Day Two
(age twenty-four)
Quiet time evolved into a weird, dizzy, floating kind of sleep.
Kelli dozed off and on, too disoriented to fall deeper, but too exhausted to want to move.
The sleeping bag enclosed her like a sarcophagus, but its thick, soft, dense sides didn’t weigh her down the way blankets were supposed to.
She couldn’t lie back and let her body sink into the mattress.
She saw weird lights flashing by when she closed her eyes; she’d read that was normal in space, just cosmic rays bouncing off of her retinas.
And she still felt like she was falling.
At first she heard Rowan moving around, faintly, not far from her; but before long that sound stopped, and she figured he’d fallen asleep, too.
After several hours, she noticed she had to pee. Kelli made a good effort to ignore this, but like all such efforts it eventually proved impossible. With a scowl to herself, she unzipped the sleeping bag and pushed back out.
She was clumsy in zero-grav, overshooting or undershooting the points that she tried to kick out to, but she managed with some effort. She knew where she was going. Rowan had pointed out the bathroom when he showed her around earlier—an outhouse-sized cubby with a privacy door.
“It’s pretty self-explanatory,” he’d said with a funny, embarrassed look. “There are instructions on the inside of the door.”
There were, in fact, instructions on the inside of the door.
They were, in fact, easy to understand. But the whole process was absurd and humiliating, involving not one but two separate suction devices which had to be positioned just right, and to make matters worse, it made a sound like a vacuum cleaner the whole time.
“I hate this spaceship and I hate space,” Kelli said to no one as she emerged. She grabbed a blob of sanitizer and rubbed it over her hands until the sensation calmed her. She was being stupid. She couldn’t remember what Orlando would do.
Well, no. That wasn’t quite true.
Deep breaths. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
She could remember if she tried.