Nice to see a little justice being served. Navarro is a dangerous creep.

I’ve joined an online writers’ forum called Scribophile. I’m not much of a group joiner, but we’ll see how it goes. I need all the writing help I can get. They’re having a little writing contest so I threw in an entry. You’re supposed to write a short (300 words max) scene involving all five senses, written in first person POV. So I banged this out:

Light blazes down on me with a furious, destructive energy. In every direction the only colors are grays and black, all shades washed away by the relentless light. If not for my suit I would cook in seconds.

I walk toward my goal, a pitch-black shadow cast by a pile of rubble. The ever-present gunpowder smell of dust reaches me in spite of my suit – the dust invades everything. Stepping into shadow my suit hisses and pops, a five-hundred-degree temperature drop forcing joints to realign. In the shadow, I look away from the sun and see an ocean of stars, hard points of cold light billions of miles away.

I almost wish I could be outside of my suit where no sound is possible. But inside, safe, I hear my own breathing and the faint whir of fans frantically trying to maintain constant temperature.

This is my church, the dark and silent space underneath the stars. I am as alone as any human in history, unseen and unheard a quarter million miles from Earth. It’s not far enough for me.

My suit reminds me to drink and I take a sip of tasteless water. With my head tilted back as far as my helmet allows, my neck rubs against a spot where I feel the deep cold seeping in. My suit reminds me that I have only two hours air remaining.

A radio transmission screeches without warning. “McLean, what the hell are you doing out there?”

My idiot boss can’t see me, but he can reach me with the radio tether. My reverie is broken, my time in church is over. Time to get back to work.

I hope that it’s obvious that the scene is on the Moon. I’ve had a lot of practice imagining what it would be like on the Moon’s surface, so this scene came easily. The extremes of the Lunar surface are fascinating.