> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cristianmihai.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Astronaut's Wife - URL: https://www.cristianmihai.com/the-astronauts-wife/ - Published: 2026-10-31T14:48:20.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-31T14:48:20.000Z - Author: Cristian Mihai - Tags: Short Story The letter waits in yesterday's mail between a Pottery Barn catalog and a credit card offer that promises 0% APR for eighteen months. Julia finds it when the microwave reads 6:32\. She stands barefoot on the kitchen tile in the jeans she slept in and Neil's MIT sweatshirt, which two years of washing have emptied of him and filled with fabric softener and the powdery scent of dryer sheets. The envelope carries a government watermark. The paper is heavy cotton stock. She sets it on the counter and drops a slice of bread in the toaster. The lever goes down and bounces straight back up, *chk*, and she pushes it again without looking, and this time it holds. The coils redden through the slot. The left one lags behind the right, the way it does every morning. Over the sink the window is still black, and a second kitchen hangs in it with a second Julia standing in the middle. Her iPhone buzzes against the granite. The screen says NEIL'S MOM. The calls come every other day now, and every call is about paper: the survivor annuity, the VA forms, the routing number for the account that still has both their names on it. Every call ends in silence because neither of them knows how to hang up first. She lets it ring. She tears the flap open. > Mrs. Garner, we regret to inform you that deep-space monitoring equipment has detected intermittent signals that bear the transmission signature of the Valhalla. The signals originate from coordinates consistent with the vessel's last known trajectory... The government regrets everything on cotton paper. She reads the letter until her coffee goes cold. A fly lands on the rim of the mug and walks the edge, and a second fly walks upside down under it in the black coffee. The Valhalla went dark a little over two years ago. There was no beacon and no distress call. NASA phoned while Julia stood at the stove making risotto. She pinned the phone between her ear and her shoulder and kept stirring, and after the line went dead she went on stirring until the arborio welded itself to the copper and the smoke alarm went off down the hall. She threw the pot away the next morning. She buys her risotto frozen now. The letter goes on. > ...request your immediate presence at Deep Space Communications Facility 7 for preliminary contact procedures. Transportation will be provided. She sets it beside the business card Captain Dressler, U.S. Air Force, left two mornings ago. He stood on her porch and read from a clipboard. Wreckage consistent with the Valhalla had turned up in the sea ice off Ellesmere Island. The ship had flown the long way home with nobody alive at the controls and come down where nobody was looking. Dental records had confirmed the remains of Lieutenant Colonel Neil Garner. Julia held the doorframe with both hands while he read, and she shut the door before he reached the end of his sentence. Two mornings ago the government delivered her husband's body by captain. Yesterday it mailed her his voice. At this rate the rest of him comes parcel post by the weekend. She goes to the front window. A government sedan idles at the curb, and its driver sleeps with his cheek against the glass and his mouth open. Julia opens the junk drawer. In the back corner, behind a screwdriver she stole from Neil's toolbox, her wedding ring sits in the blue dish they brought home from Lisbon. The dish cracked along the rim in the move. She took the ring off four months ago, set it in the dish, and closed the drawer. She drops the ring in the pocket of her jeans and presses her palm flat over the denim. She laces her sneakers at the front door, goes out, and raps on the sedan's window, *tok tok*. The driver jerks awake and wipes his mouth and opens the back door for her. The city thins out behind them into gas stations, and the gas stations thin out into creosote and nothing. The facility is a low concrete box on the desert floor, and the flag out front hangs straight down in the heat. A woman at a folding table takes Julia's phone, her purse, her watch, and her shoes, and writes her a receipt for all of it. Then she hangs a yellow visitor badge around Julia's neck. The elevator has no buttons. The doors close and the car drops, and a display over Julia's head runs down through negative numbers and stops at minus sixty-one. Her ears pop. The consultation room is at the end of a corridor lined with cable runs and exposed ductwork. The recycled air is dry and tastes of minerals, and it pulls the moisture out of the back of her throat. Two chairs with vinyl armrests. A desk. A closed laptop cabled to a dark monitor. The ceiling panels give off a flat white light that makes every object in the room look cut out and pasted on. The face in the black glass of the monitor is older and more hollowed out than the one in her bathroom mirror. A man comes in. He wears a clearance lanyard over a polo shirt with a coffee stain near the third button, and his badge reads PAULSON. The skin under his eyes has gone gray and thin. "Mrs. Garner." He sets a pair of headphones wrapped in plastic on the desk. "We called. We had a man knock on your door last night." Julia looks at the headphones. "The signal started two days ago. Sixteen-fourteen Zulu." "In English." "Nine-fourteen in the morning, your time." He taps his pen on the desk, *tk, tk*. "Audio and video, in bursts of ninety seconds to four minutes. We've lost forty percent of the bandwidth since first contact, and the window narrows every hour." He opens the laptop. "Every burst starts with your name. We need you to identify him." So Neil had been calling her name while Captain Dressler stood on her porch and told her they'd found his body. Julia tears the plastic off the headphones and fits the cups over her ears. The room folds in on itself in the padded hush of the noise cancellation. Her own breathing sounds like a stranger on the line. Paulson types. The monitor clicks on. Gray and white static churns across the screen first, and it churns for so long that it could be the whole joke. The static clears into Neil. Same jaw. Same brown eyes. The thin scar above his left eyebrow comes from the summer he tried to vault the chain-link fence behind the Kowalski place and caught his forehead on a twist of wire. He walked into the ER with a Dairy Queen napkin on the cut, and blood had dried between his fingers. He sits centered in the frame. The light falls on him from above and a little to the right, and behind him the black is as flat as a chalkboard. His lips move, and the sound trails them like a dubbed kung fu movie. Somebody has scrubbed the audio clean, and every word arrives at the same volume from the same distance. "Hey, Jules." The pitch is right. So is the cadence, and so is the way he leans on the vowel in her name. Julia digs her fingernails into the vinyl armrest. "Neil." "Yeah." He grins, and it arrives finished. "Surprise." "Where are you?" "Hard to explain." The grin stays pinned at the same width. "Connection keeps dropping." "Are you hurt?" "No. I feel..." His head tilts the way a security camera tilts. "Different. Like I'm learning how to do this again." He raises a hand and turns it front to back and studies his fingers. "Talk. Move. The whole routine." "Neil. They found the ship." The grin stays pinned. "They found your body." Julia works her thumbnail into the seam of the armrest. The grin lasts until the seam gives, and then it goes out like a porch light. "Yeah. I know." "How?" "Because I was there. I was there when the hull breached. The cold came in and it was—" The channel *hisses*. "Fast." "That was two years ago." "Yeah." "Where have you been?" "Waiting." He looks at his hand again. "For somebody to find the rest of me." "Then what am I looking at?" "What's left. The comm array was still open when the hull went, and it caught a piece of what was in my head." He folds his fingers down from the pinky to the thumb and opens them. "Enough of a piece." "Enough for what?" He looks up into the camera. The eyes are the right shape and the right distance apart. "Enough to miss you." Julia pulls the cuffs of the sweatshirt down over her hands and wipes her face with one of them. His hand drops out of the frame. "Do you remember our first apartment? The one on Delancey?" "Yes." "Above the laundromat." "I said yes." "The dryers ran all night. You could feel them through the floor if you put your palm flat on the boards." She grips her thigh. "And the kitchen window was painted shut. I spent two hours on it with a putty knife and your hair dryer, and when the sash finally moved, the first thing through the gap came from the restaurant on the corner." "Jade Garden." It comes out into the cuff of his sweatshirt. "Jade Garden. You said, 'I'm not paying sixteen hundred a month to smell General Tso's chicken at midnight.' And I said—" "'That's the best reason to pay sixteen hundred a month.'" "And you hit me with a dish towel." She laughs. The laugh barks out of her and scrapes her throat, and for a moment she is twenty-three in a kitchen that smells of soy sauce and fabric softener, and the floor hums under her bare feet. On the screen the grin goes wide and smug, and it is the grin of a man who knew the joke would land. The image stutters, and the headphones spit *ksshht* into her ears. A frame drops. Neil's face smears sideways like a wet Polaroid under a thumb. The image corrects, and his face puts itself back together. On Paulson's legal pad she reads HIM? He has underlined it hard enough to tear the paper. Julia leans toward the screen. "Tell me about Lake Ossipee." "Lake Ossipee." He nods. "The camping trip." "What happened on the dock?" "You fell in." "How did I fall in?" "You were reading. You lost your balance." Julia tears through the vinyl into the foam. "What else?" "It was September. The water was cold. You came up looking like—" "Stop." She pulls one cup off her ear and turns to Paulson. "That's wrong. He pushed me. He snuck up behind me while I was reading and shoved me in. The water was forty degrees. He laughed so hard he sat down on the dock and couldn't get back up." Paulson writes. Julia settles the cup back over her ear. "That's how I told it at the memorial, Neil. Your mother was in the front row." The face on the screen waits. "Nobody goes to their own memorial. You got that from me. You filled in the blank." "The signal fragmented. Some pieces—" "Tell me one thing you didn't fill in. Tell me what only you would know." Static pours into the headphones like rain on a tent fly. "The toaster." Julia stops picking at the foam. "The one on the kitchen counter. The left coil's shot. You push the lever down twice. The first push wakes the coil, and the second one latches the timer." He pauses. "I kept meaning to swap out the element. I was going to fix it after the mission." Julia's chair *skreeks* back across the concrete. She stands, and the headphones slide down around her neck. She leans over the desk toward the laptop. "You never pushed it twice. You held the lever down with your thumb every morning until the toast smoked, and you told me you liked it dark." The answer leaks thin and tinny out of the cups at her collarbone. "I lied." "Three years of burnt toast. I figured out the second push after you were gone. The second winter. By myself, in the dark, with nobody to tell." She turns to Paulson. "He never knew that. I did it this morning at six-thirty-two, and I've never said it out loud to anybody." Paulson's pen stops over the legal pad. "How does it know what's in my house?" Paulson puts the cap back on his pen. "How?" "Mrs. Garner, the dishes put that signal out where the ship went dark. There's nothing there anymore. From that far out, every answer should take most of an hour to reach us." He looks at the screen. "He answers like he's in the next room." "Jules. I'm not trying to scare you." His voice buzzes thin against her collarbone. She puts the headphones back on and sits down. "You just told me how I make my toast." "I told you what I see." "You're watching me." "Yes." Julia puts her hand in her pocket and closes it around the ring. "You got the dock wrong. You lost the afternoon you laughed so hard you had to sit down on the boards. You got my toaster right." "Some things held. Some things didn't." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one I've got." He stops moving. The picture goes so clean she can see the pores on his nose. The glass seems to vanish between them. "Your screwdriver's still in the junk drawer. Two years it's been in there. I can't throw that toaster out and I can't fix it, and every morning I push it down twice, and it's the closest thing to you in that kitchen. The closest thing to being married." She digs a crumb of foam out of the armrest and rolls it between her fingers. "You know I push it twice. Tell me why." The picture freezes with his lips apart. The thing on the screen has eyes the color of creek water over brown stones. She first saw that color in an organic chemistry lecture, in October of their sophomore year, when the boy in the next seat leaned over and asked to borrow a pen. Overhead, the ductwork *tinks*. The ceiling panels dip and recover, and so does he. "I want to come home, Jules." "You can't come home." "I know." "Your body's in a morgue drawer in Canada. Your hands are in there with it. You're a transmission shaped like my husband." "I know where they are." Julia presses the foam back into the hole with the heel of her hand. "Then what do you want?" "Leave the porch light on." Her breath turns white between her face and the screen. Paulson looks up at the air vent. "It's already on. I leave it on every night. I leave it on and I check the lock twice and I go upstairs and put my face in your pillow, and it doesn't smell like you anymore, and I leave the light on anyway." "I know." This time the smile builds from one corner to the other, and the creases at his temples arrive last. It is even on both sides. Neil's real smile pulled harder on the left and showed too much gum. "Signal's degrading." Static creeps back over him, and his outline goes soft. "Tomorrow. Same time. If you'll come." "Neil." "Push the lever down twice." He keeps smiling. "I love you, Jules." The screen snaps to black. Julia stays in her chair, and the only sound in the room is the laptop fan. The monitor glass gives her face back to her in a blur. A second shape waits in the middle of the glass where his face was. It is as dim as the watermark on the envelope. The shape has his jaw and the broad smile that always showed too much gum. She leans to the left, and her reflection leans with her. The shape stays where it is. Julia keeps her eyes on the glass. "Unplug it." Paulson reaches behind the monitor and pulls the plug out of the surge protector. The shape stays. Paulson backs into the desk. His pen rolls off the edge, ticks against the concrete, and disappears under her chair. Julia touches the glass where the jaw is. "I'll come back tomorrow." Paulson opens the door. Julia walks the corridor in her socks, and the cold of the concrete gets through the cotton with every step. The cable runs follow her along the walls. She takes the ring out of her pocket. The gold is warm from her body, and it is small and heavy in her fist. She does not put it on. --- In the morning the microwave reads 6:32 and the window over the sink is still black. Julia drops a slice of bread in the toaster and pushes the lever. It goes down and bounces back up, *chk*. The kitchen hangs in the black window with her standing in the middle of it. Beside her face, the glass holds his jaw and the broad smile that always showed too much gum. Julia puts her thumb on the lever. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fd/2f/fd2f6b66-a69b-4e4d-a5e7-2ef68b410b3a/content/images/2026/10/dream-city-hardcover-mockup-05-overhead-landscape-1.png) *You’ve read one. 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