Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
I wake up from a dream about bookshelves and the answers to life. The sheets are damp with sweat and tangled around me. I sit up and look around at my dark room, allowing my eyes to adjust. The stars twinkle outside my living quarters window.
I’m one of the few people here who remembers life on Earth.
I fumble a cigarette out from a pack on the bedside table and wonder for about the hundredth time why there isn’t a twenty-four-hour kitchen on this station.
I stand by the window for a few minutes with the sheet wrapped around my shoulders like a cloak as I smoke. I look back at the bed and can still almost see the impression that Janet made after being there for six weeks. She hasn’t been there for the last two nights and has no plans to return.
I am worried about how little I care.
I have no position of authority here but there is a certain mysticism surrounding the fact that not only have I been on a planet, but I’ve been on the very planet that birthed us as a race. To tell the truth, I remember very little about those days back on planet Earth but I don’t let on.
I stand and smoke and look out the window and wait for the timers to turn on the morning lighting.
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