OPPORTUNITY COST PART III

OPPORTUNITY COST PART III

short story Theron Camp // 12

Montana, 2036

MARS SETTLERS several years ago, while Peter, Erik, CELEBRATE THREE MONTHS and Andrea took care of the farm. SINCE ARRIVAL OF ROBINSON She believed her work-- and the II CREW, the headline read. It was money it brought in-- was one of the remarkable, this-- sixty-odd colonists main reasons that their farm was still in a hostile environment more than thriving while other small farms in the eleven light-minutes away, some area suffered. living there for more than two years, On her way out the door to work, and not a single fatality. Annie she passed the fireplace and stopped Zimmermann Olsen had paid close to look at the pictures on the mantel. attention to reports on the Robinson There, second from the right, was the missions over the past few years, and one from when she and Peter were knew all the particulars “She was domesticated. Tamed. kids-- Peter was in his mid-teens, of the This was her freedom now-- wearing that perpetual program in a way that a bike ride between home and work.” teenage look of (she suspected) few others outside exasperation, and Annie was twelve, the program did. It was her main her face obscured beneath a giant concession to her childhood dream. plastic astronaut helmet. As she fished

It was best that she’d stayed here, her bike helmet from the cardboard she reassured herself as she cleaned boxes in the corner of the garage, she up after her breakfast. After all, she’d wondered how twelve-year-old her met Erik when they were in college would react if she saw her now. in Great Falls, and they’d married She was domesticated. Tamed. the autumn after Annie graduated. This was her freedom, now-- a bike They had gone to Colorado for their ride between home and work. Home, honeymoon, but Annie hadn’t left work, home, work. She had left the state since. She still lived on Montana, what, two or three times in the farm, but most days she’d bike her life? The best she could claim now into town to work at the thriving was a little shop which fixed people’s machine repair shop she’d established clarity cars and tractors. Was this the best she

could do? No, she had given that up when she turned her back on the stars and the red dot that spun and danced among them. And for what? Why had she not gone to Mars?

Annie had let herself down. She’d had a shot at becoming something greater, at pushing the bounds of the world outward where she’d wanted to go, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Was a life on Mars worth sacrificing a life on Earth? Perhaps it was, perhaps not. Either way, it would’ve been hers. Now, she had forgone it, thrown her dream away without even giving it the chance her childhood self deserved. She’d yielded.

Annie Zimmermann Olsen pedaled away down the sunny farm road towards the beginning of another dull day, haunted by the sudden and intimate understanding of what she might’ve been and now could never become.

FIN.

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