Religion In Space

• Tara McBean, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2022

The inescapable emptiness, the insufferable fear of the unknown. Propelling through the vast expanse, the vast darkness. An all-consuming grasp on your soul, its dark tentacles wrap around the pumping heart releasing ink until your ventricles soon pump the purest of dark bloods. Pure for it is terrifying but contradictably beautiful, perhaps it is the sheer beauty that makes it so terrifying, so powerful.
Looking out the small window like a hallowed socket of blackness, into the unknown, into space. When there is nothing for hundreds of petrifying miles, all there is left, the only morsel of consciousness, is you. Then you start to hollow out yourself, it starts as the smallest piece missing from the centre of your torso, but as you propel further and further climbing the endless invisible ladder the emptiness spreads. Down your legs so you can’t walk anymore, and then it works its way up getting faster and faster, as you catapult faster and faster. You search, you look out your weary sockets searching for a glimpse of light from somewhere deep, just the smallest glimpse you plead.
But nothing. The darkness grows, it moves up your legs to your hips freezing you in place looking out into the darkness frozen ironically just like it. Now its cold touch is ever more evident creeping up your body the crimpling fear taking over your hips your torso, gasping breaths with no air trying to escape it. It curls round your chest its tentacles fastening round your throat pushing down crushing your final rasping breath out of you, making your knees buckle you slip to the cold ground lifeless.
With no ability to move or breath an urgency to speed the agonising process absorbs you, to open the air vents and let it take you, for what better escape from excruciating all-consuming fear than death itself, oh death what a treat what a release.
With nothing else to do but die you make a final prayer to a god you never believed in when you could have. With no voice left you mutter your hallow words in your head hoping they can hear you. ‘Take me.’
Just as these words are drawn from your consciousness trickling through your brain to the smallest crevices of darkness. Light bursts into view.
A gold blue green light blaring through the once empty sockets of the vessel cascading over your lifeless body. It’s now golden tentacles wriggle through the thick glass and curl around your icy toes, quickly spreading a golden liquid warmth through them springing the life back into you. The golden river travels up moving faster than the darkness ever could before covering your body, your legs, your torso, your chest. Gasp of life filling the small cabin with hope. The gold moved to your head bringing the pink back into your cheeks and a sparkle to your empty eyes.
You look out onto the green and blue orb that sent the gold and mutter, “Thank God.”