Magnet (Lacuna Short Stories) Read Free Page A

thin wisps of exhaust trailing from the end, slowly expanding and dissipating to nothing.
    The blood was focused around my abdomen. I reached down, feeling gingerly, trying to find the hole in me.
    And then there it was. About the size of a coin, smaller perhaps, through my lower chest. I wiggled my finger inside and found it fit quite snugly... which also helped stall the rush of escaping air from my suit. What organs were in that area again...? Kidney? Liver? A hole in one of those would be bad. Organs were important for long term survival... and I’d had them all my life, so there was a kind of emotional attachment there. I pressed my finger in a little deeper and hoped that, if I passed out, there would be enough friction to keep the digit lodged in.
    A fairly morbid way to spend your Saturday, I suppose.
    I blinked away another wave of drowsiness. With my finger in the way the suit itself began to fill with blood. I could see droplets rising up in front of my visor, the force of my breath enough to suck them towards me, then away as I breathed out. For some strange reason I tried desperately not to swallow any, preferring to see them splattered against the thick glass of my visor.
    I thought of my girlfriend, back on Earth. She was the sweetest thing... hotter than a chilli bean, funny, smart – she had a PHD in physics – and... legally blind.
    People say that attractiveness doesn’t matter in a relationship, but it does. It does... and while Penny knew I wasn’t as beautiful as she was – she’d touched my scars, run her fingers along them – it wasn’t something she had to look at every day, so it was bearable.
    I wondered how she’d react to the news that I’d bought it in my first real combat. I didn’t want her to think that it was a painful death – despite it all I felt no pain at all, even when I blocked the hole with my finger – but at age twenty six I still felt a little too young to be given the twelve gun salute and tossed in the ground to become fertilizer.
    I’d never gotten to propose to her, either. I fumbled, reaching into my chest pocket with my unbloodied hand, retrieving the thin strip of metal that I’d stowed there. An engagement ring... a cheap one, nothing fancy. With the economy the way it was nobody could afford any luxuries these days; this simple steel band would have to do. We couldn’t afford diamonds – nobody could – so the ring was adorned with a simple red ruby shaped like a heart. The moment I saw it I knew it was perfect. With hands for eyes Penny wouldn’t be able to see the colour, but she could “see” the shape with her fingers. She would love it...
    Well, she would have loved it.
    I clasped it in my fingers, unfurling them gingerly, watching as the metal slowly floated up from my palm, spinning lazily in space. The metal caught the light as it spun, refracting off the gem and creating thin strips of white on the otherwise dark red gem’s surface. Spots of blood appeared on the metal and, acting on instinct, I reached up to wipe them off.
    I missed, though, and knocked the ring tumbling away from my grasp. In the lever-less vacuum of space I could do nothing but watch as it slowly drifted away.
    Blast .
    I wasn’t sure why, but the loss of my ship – and the injury I’d sustained – didn’t hurt me as much as the loss of that ring did. It was cheap, but... it was something . There was an emotional attachment to it that surpassed its value in notes and coins.
    Like I said, she would have loved it. Penny was a Buddist, so I'm not sure what exactly they do for marriage. Something I suppose. Maybe I should have asked her that before I bought the ring.
    My air was almost gone. Breathing became difficult and my visor began to fog up. Some part of me realized that my finger must have slipped out of the hole and I tried, blindly, to reinsert it. But now my hands were numb – my whole body was – and I couldn’t see to find the hole. Being unable to see or