After missing a few weeks (sorry; life is not orderly), my next piece of short fiction is up at Noble Cobra Magazine. Like The Old Man in the Sky, this was intended for the Planetary Anthology series – in this case Saturn – but turned down, so I offer it now for your reading pleasure: The Last Harvest.

Senek was awake at four in the morning as usual, without so much as an alarm clock. After nearly eighty years of practice, he just naturally got up before the crack of dawn.

Not that dawn meant much this far from the Sun.

The old man rose, stretched his arthritic limbs, and made his usual morning devotions before stepping into his jumpsuit and sitting down to a breakfast of porridge and bacon while unfolding his ancient paper and trying to bring up a news report. There wasn’t much of a signal these days; at least, not in the old planets, and the holographic-projection paper, like its owner, had seen better days. Most of the news came in from the new systems – so they were still called, though mankind had occupied some of them for thousands of years – and was about the usual politics, crime, war, the rest; all completely irrelevant to an old Ring Farmer dwelling lightyears from any of it.

Of course, he hadn’t much cared about the news even when it had been about things closer to home. Reading the paper over breakfast was just a habit.

The only item that remotely interested him was a piece titled Why They Stay: Life in the Shadow of a Supernova.” It was an interview with some of the people who had elected to remain on Earth years after everyone else had evacuated.

“We believe that the Earth is our home. It was where humanity first arose, it was for many thousands of years the only world we knew, and for tens of thousands more it was the heart of our civilization. For most of us, it’s still the only home we’ve ever known. If this is to be its final years, we would rather stay with it until the end.”

Senek’s smooth, thin skin crinkled in thought. He supposed some folk were sentimental like that. It was an interesting idea: sort of like sitting by a loved one until their last breath…

“But that ain’t why I stayed,” he said aloud. “I stayed ‘cause I have a job to do.”

Silence answered him. But he knew what would have been said.

“I’ve never missed a day of work in my life. You think I’m gonna start now just because some big-brains say the world might end today? Besides, that old Sun’s outlived plenty of men before me. Odds are he’ll still be going by the time I kick off.”

There was no one else there. Aria was up on the hill, under a stone: not in the kitchen where she belonged. Talking to her and answering what she would have said was another old habit, one he had made no effort to curb for six years.

He rose, drained the rest of his coffee, and headed out to the barn. It was harvest time and he had a lot of work to do.

Read the rest here.