/lit/ - Literature

>A Nap in Satin Sheets
>It had been years since he tried it. The freeze marks showed on his arms, shoulders, spine and feet. Not that he could see the red, boil covered spots tender on his back.
>They had all died in the jostle. Asleep in their icy beds, unaware that life had ever passed from their fingertips. He had awoken in pain, several thousand years too early. An inevitable glitch in the system. It had picked him, fate. It had chosen him to be the one out of millions that would be subject to an unavoidable system failure among a world of perfect people and machines.
>Now he was out here, truly alone. The massive ship careened into space several times the speed of a bullet, fumes of energy long gone and spent trying to set a course and autopilot back home at the glitch’s first encounter. Despite the computer’s clever attempts, all it had managed to do was move the ship exactly one millionth of a way back home with the remaining fuel it had left. Now it was drifting in the general direction of home, every bump and scrape against the hull, every noise he heard aside from his own shallow breathing meant getting even further and hopelessly further off course.
>Not that the course was ever close. Had he his own cryosleep system, he may have stood a chance. But it had been years since he tried it. The boils lasted almost indefinitely, and he couldn’t lie down anymore, not without laying waste to the last clean sheets this lifeless ship offered, dirtying them with the outlines of large boils. Systems would soon shut off for good, yet he found himself wanting to keep the sanctity of sleeping in clean sheets above all else.
>Perhaps what he was scraping off would eventually decay. Skin and blood, puss and infections that could be healed in an instant back home, they would likely melt away into a black stain on the floor, even though his pile was getting higher now. Scraping with a knife, he tore his pain away to a sensation more purposeful, a red more beautiful, without sully from infection, without the presence of an imperfect sin.
>When he was done, all that ran down his back was a slick, dark red, skin cut to be even and serene. It soaked into the sheets of his dead cryosleep chamber.
>He would not try again. But he would finally get some sleep.