Writing writing, more and more.
This is my newest story for my fiction class. I'm almost done with the first one, and the one I posted last time I've abandoned because it's not going anywhere. This one, however, I'm REALLY loving.
Robert knew he was going to die soon. And not just the fact that he would die eventually, that life would inevitably end for him as it would for every living creature. He had been wrestling with that since childhood, after watching his old dog Bernie die underneath the porch. Later he had asked his mother what death was, and she had explained that when you die, your soul goes to God and all that. When he asked his father, he just simply said, “The end.”
His therapist had asked him why he feared death so much. It wasn’t that he thought it would hurt, or that something far worse lay beyond. The idea of nothing lying beyond this life terrified him more than anything he could comprehend. “But why fear something you probably won’t even feel?” his therapist asked. Robert had said, “Not feeling, not thinking, not BEING scares me; because I don’t know how to do anything other than exist.” The fact that everyone else was faced with this sort of existential dilemma did nothing to soothe Robert’s fears- he felt alone in his paranoia, as if every other human being had accepted their faith with a sort of resolute apathy, and he alone was left to ponder what lay beyond his body’s expiration date.
He wished with all of his heart that death could be as quantifiable as the science he built his life around, but with age he learned that he wouldn’t find the answers in his physics textbook, the laboratory, and later in the depths of space. If anything, the dependability of absolute scientific proof made Robert even more aware of the lack of evidence on the side of life after death, and he could barely sleep, his thoughts thickened with despair, his dreams even darker than the endless sky outside the window of his sleeping quarters.
No, what Robert knew was that the end was coming. Actually coming. His crew had survived the water rationing, the mutiny, the eventual cutoff of contact with Earth after they had entered the dead zone. The nine of them had lived together in close quarters for almost sixteen months, and there’d barely been a scuffle between them. But Robert knew they were no closer to completing their mission, and their oxygen supply would run out before they could find a source for more.
Robert’s God-fearing mother, his alcoholic father. Lynda’s nine cats, all named after members of the crew. Elizabeth’s newborn son and faithful, unsuspecting husband. Martin’s unstable psychotic sisters. John’s long list of lovers. Samantha’s houseplants. Cassandra’s remaining set of grandparents. Lee’s father, the president. Edward’s daughter, Jane. All would perish, back on Earth. They had failed.