Drifting by Victoria Mendoza

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 sunbleached 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

him, his family. The army and his duties kept him from seeing them for some time.

“Oh God, where are they now?”

A comet flashes into view. A blue stream of brilliance streaking across the cosmos. The dusty tail cutting a line in the darkness in the dance of an icy flame. The comet moves as he does; perfectly synced with his neverending spin. During training, the mark on his chest glowed a cold blue. The colder the mark, the more in sync everyone was. It was more than just in body. During battles, they would communicate without speaking. Men would go down and get right back up. He took a bullet to the chest but never bled. The mark burned colder. He kept fighting. They all felt The Master’s grip on them—they never spoke of it, but he knew. So they fought. Cut through cities. Burned them, as their homes had been burned. The Master promised they would all burn. They’d start anew. All of them, and their families, would finally be free.

“You should have run…”

The comet disappears in a flash behind a fiery tentacle lashing out from the sun as it inches back into view. He focuses on the shadows of a debris field. The space station. He’s suddenly standing in it, his gun raised. There’s screaming. People run for the escape pods. It’s hard to see. His right eye is gone; it fell out months before.

“Months… When was the last time I saw my family?”

The Master isn’t there but he can feel her hand on his back, pushing him forward. Her finger gripping the trigger of his gun. She walks him forward, aims his gun. He feels her anger—not his own—when the first escape pod launches.

“I want to see my family.”

His gun flashes. He doesn’t bare the weight of the recoil. He looks to his comrades. They shuffle forward in unison, as he does. Guns raised, always firing.

“Where are they?”

He tries to speak but nothing comes out. They don’t look his way; they just gaze forward, as slack jawed and lost as him.

“I want to see them!”

His body stops. The second escape pod jettisons and he can feel his body shake violently. Her anger spikes within him, as does his, in a visceral meeting of decrepit and violent minds fighting for control of a beaten and worn vessel which wants nothing more than to sit and relax and see his family one more time.

“Let me go.”

A part of him sighs, though he can’t say which part. He sees a row of white and silver tanks down the corridor. Hundreds of tubes neatly extend out form each tank. Large blue, red, yellow, and white diamond hazard signs lazily hang on each one.

“Please.”

In a single flash the colors jump out at him in a beautiful swirling display of bubbling, frothing masses which metastasize and spread through the corridor in ways equally mesmerizing and revolting. The numbers and letters on the signs expand and dissipate, losing themselves in the cancerous masses that spread like a flash flood through this inanimate body drifting through a void. His suit was scorched and torn. That was the last time he felt the heat. The station was breaking apart. He was spinning. Her grip fades and her mark warms with each rotation.

“Thank you.”

He tires of the glare from the sun and strains his neck to look up into the stars above once more. He could swear he feels pain as he forces his head back further, but he doesn’t care. He has to see them.

His dread and anguish disappear as he hears a pop within the suit, which rings throughout the domed glass that’s encased him. His neck finally moves. He looks up freely and is greeted by the sight of Jirus pulling Nira’s hair. He traces the outline of each child and can almost make out a third. He spins along and traces out a mother within the stars. She’s berating the children who seem to pay her no mind. How he wishes to be there. If only to live a moment longer. If only for the chance to see them again.