Esther K Bowen

They say space is black.

You spin in the void, slowly, gracefully, like a ballerina, like a child in the womb. Can you feel nothing? Is it physically possible to lose all feeling?

The senses have shrunk down to the pinpoint world contained in your vacuum suit. The sweat. Each breath. The blood pounding in your ears and through your heart.

You are bathed in the light of stars. Countless points gleam above your head, below your feet, and any way your weightless body turns. Points so far their distance is measured in the years it takes for their beams to travel. Somehow, they appear to be just beyond the tips of your fingers.

You want to reach out, to touch one. Pluck it from its shroud and hold it in your hand. Watch its beams play across your glove. If you wrapped your hand around it, would you put out its tiny flame? Would it burn you as it died?

You stop feeling when you die.

You could close your fist in fury, give the rage its outlet where none existed before.

“It’s just meat,” they said.

“Souls,” you answered. Unmeasurable and unquantifiable.

They say space is cold.

But you are sweating in your vacuum suit. And the suit is yours. None of your crewmates would have wanted it afterward. It is bad luck to wear the clothes of the dead.

For a heartbeat, you cannot breathe. You are smothering in the layers of your perspiration-filled uniform, pressed flat against your body by your suit. Are you drowning? Like in the lake back home, when you dove so deep you forgot which direction led up, back to the summer air of the meadow. You clawed at the muddy bottom in panic. The blood pounded in your ear until your brother’s arm wrapped around your burning chest and dragged you back to the blue sky.

The sky is no longer blue. Up is a concept. You can breathe, but not forever.

No one can breathe forever. From the time you tumbled out the airlock until now, thousands of people took their last breath on Earth. Some wanted to go, waiting, ready. Others must have been terrified, fighting, screaming. At least you are not afraid.

And you won’t scream. Not anymore. There is nothing left to say.

Your fingers grow numb, but not from cold. The cuffs that hold your wrists in front of you have pinched the circulation. You try to wiggle your fingers a bit, but you are clumsy in the suit. What does it matter now if you can’t feel your hands?

Suddenly, you want to scream again. To lash out at the entire universe. You beg to feel pain, to die in blood and fire. That would be a soldier’s death. Not this slow numbness and final choking breaths. You want to kick something but you cannot, so you turn your gaze back to the stars.

They say space is silent.

Silence is welcome. The first thing you did in the airlock was smash your head against the unyielding metal, crushing the sensitive transmitter on the side of your helmet. Cutting off the voices that threatened, pleaded, offered you one more chance to change your mind.

You never heard the screams. The commander would not give audio. Did not want her crew to balk at the orders she had received. But everyone standing on the bridge knew some of the people screamed. You could see it plain as the sun. They screamed while some cried and others prayed. A few just stood looking up at the instrument of death. That was when the junior officer threw up, and for a heartbeat, for a breath of sweet air, you thought they wouldn’t do it. You knew your crewmates. You laughed with your fellow officers, played cards with the first mate, shared e-books with the commander.

For a heartbeat, for a breath of air, you thought they were human.

You stop feeling when you are dead.

Is that what they were? Dead? How could they feel? Were they dead as they stood on the bridge? Dead men standing? Had they no life as they made their calculations? Were their fingers stiff and cold by the time they flipped the switches? Every one of them did their duty, made their calculations, pushed their buttons.

As you screamed at them, threatened, pleaded, you remembered they were human.

They say space is black.

Black for death and sin and mourning. You know people will mourn. You know enough of history. When the wars are over, people will ask how it could have happened. What factors came together? The politics, the economics, the social culture. But they will forget to tear away the layers of the human heart. To remember its desperate condition, the razor’s edge it beats on. How it is ever ready to plunge to the depths of a blackness deeper than the void.

Sight remains. The only sense that escapes the confines of the suit, reaching out, drinking in the piercing light of a million stars. A billion?

What is the number of the stars? Who watches them die? Who remembers? Who counts each breath? Each rise and fall of your chest. Every time you are filled with stale air. It will not last forever.

Nothing lasts forever, does it? Not breath, not light, not stars.

Souls.

Souls last forever. Long past the infinite sea of black. You have to run to keep unstained. But what happens when you can no longer run, when you find the dead end?

Dead end is redundant.

Sometimes all you can do is stand.

They are deaf to your condemnations, blind to your pleas. Their hearts are stone while yours beats red. Are they all dead?

Or are they only human?

The air seems thicker with every breath, though you know it is your imagination. The night of space wraps its black curtain around you like a shroud. Perhaps you will close your eyes now. Slip from sleep into the grave. Or will you keep awake, watching for the moment when the shroud is torn away?