She knows only four things when she awakes on the silent spaceship, bleeding.
- There’s an alien on board.
- Someone shot her.
- There’s a dead body and a blast-gun in the airlock.
- Someone’s banging on the porthole.
Outside the porthole, adrift, is a man in a spacesuit, pounding on the glass.
She can’t remember who he is. Can’t remember who she is either.
There’s blood on his gloved hands. Blood on her hands, too.
Watching him scream through the blood-streaked window, she wonders if he knows the one thing she is trying to remember: which one of them is the alien.
Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and reviewer of speculative fiction. She currently lives just outside Vancouver with a husband, two kids, a snake, several birds, and a very large black dog.
Her short story collection Six Dreams About the Train is out now from Trepidatio Publishing. Maria’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Black Static, Interzone, Fireside, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Flash Fiction Online, Mythic Delirium, Shimmer, Cast of Wonders, and elsewhere. Find out more on her website, mariahaskins.com, or follow her on Twitter, @mariahaskins.
Subscribe to Martian Magazine to support us! Subscription includes four quarterly digital issues PLUS the year-end anthology for only $8!
themartianmagazine.com 