Paragraph: (Fiction-stories-masc-hotel-California-1.txt)
Sent 1: Hotel California My first thought: I was going crazy.
Sent 2: Twenty-four hours of silence (vacuum, remember); was I hallucinating noises now?
Sent 3: I heard it again.
Sent 4: It was a fine bell, reminiscent of ancient stone churches and the towering cathedrals I'd seen in documentaries.
Sent 5: And accompanying the bell, I saw a light.
Sent 6: Now, there were two things here that made ridiculously small amounts of sense.
Sent 7: First, the whole in-a-vacuum why's-there-a-bell thing.
Sent 8: Second, I was floating in the dark remnants of my broken ship, and any conceivable light sources were not within view; starlight is a distinctly different color and significantly less bright.
Sent 9: These signals were the heralds of my saviors.
Sent 10: The first words they said to me meant nothing.
Sent 11: I wasn't listening; I didn't care; I was going to live; I was going to keep breathing.
Sent 12: Next to those, nothing else mattered.
Sent 13: The recycled air tasted sweet in my mouth, and all thoughts that crossed my mind were cheap metaphors about life-giving substances and how breathing was like sex, only better.
Sent 14: (I reserved the right to revise this opinion later.) When I was done mentally exclaiming over my impossible rescue, I looked around.
Sent 15: The ship, it was odd and old, either so outdated or so heavily modified that I couldn't tell what make it was, and somehow, the crew standing around me fit the same description, a singularly atypical amalgamation of folk.
Sent 16: And me, I guess I was one more piece in their puzzle.
Sent 17: I was one more scrap to weld onto the rest, one more stranded survivor who was found.
Sent 18: I was now one of them.