She sat looking at him in the dull light. Above, cables slashed out at the couple.

Their spaceship had been going across the nightly galaxy at ease, and comfort. He even had a case of cigars to keep him company. He was, of course, Dr. Goiler of the many, fast responders to various diseases that started to pop up on various planets.

She was his wife. What more can be said?

As mentioned, she sat looking at him. He stared angrily, and started to dust himself off. He was in such a state that he felt he and she had just had an argument, a battle of gigantean proportions. His insides felt like many notes being written on by creatures whose ink leaked from their spider-like fingers. It was that feeling as if he had a wound. He looked down at himself, realizing for the first time the mass of fluid hissing out of his belly.

Perhaps that is why she stared at him, he thought.

“Listen, honey,” he tried to say, arching his back to as straight as he could get it, leaning against the spaceship wall, groping in the smoky atmosphere for something solid to hold onto. He found a coat hanger, and he used it delicately to hold him up, and he treated it as if it were a child.

The children, he thought, and knew she must have been thinking the same thing.

Or she was just terrified.

As he shakily stood on his two feet, on flooring that was covered in bubbling debris, he tried to see through the pitch of smog that started to consume the room: he was looking for her face. Finally, he could focus on it, and it reminded him so much of his mother in the springtime that it almost frightened him.

“Honey…”

He had no right words now. He could have said he was sorry to have brought her and the children. He could have said it was his fault that they crashed on some planet and were now suffering terribly inside a cheap spaceship. But all he could muster was a simple, and demeaning, “Look at me.”

As she refused the hand that tried to direct her face towards his, turning away viciously as if she were being slapped, he realized that the world wasn’t as he thought it was. And his wife wasn’t happy. Which of these things were more important to him now?

He watched her getting more distant, as if just by sitting still and ignoring him she was disappearing. Behind her rows of passenger seats were flung about, and they looked like a mass of clay by the way they were distorted and boiling by the fire that was rising below them.

Dr. Goiler sat down, defeated.

“Well, honey,” he said rather modestly, despite his constant tremble. His hand reached out and touched hers. And when she turned to him, he knew that what she feared wasn’t fear at all. It was love.