The spoon was never meant to be left behind.
Mara packed it herself before the cargo shuttle to Mars Station 9. Stainless steel, dented from her mother's jollof pot. "For luck," her mom said, pressing it into her palm at Port Harcourt spaceport. "Cook for them like you cook for us."
Six months later, Mara stared at that spoon lying on the galley counter of Station 9. The evacuation alarm screamed. Red light washed everything the color of blood.
"All personnel to pods, now!" Captain's voice cracked over comms. Solar flare. 3 minutes till impact.
Mara grabbed her notebook. Her jacket. Her tablet with 40,000 words of universe drafts. She ran.
She forgot the spoon.
The shuttle launched. Through the window, Mars Station 9 glowed, then vanished in a white flash. Mara's stomach dropped. Not from the G-force. From the image burned in her mind: that dented spoon, humming softly on the counter. Humming like it did back home when she cooked.
For 2 years after, Mara wrote stories about portals and multiverses. Readers loved them. "How do you make cooking feel like sci-fi?" they asked. She never told them about the spoon.
Then the letter came. Handwritten. Paper. Impossible.
Mara,
Found your spoon in the wreckage. It still hums.
Station 9 debris field. Sector 4B.
- Jax, Salvage Crew
Her hands shook. Sector 4B was a fictional coordinate she invented for her stories. Universe 4B. The place where her jollof opened portals.
She shouldn't have gone back. No one returns to a solar flare zone. But the spoon hummed. She heard it in her dreams.
Jax met her in a rusted salvage ship. He held up the spoon. It vibrated. Not from ship engines. From something else.
"I've salvaged 200 wrecks," he said. "This is the only thing that survived intact. And it sings when you hold it."
Mara took it. The moment her skin touched the dent, the galley flooded back. The alarm. The red light. But different this time. She saw herself 2 years ago, running. She saw the version of her that paused, grabbed the spoon, missed the shuttle.
Two timelines. One where she lived and wrote. One where she died and the spoon became legend.
"Why me?" she whispered to the spoon.
It didn't answer. It never did. It just hummed. The same note her mother's pot made on Sunday mornings. The note that said: "Feed people. Connect people. Even across ruins."
Mara looked at Jax. "You could sell this. Collectors would pay millions for 'the spoon that survived Mars.'"
Jax shook his head. "Stuff like this chooses who keeps it."
She slipped the spoon into her pocket. Not for luck this time. For responsibility.
Back on Earth, she changed her writing. Less entertainment. More bridges. Every story now had a recipe at the end. Readers started cooking for each other. Uploading pics. "Made Mara's Universe 4B Jollof tonight."
The spoon stayed on her desk. Sometimes it hummed when she typed. Sometimes when she cooked.
She never left it behind again.
Because the unhappy circumstance wasn't losing the spoon on Mars.
The unhappy circumstance would've been leaving it there forever.
lmages are AI generated ✨
