(no subject)

Someone passed out donating blood today.

I didn't notice right away. Someone yelled - I don't know what, asking for help, I think - and I looked up to see this young lady lying like a corpse, muscles slack, head lolling, and the Red Cross employee crouched next to her, doing something with (disconnecting?) the donation apparatus. I was plugged into an apheresis machine, I had to squelch the impulse to go and help - all I could do was sit as a half-dozen workers hurried over.

(She was okay, but that was scary.)

"The Slow Way Out"

nanakikun was generous enough to let me edit this and post it here, in exchange for typing it in for him.

"THE SLOW WAY OUT."
By Merle D. Zimmermann, author
 Robin Zimmermann, editor

The dark-clad figure, floating silently in the abyss of stars, moved wrist and hand clumsily in the unfamiliar encumbrance of the suit and eyed the flexible status screen. For once, his sigh of dismay was unfeigned.

Of all the suits he found, of all the oxygen cells he could have lifted, why one with less than quarter reserves?

And of all the times, why hadn't he made sure to radio first?

The opportunity was too good. It was always too good. Or too bad, he thought, and dialed the filter valve down until the air grew stale and the edges of the dimmer continents drifting above began to flicker into darkness. He had known he was going to die, like all the other fools who were on what was now the battered broken wreck of the satellite substation. But he always thought his death would come much later back ... home, where the icy blue fields of frozen glass held the rainwater, cupped it in the monstrous prints of outstretched hands which were all that remained of test site twenty five, of "fairvale" after everything became nothing and he returned to find an ocean of silicon ice.

He didn't expect death like this, quiet, slow, creeping and choking.

Recalling something he had read as a child, he reached glacially across his chest again and slowly turned another knob, beginning to shiver almost before the first wisp of chill tickled his skin.

His silent sixty crewmates, or soon to be silent sixty, had to be floating somewhere nearby. He hadn't the heart to turn the radio back on. Whether he lived or not, he knew the few cries he would hear before switching it off again would haunt silence's steps, echoing mutely in the gaps between breaths, between thoughts.

He felt the cold now, and savored the shivers while he could, savored the little glimpses of the sleeping rabbit of eurasia, now below him, and the moon's shadow, now above.

Then he closed his eyes.

Footnote: He wrote a wicked audio track that 'goes with' this, too. (Technically, it's a tone poem for the unwritten prequel to the story.) Pity you can't hear it. *hinthint*