Nine Seconds by Theodora Goss

Nine
The hull has opened, like a silver flower.
She tries to grab a hatch. The handle breaks,
And fragments, spreading like serrated knives
Or jagged petals, float against her arm,
Then float away. She thinks of the alarm,
The red light flashing in the corridors,
The impact and the grinding and the rip,
Remembers running, being lifted up,
Floating above the floors, then floating out
In jets of oxygen and nitrogen.
She reaches toward the hull, remembering
In space you have nine seconds, fails to hold.


Eight
The motion sends her farther from the ship.
She sees the ruined modules with debris
Floating around them, and the ruptured shape.
She thinks, I should feel something more than this
Dispassionate regret, like grief or fear.
But fear has drifted off and floats somewhere
Among the reinforced aluminum
That moves in shards through random fields of glass.
She thinks, it is a dream, but knows no dream
Has this exquisite clarity.

Seven
In space,
She thinks, you cannot hear the clashing sound
That metal fragments make, like kettledrums.
They drift and crash in mute cacophony.
She mouths her name, the multisyllables
Of her identity, but makes no noise.
It has no meaning now, and she discards
It like a scarf that drifts and disappears
Into the silence.

Six
When she notices
She cannot feel her hands, she turns to look,
Sees hands that flicker red, then flicker out,
Then flicker red in intervals that match
The intermittent flash of the alarm.
They are not hers. She wonders who has lost
Two hands like hummingbirds.

Five
She thinks, at last
The universe reveals itself. The eye
Perceives directly, not through panes of glass
But naked and uncertain. Look, the stars
Revolve erratically, like fireflies
Glinting above the surface of a lake.

Four
She dives into the water, hears it rush
About her ears. The lake is dark and still,
And on its bottom blooms a silver flower.

Three
She reaches for it, but the scattered lights
Of phosphorescent fish are winking out.

Two
She must dive deeper, so she spreads her mouth
And drinks the darkness in.

One


(For Geoffrey Landis, who first told me that a
body in a vacuum has about nine seconds of useful
consciousness, and whose web site was my primary
source of information.)