The Last Two Gardeners of Mars by Irene W. Collins
3100 words, ~15 minutes time
Issue 9 (Winter 2025)
The greenhouse breathed.
Not with the sterile hiss of regulators, nor the dry rasp of Martian wind against its dome, but with a slow, vegetal rhythm – leaves unfurling, moss exhaling, orchids humming in the low gravity. Red-veined fronds shivered as though stirred by invisible fingers. The cobalt moss spread in cushions across the stones, pulsing with hidden bioluminescence. From outside, the dome was just another bubble of glass on a dead world. From inside, it was a cathedral of chlorophyll, color, and memory.
Anara adjusted the nutrient valves with a wrench that had long since lost its chrome. Her movements were precise, economical, the way they had always been. Seventy-three years in her bones and still her hands did not tremble.
“You’ll tighten the poor thing to death,” Mireille said from across the dome. She crouched over a patch of orchids that thrummed like tuning forks. Her hair, silver shot through with copper, haloed around her face in the artificial light. She was singing – soft, off-key, a French lullaby the plants seemed to lean toward.
“They like structure,” Anara replied, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Order keeps them alive.”
“They like kindness.” Mireille’s lips curved. “Kindness and music.”
Fifty years of this. Not quite lovers, never merely friends. Something more ferocious, more faithful. A queerplatonic tether forged in the red dust and sealed in chlorophyll.
Anara grunted and shut the valve. “Sing them stable water pressure, then.”
The orchids answered first, their stems vibrating with a faint harmonic. Then the moss swelled brighter, as though laughing at the joke. Anara did not smile, but her shoulders eased.
Beyond the dome stretched endless rust: dunes shifting under thin storms, the horizon blurred by ochre haze. Mars had long since been abandoned by its colonists, written off as a failed experiment. Only this dome remained, the last greenhouse. Only them, its last two gardeners.
Once, they had been scientists. In the early days of terraforming, they spliced their DNA into alien seeds, gambling on symbiosis. The experiment worked too well. The greenhouse recognized them now as kin. It knew their breath, their blood. When they touched a leaf, the stem turned to meet their skin. If the garden died, so would they.
Mireille broke the silence again. “It’s nearly my birthday.”
“I know,” Anara said without looking up.
“You didn’t last year.”
“I did. I just didn’t say it.”
Mireille hummed her disapproval, then smiled into the orchids. “Do you remember the strawberries? The Martian ones, before the soil soured.”
“They tasted like tin,” Anara said.
“They tasted like survival.”
“That too.”
The air between them filled with something weightless – decades of conversations folded into shorthand, argument and affection inseparable. A language older than memory, spoken only by them and the plants.
Then the dome shivered. A faint flicker ran through the greenhouse lights, dimming the cobalt moss. Anara’s eyes snapped up. One patch of moss darkened, curling in on itself like burned paper.
Mireille stopped singing. The orchids’ hum went flat.
Anara crossed the floor quickly, crouched by the fading moss. She pressed her hand to it. For a heartbeat, the blackened patch pulsed faintly in response – her pulse, mirrored. Then it went still.
The greenhouse exhaled again, but slower now. Too slow.
The hiss of the oxygen regulators faltered. A hiccup, a wheeze, then a struggling pulse. The sound caught Anara’s ear at once, she knew the rhythm of the machines like her own breath. She rose from the wilted moss, crossed the dome, and laid her palm on the nearest vent. The airflow was thin, uneven.
Mireille noticed too. She straightened from her orchids, her face creased with concern. “It sounds tired.”
“It’s a regulator,” Anara said briskly, already reaching for her toolkit. “Metal doesn’t get tired. It malfunctions.”
“Everything tires, Anara. Even metal. Even us.” Mireille smiled faintly, but her eyes lingered on the sagging leaves of a fern that yesterday had stood proud.
Anara knelt, unscrewing the regulator panel. The hiss became a cough. “It just needs maintenance. Not philosophy.”
Mireille’s laugh was gentle, infuriating. “Your maintenance has kept us alive. My philosophy has kept us human.”
The words hung there. For a moment the only sound was the shallow, uneven breath of the machines.
Later, when the system was patched enough to buy them another few hours of steady air, they sat together on the greenhouse floor, backs against a column of climbing vines that twined around both of their shoulders. Mireille stroked the leaf nearest her cheek.
“Do you remember,” she said softly, “when the colonists still called this world a beginning?”
Anara’s mouth tightened. “I remember fools in boardrooms promising Earth’s second Eden. I remember dust storms chewing through habitats like paper.”
“You remember building this dome.”
Anara glanced sideways at her. “We built it because they told us to.”
“We stayed because we wanted to.” Mireille’s voice grew tender, insistent. “They left, one by one, when the harvests failed. We could have gone too. But you wouldn’t leave. You looked at me in the airlock, do you remember? You said, ‘We can’t abandon it. Or each other.’”
Anara’s hands stilled in her lap. That old memory cut through like sunlight in thin air, two younger women in dusty suits, choosing the dome over escape, choosing each other over empty survival.
She muttered, “We should have had somewhere else to go.”
“But we didn’t.” Mireille leaned her head against the vine, eyes closing. “And this place became home.”
That night, Mireille dreamed of whispers.
They threaded through the leaves, soft and steady as rainfall. Mireille, rest. Mireille, return. The voices pressed against her ribs like vines growing inward. She woke with a start, breath rattling, the dome glowing faint green in its night-cycle. Beside her, Anara stirred, but did not speak.
In the silence, Anara heard it too. Not words… never words, but a thrumming inside her veins, the way a cracked pipe hums when water rushes through. The plants were calling. She pressed her lips shut, refusing to admit it. Mireille’s fancies were enough for both of them.
By morning, Mireille’s face was pale, her smile fragile. She said nothing of the dream, but hummed while she watered the orchids, a lullaby the garden seemed to echo.
The ground quivered at midday. At first it was subtle, a ripple through the soil beds. Then the dome rattled with a deep subterranean groan.
“Marsquake,” Anara snapped, grabbing the nearest support beam.
The tremor widened a hairline crack in the irrigation line. A hiss, a spray – water gushed into the soil, flooding roots in a sudden surge. The plants convulsed, stems thrashing as if struck. Leaves curled violently, moss dimmed.
And then it came: not sound, not vibration, but a silent scream that tore through the marrow of both women. Anara gasped, clutching her chest. Mireille fell to her knees, hands over her ears though there was nothing to block.
The dome shuddered once more, then stilled. The spray of water slowed, dripping into the soil. Silence settled heavy.
Anara forced herself upright, heart pounding. The greenhouse breathed again, but ragged, wounded, gurgling like a chest filling with fluid.
Mireille whispered, shaking, “It’s dying. It’s tired, Anara. Like us.”
Anara’s jaw clenched. She gripped her wrench like a weapon, eyes blazing. “Then I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it until the end.”
But in her veins, the plants hummed louder, aching, as if they knew better.
The rot began quietly, a bruise on a single fern. By morning it had spread across half the bed, black veins spidering outward like ink in water. The air smelled wrong – sweet and sour, like spoiled fruit.
Mireille cupped the fern’s curling fronds in her palms and whispered a lullaby. Her voice trembled, but she sang anyway, each note carrying years of ritual, of stubborn faith. She had always believed the plants listened. Now she needed them to.
“Don’t coddle it,” Anara said, crouched nearby with her toolkit. She stripped away the blackened stems, tossing them into a waste bin. “It’s infected. We cut the rot before it spreads.”
“They’re not machines,” Mireille murmured.
“They’re not gods either.” Anara’s wrench clinked against the pipe. “They’re organisms. We fix the system. We don’t pray at it.”
The orchids nearby hummed faintly, a discordant vibration, as if unsettled by their raised voices.
By afternoon, Anara had rerouted two irrigation lines, jury-rigged a bypass around the cracked feed. The flow steadied, but the plants continued to sag, mottled with creeping darkness.
Mireille set bowls of water at the roots, a gesture more symbolic than practical. She lit a small lamp – contraband, salvaged from the old colony, to cast warm light over the moss. She hummed louder, her voice raw.
Anara snapped, “You’re wasting air with that singing.”
“And you’re wasting time chasing leaks,” Mireille shot back. She rose, eyes flashing. “You’d rewire the stars if you thought it would keep us breathing.”
Anara turned on her, rage and desperation mingling. “And you’d sit here singing while the air leaves our lungs.”
The words cracked the dome more deeply than any quake.
They stared at each other, decades of companionship taut between them like a fraying tether. The silence that followed was brutal, weighted not with absence but with too much history, fifty years of arguments resolved with a squeeze of the hand, fifty years of meals shared in the shadow of red storms.
Now, neither moved.
At dusk, Mireille sank to her knees beside the fern bed. She pressed her trembling hand to a blackened frond.
The vision struck like lightning.
The greenhouse vanished, replaced by a flood of memories. She saw herself and Anara laughing over the first Martian strawberries, sour and metallic but miraculous. She saw them arguing over broken regulators, dancing once… awkwardly, shyly… while the orchids sang in resonance. She saw nights when storms battered the dome and they clung together in fear, mornings when the first shoots of life pushed through soil like prayers answered.
Every fight, every scar, every harvest. The garden was not merely theirs. It was them, an archive of intimacy, a living vessel of all they had sown in each other.
She gasped and tore her hand back, but the truth lingered: if one of them faltered, the garden would crumble with them. It needed both of their breaths, both of their roots, to survive.
“Mireille?” Anara’s voice softened. She had seen the color drain from her companion’s face.
Mireille turned, tears streaking her cheeks. “It’s us, Anara. Don’t you see? It’s never been just plants and pipes. We are the garden. If one of us dies…”
Her words broke off into a cough.
Anara rushed forward just as Mireille crumpled, her body folding like a stem under frost. She caught her before she hit the soil, lowering her gently onto the moss. Mireille’s breath came shallow, ragged, as if the air itself had grown too thin to hold her.
Around them, the greenhouse dimmed. Leaves sagged, orchids fell silent, moss dulled to ashen gray. The plants mirrored her pulse – slowing, weakening, tethered to her failing body.
“No.” Anara pressed trembling fingers to Mireille’s wrist, then the moss. The same rhythm faltered in both.
Her own heart thudded like a fist in her chest, but even as she held Mireille close, she could feel it, something hollowing in her veins, the garden’s hum deepening, grief made tangible.
The dome had stopped breathing with them.
Anara worked until her fingers bled.
She sealed cracks with resin paste, rewired conduits, rerouted oxygen lines through jury-rigged tubing scavenged from forgotten storage bins. Each fix bought her minutes, never hours. The monitors still blinked low, the hiss of the regulators still stuttered like an old lung drowning.
Beside her, Mireille lay pale among the moss, her chest rising shallowly. Every plant mirrored her weakness: orchids drooped, ferns shriveled, even the cobalt moss dimmed to a sickly violet.
“Breathe,” Anara muttered, twisting a valve. “Come on, damn you, breathe.”
The valve snapped in her hand. A sharp metallic ping. No hiss followed. Silence.
Anara sagged against the pipe, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. Rage surged hot behind her eyes. She had always fixed things. She had always kept the dome alive. She would not… could not… stop now.
A sound behind her. Mireille’s voice. Thin, but clear.
“It’s time, Anara.”
Anara turned, heart hammering. Mireille’s face glowed faintly in the failing green light. She looked impossibly calm, her silver hair splayed against the moss like roots reaching outward. Her eyes – clouded by exhaustion, luminous with something deeper, met Anara’s and held.
“Don’t you dare,” Anara hissed. “Don’t you dare talk like that.”
Mireille’s lips curved, the ghost of a smile. “Gardens aren’t meant to last forever.”
“No.” Anara crawled to her side, gripping her hand. “I won’t let you go. I won’t let it go. I can fix this. I will fix this.”
Mireille squeezed weakly. “You’d rewire the stars if you thought it would keep us breathing.”
Her words cut. Familiar. Final.
The air shifted. A low vibration threaded through the floor, through the leaves, through their bones. Not hum, not whisper – voice.
It came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
We are one root. One body. One ending.
The vines shivered, curling as though in wind. The moss pulsed faint light in rhythm with Mireille’s heartbeat, then Anara’s. Orchids thrummed, harmonizing with the words.
Anara froze. “No,” she said hoarsely. “Don’t speak to me like—like it’s decided.”
To sever is to kill. To cling is to wither. To end is to bloom.
Her chest tightened. For years she had dismissed Mireille’s talk of listening, of spirit. But here it was: the garden itself, their fused consciousness, speaking with all their voices braided. A chorus older than either of them.
Mireille’s eyes glistened with tears. “Do you hear it? At last?”
Anara shook her head, trembling. “I hear nothing but endings.”
“That’s all life ever is,” Mireille whispered. “Endings. And the beauty of choosing how to meet them.”
Anara pressed her forehead to Mireille’s hand. “I can’t. I can’t let you go.”
Mireille lifted her other hand with effort, cupping Anara’s cheek. “Then don’t let me go. Let’s finish this together. Not as engineers, not as caretakers. As gardeners. We planted joy here, Anara. Let it bloom into ending.”
The chorus swelled again, soft, inexorable: One root. One body. One ending.
Anara’s chest heaved. Her mind whirled with numbers, schematics, endless failed repairs. She had built her whole life on resistance—against dust storms, against abandonment, against death itself. But here was Mireille, radiant even in her weakness, asking her for surrender. Not giving up. Giving back.
Her voice broke. “I’m not ready.”
“Neither am I,” Mireille murmured. “But the garden is.”
For a long, trembling moment, Anara stared at her, fury and grief tearing her apart. Then slowly, she let the wrench fall from her hand. The clang rang through the dome, final as a bell.
She lay down beside Mireille, their bodies pressed into the moss, two old women held by the roots they had sown. Mireille’s hand found hers. Fingers laced.
The greenhouse shuddered. Not in collapse—release. The plants glowed faintly, brighter than they had in years. The moss pulsed steady, the orchids thrummed a low hymn.
Anara closed her eyes. For once, she did not resist.
Together, hand in hand, they offered themselves back to the soil.
The greenhouse bloomed as they died.
Not slowly, not gently – but in a wild, delirious eruption. Every vine burst into blossom, orchids splitting open in cascades of impossible hues: silver petals veined with fire, blue roses that pulsed like stars, ferns unfolding faster than breath. The moss blazed with light, glowing cobalt so bright it turned the dome into a lantern against the Martian dusk.
Air thickened, sweet and sharp, as though the garden had exhaled its final stored breath. Oxygen flooded the dome, heady and rich, carrying a scent no one had ever smelled before, a mingling of every memory Anara and Mireille had rooted into this soil. Strawberries and iron. Sweat and laughter. Dust and rain that had never fallen here.
Anara lay curled against Mireille, their hands locked. Every inhale felt like breathing through silk, too bright, too sweet. She wanted to rage still, to fix, to resist, but Mireille’s presence beside her softened the jagged edges.
Mireille turned her head slightly, lips pale but smiling. Her voice was barely more than a thread. “Do you think anyone will remember?”
Anara’s eyes burned. She kissed the back of Mireille’s hand, rough and dirt-stained, the same hand that had pulled weeds, turned valves, wiped tears. “The garden will.”
A small laugh escaped Mireille, soft as moss. “Always so literal.”
“And right,” Anara muttered, though her voice cracked on the word.
They lay like that, as they had on countless nights before, talking in the low murmur of people who had brushed their teeth together for fifty years, who had folded silence and argument and affection into a single life.
Anara whispered, “I should have sung with you more.”
Mireille’s eyes fluttered closed. “You were always singing, my love. Just with wires and wrenches instead of notes.”
Their last breath together slipped into the dome, caught by the garden, carried outward into every leaf and petal.
The dome could not hold the bloom.
With a soundless shiver, glass cracked along its seams. A single pane burst outward, then another, until the structure fractured entirely. The shards drifted in the thin air like ice, scattering the greenhouse’s final breath across the wasteland.
Seeds rode the collapse. Spores glowing like embers whirled into the Martian wind, carried far over rusted dunes and valleys long abandoned. Some might root in hidden cracks, some might die in dust, but all of them carried the imprint of the two women who had tended them, who had given their bodies and breath to their survival.
Mars, long thought dead, held its breath. The red storms lifted, just slightly, as if curious. Dust spiraled with spores, the air tasting different – lighter, tinged with the faintest possibility.
The greenhouse was gone. Anara and Mireille were gone. But the garden was not ended.
It had scattered itself into the bones of the planet, into the silence of the horizon, into whatever future might still arrive.
Mars kept their garden, not in soil or stone, but in every breath the planet would ever take again.
