Murmansk-13

Katja had wanted to honour that dream, for him, for everything he’d done to make her life comfortable. She also wanted to escape a lifetime in Gorky and the ennui that settled like grey sediment over her psyche. This was the first year the deep space program had offered a place for a medical student and it was place, singular. The assignment would be aboard a retiring space station as a laboratory assistant, the name of the station and its location were otherwise unknown till a later date.

The placement would mean Katja would miss her classes graduation, unlike other assignments, this came sandwiched between two nine month burns in cryo, not a two hour airplane flight. But Katja was OK with that, the majority of her childhood clique had already slipped away into new lives and professions. She could shed what remained of her puppy fat and reinvent herself, her absence would at the least shake the persistent attentions of Danill, but most of all it would give her a fundamental understanding of the sacrifices her father had made for his family.

Her father did not speak for a long time, a look of pain and confusion spread slowly across his face, emotions moving like tectonic plates. This was his dream, she’d been wrong to seize it. Katja felt her heart sink with his expression. Her father warned her when she’d first mentioned that the program had become available; that the work would be hard and lonely. That she would grow bored, trapped and unable to go anywhere. She believed her father was just transferring his own justifications for accepting his career stagnation, his own mental validation for failure.

“Katja,” he began, his voice dripping with sadness.

Then the scene skipped. The passage of time blinking. Gorky below had fallen silent and black, the streetlights and Christmas lights extinguished. Even the stars guttered out. For a moment she was alone on the balcony in blackness. Then her father was back, his eyes sad and feral, his slack face slicked with blood. He paused to look at her, his neck broken and twisted. He was on his knees, beside him Katja’s mother lay sprawled on the cold wooden deck. Her face ashen and waxy in a cryptogenic argent glow. He regarded Katja for just a moment before burying his face into the ragged cavity chewed into her mother’s bloated stomach, attempting to wrench out unidentifiable viscera, the smashed bones in his neck grated with crepitus.

She’d brought him here. She’d killed him.