Page 103 of The Lottery

And Azalea’s cherry tree, lying on the ground.

A pool of blood, soaking into the floor.

27

ZAE & MAREK

“I am arguing for the future of humanity and a long-term strategy to achieve this. We have given our planet the disastrous gift of climate change ... When we have reached similar crises there has usually been somewhere else to colonize ... But there is no new world, no utopia around the corner. We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds.”

—Stephen Hawking

* * *

ZAE

Pain splits my skull.

Stars dance behind my eyelids.

A moan escapes my parched lips when I attempt to move.

I blink.

Once.

Twice.

Something stings my eyes, blinding me.

Everything--and I do mean eve-ry-thing on my body hurts.

For a fraction of a second I fear we’ve crashed into Mars and I’m dying on the spaceship.

No. That’s not right.

We did crash.

Someone did die.

No, that already happened. This isn’t that.

My thinking is slow, muddled by… something. My thoughts plunge through the molasses of my mind trying to find their way out.

My senses are overloaded. I can’t decipher anything. I need to slow it all down.

Breathing.

Just breathe.

That’s all I need to do is breathe.

I breathe in through my nose, but my sinuses are clogged. I try through my mouth and that’s when I realize something is pressed between my lips, so tightly it’s spreading my cheeks into a horrifying grin that feels like it’s splitting my face in half.

I wiggle my tongue, and it brushes against cloth, bitter and rough.

When my lip splits from the movement, a trickle of blood leaking out of it and down my chin, I can’t help but wince. Bullets of pain assail my body whenever I move.

Breathing isn’t working, so I focus on my fingers. I find them on my body and wiggle them.

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