Perseverance

She is an old woman who sits in a high back chair beside a window ten storeys up. Although she lives alone, she is not lonely. Dressed in black, her stockings concertina around her ankles. The concertinas gather dust. The day she gets up from the chair, walks to the window, opens it, climbs out and stands on the lintel is the day the Perseverance rover lands on Mars. ‘It was the best so far’, Matt Wallace says of the landing. Matt previously worked on five other missions to Mars. The woman, her name long forgotten by those who live beside her and around her, puts one leg out into space and then another to shake the dust off her stockings. She is not wearing shoes. Perseverance travelled for 203 days, a journey of 293 million miles. The woman travels for forty seconds to the lintel, a journey of two metres. Standing on tip toes, she hesitates, turns to look at her reflection in the window, smiles at what she sees. Holding onto the wall she smoothes her hair with her right hand, adjusts her dress over her breasts, and steps off the tower block. The woman goes up and up, turning from woman, to blob to dot to nothing. Only the child in the next door apartment observes the woman disappearing into space. Nobody believes the child when she tells the story the next day at school. Then again, there are those that think Perseverance landing on Mars is also just a story.