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The Forge SHORT STORIES
Spring 2021
drifting By: Victoria Mendoza
A spacesuit drifts within the void of space. It’s tattered, burned, and locked in a slow perpetual spin. The light of the nearby star shines through the golden-green visor and onto the greyed, necrotic skin loosely hanging from the face of the man inside. His one remaining eye glows in the reflection of the great oasis of fire before him. How he wishes to be there. To just be able to feel the heat again. To feel the energy of it. To feel alive as he once did working on his farm on Octavius IV. He can almost feel the dirt beneath his fingernails again, the sweat running through his brow. “To live for just a moment longer.” The feeling is pulled from him and flung into the encroaching void as his vision spins past the sight of the sun. The light bouncing off of his visor makes it hard to see the stars beyond. An everlasting blackness floods his view. It’s broken only by a single spec, a far off star. He tries to reach for it but he can’t move. Dread seeps in. The same he had felt for most of his life. The dread of an incomplete crop for the fourth year running. The dread of city limits slowly creeping toward the farm. The dread of the growing popularity of synthetic foods. The dread of a corporation offering pennies for the land he worked for half a lifetime. The terror of watching his crop burn the day after declining. Of watching his family cry. “Please stop crying.” The thoughts bounce around his sun-
bleached skull until it’s filled with the image of a green planet as it spins into view. Octavius IV. It spins and orbits as it always has. The lights of the cities that dot its surface flicker like fire. Or perhaps it is actually fire. The Master had promised as much. When his lands had burned, the government came and put out the fires. They quarantined the area, citing strange radioactivity. The story changed with each agent or representative he talked to. After months of this, the corporation offered to come ‘clean up’ the land. They were given the land as payment. “What will we do? My family…” Anger sparks in the back of his mind. His slack jaw clenches with memories of fighting for his land in the courts. They dot his mind like the void beyond the planet; speckled with fires that burn in the vacuum of space billions of miles away. The speckles hang in vague shapes depicting an uncertain history on Octavius IV. He looks up to search for the twins, Nira and Lirus. He catches sight of the Sigma V star which makes up Nira’s foot. His stone-like neck forces him to give up on seeing the rest and focus elsewhere. “Where is my family? Where did she take them?” He thinks about her. The Master. She had offered her support. Her guidance. Her home. Safety. She offered her hand and he took it. He took her mark; two parallel marks cut diagonally, enclosed in a circle, in the center of his chest. He took her training. She housed
