves embedded within the thin material. It has strange green shapes spread across it, and white blobs on the top and bottom. The boy does not know why, but something tells him they are the places the people live.

Then there is a stack of more papers at the bottom of the box. The boy is not interested in them, but still he turns them over.

And finally he feels like a Martian no longer. 

They are pictures of somewhere far, far, far, seeable and unreachable. They are pictures of green towers and flowing blue seas, of sandy yellow mountains and turquoise skies, of a golden sun, of a hut much like his own, but much more colorful.

The boy carefully picks up the last photograph, the one taped to the bottom, not wanting the probing eyes of a curious one.

It is a picture of four smiling faces, their hopes and dreams all the same as his, to go somewhere that they cannot. 

But then, they do.