A Pall of Moondust by Nick Wood (Omenana, April 2021) opens with the female narrator dreaming about an airlock accident on the Moon:
I dreamed, and shook awake, as the two bodies flew away from me.
Dreams live.
Scott is the one keying in the Airlock code, mouth O-ing in shock at the tug and hiss of escaping air behind her. “Helmets on,” she says, but it is already too late, the door to the Moon behind her is wide as a monster’s maw.
Bailey is fiddling with the solar array on the Rover, his helmet playfully dangled on the joystick for a second, before being sucked out and beyond my reach. Scott pushes me backwards and the inner door closes, leaving me safe on the inside. The wrong side?
The Airlock explodes with emptying air and a spray of moon dust.
Two die, while I live.
Most of the rest of the story tells of the narrator’s therapy sessions, during which she is questioned about the accident, and the death of her grandfather when she was young (he is referenced at the very start of the story and is the source of more unresolved guilt and grief).
The story concludes with the narrator later going out on a therapeutic moonwalk with two others and, during this (spoiler), she has a momentary vision of her grandfather and his dog. He waves at her, and behind him she sees the two people who were killed in the airlock accident.
This is a rather slight mood piece and the African flavour of the story didn’t quite mask that for me—but it’s not a bad effort, and at least the writer avoided the temptation to expand it into six thousand words of angst.
** (Average). 2,050 words. Story link.