Disclaimer: This is the first piece of fiction I’ve ever written in English, and the first I’ve written at all in five years, so don’t judge me. It’s for /r/writingbasics.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been floating in space untethered. The accident may have been a few hours ago, but it seems like days. A small piece of debris, probably from an old commercial satellite, hit the space station. It was too small to be detected by our sensors, but travelling fast enough to cause severe damage. Soon after it hit I could hear my colleagues screaming through the radio, but now it’s just silence. I can no longer see the station either, only the blue of our planet and the black, starry sky.
Human problems seem so petty from up here. The woman in a business suit worried about some numbers on a screen. The man screaming at the TV screen: “It was goal, it was goal!”. The people fighting over which gods to believe in, or over what piece of land belongs to whom. The Earth still spins, the stars don’t care. From this vantage point—if I didn’t already know—I could have never guessed that the creatures that live down there have built cities, dams, and roads, or waged disastrous wars over who controls them.
I’m starting to get sleepy. I think of Julie. She probably hasn’t heard of the accident yet. I can almost see her big green eyes, her dark curls, the tiny mole on her right cheek. Maybe she’s at school, doing what she loves. Maybe one of her students just asked a question and her eyes lit up, like they always do when she manages to spark their interest. I remember my parents. I’m glad they won’t have to mourn me like I mourned them. I remember going camping with dad when I was twelve. And that time we fell off the boat and had to swim to shore because we couldn’t flip it back up. And when…