Deranged
I’m walking on the Moon.
The Moon is dull. It’s grey. Only shades of grey, and ha, I made a joke. It was fun the first time Mission Control heard it. But at the same time it’s oh so beautiful here. The feeling of awesomeness and solitude. On Earth you always see the sky, and by night the stars are so far away. But here… here you just have to look up and you immediately have that feeling of being a dust mote standing on a tiny ball of rock, floating in the immensity of space. I have always found it mind-boggling.
So I look up. And it’s there. The Earth is rising, as if being on the Moon, living and working here, wasn’t enough, and I’m also given the privilege of watching the blue marble rise over the far hills.
I shiver.
This is wrong.
I don’t know how, but this is wrong. I cannot be an astronaut. I never trained for this, I don’t remember it. I look at my hands. Four fingers and a thumb, encased in the sturdy gloves. The regolith cloud slowly falling back at my feet. I turn around, and stare at my rover, and in the distance the lights from Moonbase glow brilliantly and beckon me.
Wrong, wrong.
I take a step, and my boots leave eternal footprints on the satellite’s surface. I feel dizzy, as if I was riding a rollercoaster. A part of me wants to call Moonbase, but another part still screams this is not possible.
Am I dreaming?
I look down at my hands again, and they are strange. How are they strange? I don’t know.
But I’m no longer on the Moon. This… this is some sort of hallucination, because I recognize this. I’m on New York, crossing Sixth Avenue. People stare at me and point at me. How could they not? I’m wearing an EVA suit in the middle of the street.
I see my reflection on a store window. And my blood freezes in my veins. I am in flames. All of this is absurd, but there’s no other way I can react. I start taking off my helmet. Some bystanders come over to help. I can see a woman running off a shop with a fire extinguisher in her hands.
My helmet disengages and I let it fall.
People stop and panic. They point, and scream, and run away. And I feel the heat and the flames and the pain.
And I scream.
***
“Is this the patient you talked me about, Dr Shane?”
“Yes. A pity. A truly brilliant scientist,” he said. He passed over his datapad. She tapped the surface several times. “Top-grade astrophysicist and astrobiologist. The work of his life was trying to contact alien life-forms. He obsessed over it.”
“To the point of becoming dangerous, I see.”
“Yes, Dr Goah. He suffered delusions. He attacked his laboratory colleagues claiming he was on fire. For now all we can do is subdue him.”
At the other side of the window, the patient’s shackled tentacles writhed and shook as the sedative kicked in. The two doctors slithered away, rattling their antennae in disappointment.
~~~~
This is my entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: February 15–21, 2016 on the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+.
I had a hard time with this story, because the astronaut on fire just made me think of some kind of unreal situation. I came up with and discarded several ideas, until I decided to go with the one above.
