Adrift
by Gillian O'Shaughnessy
After a while you forget you’re afraid. You retract your helmet and lift your face to a pink bloom of celestial cloud. It smells of sour milk and steel. It won’t be long now. You don’t dwell on the shattered craft that failed you or if there might yet be a way to escape. Explorer’s folly, they’d said when you left, and you don’t wonder now if they were right. You sit cross legged in a vast field of ilmenite dust, remove your glove and trace circles in the surface with your finger while you wait. You think of a lost planet far away, where you fished with your father on a clear lake, cooked your catch over the reckless embers of a coal fire, tasted sugar-white flesh in your mouth. As you breathe your last under a three-moon sky, you know, in the end, you were always going home.
Gillian O'Shaughnessy is a writer and reader from Walyalup, Fremantle in Western Australia. She has work in x-R-A-Y, Fractured, SmokeLong, Lit Namjooning, Splonk and Night Parrot Press, among others and her stories appear in the Best Small Fictions in 2023 and 2024.
This story won First Prize in the November 24 Monthly Micro Competition.
Beautiful - a savasana meditation.