Anita sighed. Her meditations were interrupted again. Foreshadowing no longer felt like an appropriate word; her situation was more like an alarm clock that could not be reprogrammed. Every six hours without fail, another launch would interrupt, demanding attention and surfacing memories.
“Love goes by many names and love’s loss recurs in memory,” Anita wrote in her worn out notebook with too-small pages. Abstracting through words. Sometimes the only way to gain control over the situation.
“Unsatisfying stories refuse to reveal their beginning, middle, or end.” That one felt really profound. Anita tried to remember if she had ever enjoyed or even experienced a book or movie as unmoored as her current life. Atonal music was the closest metaphor at hand: every note randomly, rhythmlessly colliding with the next. A goldfish’s stream of consciousness.
She had become tired. Not of the repetition. The pattern was comforting. It was the arbitrariness of the people and events. She had no control over who came into her tiny room or what they said or did. One man, however, had tried to take her notebook. Anita was not powerless when highly motivated.
When would her room start to accelerate? Would she be alone when it happened?
The words flowed:
I am a sunflower seed I am the daughter of a weed I dance with sunshine While bound to become wine
When rhyming entered her writing, Anita knew things were especially bad. With only six minutes left on her timer, she opened the shield window. It was worth it, she decided, even if the risk was so high.
As she gazed out, she realized her mistake. She felt like she was in front of her entire high school delivering the wrong lines of that awful play. As the glass shattered and the fireball leapt in, Anita decided that she hadn’t really wanted to die in space anyway.
Roman Ryan 