Nyala
A Short Story
There had been a large explosion. There had to have been. She hadn't heard it, but she could feel the tremors ripple through the dull grey steel as if the side of the ship had turned liquid and she was standing in the shallows of the South Pacific, waves lapping up on a pebble beach. The next instant her breath spiked, she turned to look. Forwards, backwards. Debris—tiny fragments glimmering at the very aft—rocketing away at such speeds that soon it was nothing but a mirage. She shook her head as if to jolt herself awake. The comms. Why wasn't she on the comms?
"What happened? Hey, Chido, what the hell happened?
Chido?
Are you okay?"
Spinning, it was all spinning. Not her, but the ship, or perhaps the stars. The stars themselves had come alive and had started dancing in unison. She could have been thrown from the ship, set adrift into eternal darkness, if it hadn't been for her iron grip whenever she was in the vacuum. The blood had surely drained from her knuckles, her hands, but she could not see, not underneath the black gloves.
"Zee? Chido?"
She had just enough presence of mind to activate the emergency broadcast, to overcome the thumping of her heart and broadcast her voice through the entire ship.
"Zee? Chido? Frances?
Are you there?"
The silence, the spin—she feels it now. How her hand was glued to the bar. How she must let go. How she can't. How dizziness seizes her head as much as her stomach. Breakfast a retch away. Corned beef and snaps. The second to last packet in the cooler, so she should save it for Chido. He has a taste for it, whereas she can barely stand the stuff, but it is better than chicken-paste and spinach for the fourth day in a row. Let go, she thinks. Let go. Her eyes glaze over and a deep breath passes through her body. Finally, she lets go with her hand—it is stiff, tingling—and clutches the bar to her right. She hooks on her tether. Move and keep moving, that is all she can do.
Could do. She is unsure if she can even get up now.
As her hand wrapped itself around another bar her eyes drifted back towards the aft, the shimmer of a thousand shattered pieces had completely vanished against the backdrop of dancing stars, but a large object lazily spun where the engine had been. Slowly, ever so slowly, it floated away from them. Away from itself. Into the depths.
Another hand to another bar.
"I am coming in."
The words were torn from her vocal cords—escaped her never to return. Each word a part of her that was lost forever. Unless she could get inside, then hope had another chance. The comms were down because of the explosion, they couldn't reach her. Zee might already be in the airlock, she reckoned, waiting for the pressure gauge to go down to zero, for the seals to unlock.
She didn't see Chido at breakfast. She went straight to the cargo bay to check on the shipment. The fragile goods were all tightly fastened, they were going to turn a nice profit in a few weeks. But she didn't know if Chido had had his last corned beef and snaps. Why it seems important she can't tell.
"I am almost at the lock."
Her hands slid from bar to bar now, faster and faster, her feet nearly slipping twice in the struggle to keep up. When she came to the door she pushed her helmet up against the glass. The airlock was empty. Dim red light filled her view. The emergency seals would have kicked in as soon as the back half of the ship erupted. She didn't know the overrides. Her heart had made its way into her throat. Something was going to give.
Something is forcing her to relive it. How she focuses on the task at hand. How she brings up her display with an eye signal, her dilated pupils taking her through various windows like a cursor. She flits her lashes to confirm. The override code superimposes itself on her view of the doors and she brings her fingers to the panel in order to punch in the code. She could lose herself in this moment. Let go and drift off. The cord would keep her latched to the ship of course, but she can't be sure that she would return. Her vision darkens. The code is rejected.
That isn't right. She blinks a couple times. At least the panel is powered. She tries the code again and the lights turn green. Before she can process it, her hand is groping for the handle. In in in.
She comes loose with a shock.
No
No, it is the doors. The doors slide open and she hurries clumsily, her feet pushing off the railing to propel her inside.
"I'm in. If you can hear me, I am in.
I am coming."
But what was it that had happened? Did a fuel tank break, or a booster set off a wrong spark? Were they shot down? She would have seen. Among the dancing light there would have been a flare setting off against the black. Maybe she wouldn't have. She couldn't even get her feet in focus, how was she to trust herself?
She recalls it perfectly, how she pushed open the inner airlock door without having to wait because the ship was depressurised. The delicate soap bubble pricked with a pin. That shouldn't have happened. The bulkhead doors would have closed when the aft blew open and kept everyone safe. They couldn't have failed unless the electronics were out. But the doors wouldn't depend on the aft circuitry, they would run on an independent circuit. Probably. It was no more than an educated guess. Zee would know.
Through the inner doors and into the side corridor. Unlike the green welcome of the airlock the corridor was dark. Streaks of light soon beamed from her helmet down upon the grated deck. Her home had never been this dark.
Home
She pushed herself forward, further into the dark halls. Then she noticed the walls. Torn open with such force that she could not imagine what had happened to cause it. As if a beast had ripped through solid steel like it was cardboard. She saw Frances greeting her at the intersection again, a spectre, the very first time she set foot on the Nathaniel. Their very own ship. Chido, Zee, Frances, and her on the brink of becoming a family. They were in the docks of Equinox Station, Frances gave her the tour. The mess on the right. A little dingy but given time they would line the walls with hydroponic tubes. Plants now curled and twisted round them, draping down to eye level. They waved lazily back and forth in zero G, begging for oxygen. Starving.
From the corner of her eye. The corner. With a sharp breath she recalls. There in the corner, a dark shade against the wall. An apparition at first. Until she turns her head, the beams of light passing over the mess table, casting a shadow on each cut and indent until she reveals the apparition, hardens it in the light. It feels like her doing. Frances, his boots magnetized, clinging to the floor as his body sways back and forth, his hair dancing like the stars outside. There hadn’t been time. A helmet made its way across the ceiling. His skin was a sickly grey. She turned, her breath spiking, her heart bursting. And then burrowing, she relives the sensation, burrowing inward and making itself into a fist, all her emotions drawing into that one powerful clasp. And the clarity.
“Chido please,”
she mutters.
“Chido please.”
A faint beep
She took hold of the bars embedded in the wall panelling, or what remained of it at least, and began to pull herself forward, filled with determination. The door to the cockpit was wide open. The helmets were on the rack, still fastened.
She can’t recall the rest. She knows, but she can’t get to it. She claws at herself but her heart won’t open. A faint beeping rings in her ears. With effort her eyes open. The oxygen bar on the lower left of her heads-up display is red and flickering. Replenish the O2 supply, it is telling her. She must replenish her supply. A faint smile briefly passes her lips. Minutes left. Till the last second it will fight the inevitable. As her vitals stop it will continue to call for aid, until it will merely call out to anyone who will listen. Human desperation in the machine. She tries to power it down, but it refuses. No matter. She sits in the airlock, the stars glide by in perfect step with one another. She recalls the night her and Chido sat in the arboretum of Equinox station. She’d snuck out while her dad dozed off as she had done a dozen times before to join him. They’d gaze up at the stars. Pinpricks he’d call them. Whilst she slowly lost all perspective within the grand majesty something would awaken within Chido. The stars empowered him. His tongue loosened and he’d chat the night away. She wasn’t convinced he needed her to keep it up, but the flow of words was comforting.
How much time had passed before she could leave the cockpit she couldn’t tell, she couldn’t even be sure she had ever entered at all.
There is no sign of Zee. Not a hint of her existence anywhere. As if she was simply plucked out of space and gone. It is preferable to the alternatives. She scoured the ship to find her. Feel her presence. She imagined her in their quarters, resting, but the quarters were deserted; half the ceiling had collapsed. When she finally made her way to the engine room, she was greeted by nothing but a few remnants. There was space, vast and endless. Only then did she understand the severity of what had occurred. They hadn’t stood a chance, she shouldn’t have either. And she won’t. She would like to mourn, but it is hard to feel at all. Perhaps it will simply pass, like the stars forever circling by. She circled back to the mess hall,
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she demagnetized Frances’ boots and laid him out horizontally, not thinking about the pool of blood floating around him, her eyes careful to avoid the cockpit. The breached walls flash before her mind.
“Peace. Be in peace” the words are stuck in her throat. She returned to the airlock and pushed herself down into a sitting position.
She sees herself again in proportion to the vastness. Again as she has so many times. Again as that night in the arboretum, she lays out her existence and measures it against that of a single star. She loses herself.
"These giant globes burning up in a fury are more awe inspiring, more poetic, more devastating than anything we could ever come up with. I can tell you the sun's precise diameter, but can you imagine it? Truly comprehend the actual size of any one of those stars?"
Chido waved her impassioned words away with equal fervor and leaned in. "No, but look at them, Nyala. Really look. They are but specks in your eye. You could extinguish a dozen with no more than a single finger. We are the giants out here." He replied, covering a slice of heaven with his forefinger.
"You are 5'6, Chi."
His forefinger swiveled from the heavens to her. "You aren't looking!"
She looked at him.
"Not like that. It is always the same story with you." Perhaps it was.
She tried to look now, filled with the sense that it was too late. The stars, pinpricks in a sheet of black paper. It suddenly seemed cruel that something so insignificant as a single light should outlast them all.
Then it seemed as if it didn't matter.
1.3927 million kilometers.
The diameter of the sun.
A sun that could never care, that could do nothing but expand and grow cold.
She could tell its story, all of its stories.
She could tell the story of Chido's first love.
A stowaway in the cargo bay. He approaches it with such care, holding out his tin of corned beef to tempt it in. The patience of a saint. The patience he never shows anyone else.
Anyone but a rat that pulls up its nose at the slightest whiff of corned beef and it scurries into a slit between the pallets.
"Don't worry, she is just playing hard to get," Zee jokes.
"It is a he." Chido replies.
"Does it matter?"
'Yes, it matters." It didn’t really, yet all of it does. The first time they set foot on earth and saw skies that weren't dark, and even when they were, they shone. Light pollution they called it. She was mesmerized. It matters. Her feet submersed in the ocean’s waves, the cool current and sudden depth of the same waters that her ancestors had stood in before her.
I matter.
They named her Phyllis at birth, after her grandmother. Father's side of course. The same father that cast her out when she wouldn't work a cleaning job in the station's old crawl spaces to line the old man's pockets anymore. Nyala. She had once heard the name in a video and it stuck in her mind. It clung to her till one day the mirror would show Nyala, not Phyllis. And it became her. She knew it was African, Bantu, that it reconnected her with her mother's heritage in some small way. She didn't know it meant mountain goat then.
Chido was the first person to get to know Nyala.
She was overcome by the urge to make her way to the cooler. To see if she would find that one last packet of corned beef and snaps, or if it was gone. She would like that, but her breath was short-
I’m sorry
Her breath short-
With the sun bright in the sky, she leaps across a hedge just like in that movie
Nothing like how she imagined it would go
Her hand cut up
Stings like pinpricks
-and she can't get up.
Her breath short
Just hold on
a little while
just a little
while
