No. I’m not in space. This isn’t air, it’s water. The water is black and so cold that my limbs have grown stiff and numb and I sink slowly, slowly, like a statue thrown into the deepest part of the ocean. I try to move my hands and feet but they are entirely unresponsive to my commands. I hear something, a muffled sound traveling slowly through the water, but can’t discern what it is or where it is coming from. It grows louder and then louder still, and it seems to be a siren, with prolonged wails followed by silence, but then I realize it is music. Rising and falling, closer and closer, until it is crystal clear, a warm, trembling vibrato, produced by an expert hand. I feel overcome by emotion listening to the cello, and just then, it seems as if I reach the bottom of the sea, my body settling onto something firm after all the falling. Like the water, it’s cold and dark. The bottom is entirely smooth so this must be a pool rather than a lake or an ocean.

I’m aware of something foreign in my mouth – a pebble, a rock, a snail, a fragment of metal? I try to spit it out but my mouth is filled with water. I push whatever it is away with my tongue, and it finally slips from my mouth. Slowly, I feel about the bottom of the pool, and my right hand seems to regain some of its movement and I realize I’m not in water at all, but on the ground. I’m so cold, colder than I’ve been in all my life, the kind of cold I know to be dangerous. Some life and movement seeps back into other parts of me. I wave the toes of my right foot and they move. I try the left but a wild pain crashes over me, like I’ve been struck by an ax. I clench the muscles in my jaw and they tighten. I try to open my eyes, but they won’t. I touch a hand to my face and the right side feels almost normal, but the left is a swollen, unfamiliar landscape of tender bumps and stinging cuts. I rub my right eye gently and after, I’m able to open it a little to look around.

I’m face-down on the ground, shrouded by a layer of fresh snow. I vaguely recall stumbling through a snowstorm, my foot catching on something, falling. The terrible reality of the afternoon returns to me – Supernova, the remote cabin, finding her note, then Leah herself. I remember the terrible gaping mouth of the gun. Leah’s one rolled-back eye, her violet lips peeled back, the meaty hole in her face.