That sinking feeling

Here's today's fiction entry for Three Word Wednesday, inspired by the space shuttle Endeavor's wayward toolbox. Here's another article about it. Today's words are tension, corrupt and intellect.

Also, please visit Purple Houses again tomorrow. I'll be posting a new minigallery of photographs. Something different.



They were adrift in the airless maw of space and the only way they were going to get home is if they repaired the drive and restored power to the ship.

Michaels hated spacewalks. In the endless eternity he always felt incongruously claustrophobic, like the heavy blackness around him would envelop him like a sea monster and crush the life out of him. He prayed the corrupt leaders who had funded the mission had not used the lowest bidder for his life support equipment.

He reached behind him to pull the tether holding the toolbox, but there was no tension on the line. He turned slowly in the airless space and saw that the toolbox was floating away from the ship.

His intellect told him that the toolbox was out of reach. He desperately rationalized, though, that there was a way to retrieve it – that he could reenter the ship and find something to snag it. Or that there was some other way to open the hatch that protected the crippled drive.

There wasn’t.

Soon the toolbox would be invisible, just another white gleam in the eye of the monster.