The light no longer shown through the windows, and I walked slowly to the only couch to plop down from a hard day’s work of doing nothing. “Long day?” my wife asked not looking up from her book. With my face pressed against a pillow, I mumbled, “If you call looking at a computer screen for ten hours long… then yes.”

She leaned over giving me one of those great back rubs. “Would watching one of your horrible old superhero movies help?” I shot to sitting straight up, unable to believe that my comic-hating wife just suggested treason. “Black Panther, please,” I said with all the childhood glee of a thousand twelve-year-old boys. She sighed reaching for the remote.

About an hour later, my wife had fallen fast asleep on my shoulder, and the dream world was closing in on me too when we were suddenly jolted awake by a blaring alarm echoing louder and louder. We scrambled to our feet; my wife was clinging onto my arm. “What’s happening?!” she screamed. In over thirty days of traveling through space, we had never heard anything like this before.

“Do not leave me,” I told her with pleading eyes, dragging her frozen body along with me to discover the error. I needed to get to the main control area. All of the alerts and malfunctions would be reported there, but the path might have become unreachable. I had to keep a strong face for her.

Leaving the ship’s sleeping quarters was not an easy task. The company I work for had chosen to buy cheaper fleet ships, as most frugal businesses do. There was only one exit and entrance for the area, and I kept praying that it had not locked itself yet. The system should typically lock down all doors that are unsafe to pass through. All my fears were confirmed when we were greeted with the cold steel hatch–completely sealed.

My wife started trembling. She knew when we stopped walking that something was very wrong. She didn’t deserve this. Her career as a freelance painter meant she could come with me on long-distance delivery runs. And the subjects of her planet portraits were beyond compare. And now here we were, stuck in a giant metal prison.

I turned to my wife, putting her silently crying face in my hands as the red lights flashed above us. “We’re going to be alright, ok? Things like this happen all the time. I know this is your first time, but I’ve dealt with problems like this before. Nod if you understand.” She bobbed her head up and down, and I wiped the tears off her face.

“Now, I’m going to go through the maintenance ducto get to the control area. I need you to stay here in case something goes wrong, all right?” She nodded her head again. She always was so strong.

I gave my wife a kiss on the cheek and crawled up into the vents. While I shimmied my way through, my mind pounded in rhythm with the alarm. Was it wrong to lie to my wife? Things like this only ever happened in training. This was the first time I was flying with this model.

The control area came more quickly than I expected, but the alarms were ts still just as deafening. I raced over to the flashing red panel and choked on my breath as I saw the error. I sunk down to the ground. Nothing could be done.

My wife called on the intercom. “Honey, did you make it? I’m starting to worry.” Her words roared louder in my ears than the alarms. I was paralyzed.
She called again, “Are you ok? What’s going on?” We had maybe ten minutes at best.
“I need to know if something happened to you,” she cried. I couldn’t speak.
“It’s getting more difficult to breathe!”

That broke the stupor. I diverted all the oxygen to the sleeping quarters, closed off every route. A rescue vessel was an hour away; she could survive until then. I ran over to the intercom, unable to breathe. “I-I love you,” I whispered. “I love you, too-” And the rest was darkness.

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash (Edited)