'Hey mom, I would love to hear more about your trip to India, but I need to do my spacewalk now. Call you back tomorrow at the same time?...Great, talk soon. Bye!'
Ali's mom always dreamt of travelling around the world and taking back control of her life. Last year, her mom finally retired from a "challenging but rewarding" corporate job and started a new chapter. Everytime Ali sees the sparks in her mom's eyes while talking about her trips, Ali knows that they're both born explorers. Her mom explores the world, and she explores space.
Ali closes Zoom and checks today's schedule, the next mission is a spacewalk starting in 15 minutes. She grabs that loose hair tie from her tiny table, puts it in her mouth as her hands try to brush that messy hair and make it a bun. Some hair is too short to be tied up, so she just let it be. 'Who cares.' she thinks. She reaches the spacesuits locker, opens the door, and drags out her sturdy spacesuit. Oxygen tank, checked. Gloves and boots, checked. Helmet, checked. Tethers, checked. Ali is ready to go.
'Ali, this is station. Your objective is to do a regular maintenance check on the electrical system. You will be in the dark for about 20 minutes until the next sunrise. Good luck.'
'Got it.'
As Ali opens the hatch, she instantly floats in the air. The endless darkness swallows all the light and noises, inviting us to delve into the realm of possibilities. She moves slowly toward the electrical system and makes sure she grabs the tethers tight. She can stand loninest, but she can't stand to drift away from the spaceship and never see her mother again.
This is not her first time doing a regular maintenance check, not to mention she practised it more than a hundred times at the station. She did it so many times that there's now a step-to-step instruction in her brain, she just needs to make sure all the parts are operating as usual and report back. Easy-peasy.
'There's no visible damage on the wires and panels, everything's running as usual.' she thinks.
It has only been 10 minutes and she has already completed all the major checks. Ali moves onto the next check and decides to slow down a bit. Just as her hands reach the tether, she notices there is something between the toe cracks of her right feet. She spreads and scrunches her toes trying to figure out what is it 'Have I sweat that much?' she thinks. It's something similar in size to a slug, quite slimy, icey, and spiky. 'What's that?' She wants to tap her feet and step on it, yet, there's not enough room in her shoes to do that. That creature slowly goes under and over her toes one by one. Imagine a slug with tiny needles treating your feet like a playground, sucking your pores millimetre by millimetre, licking all the dead skin between each toes, then filling up your pores with their mucus, leaving red marks on your soft skin with their needles. Ali is feeling a mixture of pain and wetness. Every time the invader moves onto another toe, she uncontrollably curls her toes and squeezes her abs. She's surprised by how sensitive her toes are. The girl she hooked up with last week wanted to suck her toes so badly, claiming that she'll have the most intense orgasm if she give it a go. It was Ali's first time hearing about toes sucking, and even though she was curious, it felt too intimate to let a stranger sucking her's.
'What's going on? Did something jump into the spaceship from earth? But there's no way it can survive...' Despite Ali trying so hard to relate what she observed to the handbook, there isn't a single piece of information teaching astronauts how to deal with a creature crawling between their toes. Shake it off? Nope, didn't work. What's worse, that thing seems to grow a lot bigger to the size of a power bank. It sucks so hard onto the lower part of her calf, pulling her leg hair and releasing more ice-cold liquid. She's overwhelmed by so many sensations and emotions, the pain, the moist, the feeling of losing control of her body, the anxiety of not knowing what will happen next, the slight relief of knowing that no one knows what is going on...Her mind gets heavier and heavier as that creature approaching her inner thigh.