DISCLAIMER!: I do not own the Martian Chronicles. The idea was Ray Bradbury's and I hereby disclaim all ownership.
This was written as a school project (a characterization piece) and I though that I might as well post it, considering that it's a fan fiction and I so devote my time to such things. I realize that this might not be a very popular fandom but feel free to express any opinions if you exist, you invisible reader you.
Mrs. Hathaway had plastic, waxy skin over warm, metallic innards. Her dull, glass eyes held remnants of years of function. Her chin was stained with unpalatable food from years passed. Her features preserved the face of her human predecessor, the late Mrs. Hathaway that never left Earth.
Every night she would stare up at that once brilliant Earth. She thought that she might have held some sort of deep sorrow towards her husband's home planet if he had built her with the ability.
Mrs. Hathaway everyday wore her high-waisted yellow chemise with red flowery furnishings. She wondered if the women in town wore such dresses. Some days she thought that she might venture the thirty miles towards the survivors' village but knew that she could not. Who would tend to her husband's grave if she did not?
Every morning when she woke, she unplugged herself, fixed a breakfast that she could not eat, and tended to her children in the mechanical shed. Though her husband never taught her how, she had nothing to do with the sunlight but tinker with her son's exhausted circuits and idly experiment with her daughter's burnt out cogs. Then, at night, she would light a fire and wonder redundant nothings towards the sky.
It was a day many years after the Great Detonation that her house's battery died out, and her only light by night could be the fires she lit. Gradually, the only action she was capable of was an adagio pace towards the fire to oil it and then a return to her seat.
She did not know precisely where the earth was in the night sky, and each night she chose a different flashing star. She imagined the earth as her husband once described to her, as green and fresh and pretty, like her old muumuu after a wash. She imagined the hard Martian soil brightly verdant and smelling of laundry detergent with many happy families living upon it, as it was meant to be. She understand how different it was now, and she did not weep. She was not able to and because of this she was grateful. It was all she knew to feel.
One night, her batteries were drained and her eyes went dark.