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Hannah stared at the small dark spot on the mess hall wall. She stood in the middle of the room, having entered moments ago. As she caught her breath, she barely remembered storming out of med bay or running through the corridors. She didn’t notice the stack of panels leaning up beside an exposed wall section in corridor D-1. She didn’t notice the crack in the floor that had appeared since she was last in this room. She didn’t notice that the vibrations of the ship were getting worse. She didn’t notice the streaks of blood that still oozed slowly from her knuckles and stained her fingers. She did, however, notice several empty Roth’s bottles on the floor near her, and these she kicked across the room with an impressive measure of strength and a certain kind of dumb luck in terms of accuracy. The first bottle flew like an arrow, directly at another bottle, also empty, that stood proudly on the counter near the dispenser. Both bottles smashed spectacularly. The next kick sent another bottle sailing directly toward the dispenser. Halfway through its flight her subconscious took note of the trajectory and its possible negative effects. Time seemed to slow, as the bottle continued to spin carelessly along its path. The narrow end smashed squarely into and through the dispenser’s display screen. The crash was accompanied by a sparking sound as the circuitry fried itself. The mess hall lights went out, draping the mess hall in utter blackness. A second later, the emergency lights kicked on, but the single dim red lamp above the hatch emitted only enough light to show the exit path, not to light the room.
“Shit!”
She started to run toward the dispenser, tripping over something in the darkness, then made her way a bit more slowly, bumping into a couple of carapaces along the way. She managed to ignore them. The dispenser was for the most part unresponsive, save for a faint, pathetically distorted beep of failure when she tried to enter any commands. A small wisp of smoke wafted out of the machine, bringing with it a horrible smell that made her feel a bit sick. At the same time though, she felt a hunger pang, as her body instinctively recognized the implication of the broken dispenser and had relayed the bad news to her stomach directly, bypassing her conscious mind.
She leaned against the dispenser. And sobbed. The dispenser had been the last thing she could trust to take care of her. Inexplicably, it suddenly seemed to act as a stand-in for her mother, now departed, and never really grieved. She had not said goodbye. She had not fully accepted the hard truth. “Everyone is dead” was somehow a much easier concept to process than “my mother is dead.” The impact of this realization shook Hannah to a depth she did not recognize and would never have guessed could exist. Some deep buried cavern of emotion never explored was suddenly flooded as if by a great wave. Her body racked in great heaving wails as tears soaked her cheeks. She had never known such pain. The torment of this loss was a tangible yet shapeless thing. It surrounded her like a heavy blanket, muffling her thought, her breath, her very life.
Eventually, Hannah slept. Pain turned to numbness, and numbness to oblivion. Hours passed. Maybe days. Her subconscious mind slowly fermented fear and anger into sorrow. Her anguish became a well-worn cloak of blackness and silent sound. That impossible sound emanated from a hidden seed within Hannah’s psyche. It ebbed with her choking breaths. It wove a resonance between her pulse and the white noise of her unfathomable neural rhythms. Slowly, as Hannah let the pain of loss and trauma emerge and flow uninhibited, the dark blanket transformed its mass into sharp energy.
Periodic bursts of uncontrollable sobbing gradually became interspersed with deeply exhaled sighs. These sighs gradually moved from her chest to include nose and throat, instigating first her sinus to a tingling energetic sensation, then her larynx to engage a passive voice, allowing each sigh to become a small vocalization, a humming buzz, a primordial word stripped of semantic limits and thus containing all possible meaning.
Eventually, this humming took on tone, and the tone became a wandering melody. An improvisational tune of remembrances of human connectivity. It gradually resolved into a very specific song of remembrance, of mothers singing sweet little homemade lullabies to their young daughters.
“Little babe, blessed babe, there’s nothing to fear, so sleep my dear.”