Out of Orbit by Chris Jones Page B

spills. Sitting down at their galley table with the aid of those foot restraints on the floor, Expedition Six saw even snack time become as choreographed as a dance recital.
    In the afternoons, Pettit liked to eat honey and tiny, addictive loaves of brown Russian bread that he called Barbie bread, because it looked like something she might have pulled out of her Easy-Bake Oven for Ken. But he couldn’t just carelessly cram a fistful into his mouth. First, he would open the bundles of bread but leave them tucked away in their package, slipped under a Velcro strap that stretched across the table or pinched in a clip on the side of it. Then he would dig out a tin of honey about the size of a can of cat food from a galley drawer, find the can opener, and keep a set of wet wipes at the ready, just in case some stickiness escaped. He had learned early on to keep the lid attached by a small tab, because that left him one less thing to worry about. He would wipe the can opener and stow it away, and then he would pry open the lid with a set of chopsticks that he had brought up with him. Amazingly enough, he learned that he could stick the tin to the table with just a few drops of water—because of the magic of surface tension, it acted like glue. Suitably prepared, he’d pick the little loaves of bread out of their package and dunk them in the honey, where they would stay until he rescued them one by one with his chopsticks and popped them into his mouth. (Sometimes he would pull out the bread just far enough to coax a long string of honey from the can, careful not to break it, and then let the bread go, watching it fall as slowly as an autumn leaf, caught in the honey’s web and the spirit of weightlessness.)
    On those days when he felt like whipping up something particularly creative, he’d snip open a small, single-serving packet of peanut butter, squeeze it into the honey, and mix it up with his chopsticks. Once, filming his routine, he caught himself salivating whilestirring the gooey mess. “It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said with a smile. To keep his peanut-butter-and-honey plague from spreading, he’d leave his chopsticks stuck deep into the concoction, a social faux pas that he apologized for, but one that he figured the Japanese would forgive him.
    When he was done, he would fill a garbage bag reserved for dry waste. On those rare occasions when some traces of food were left over, they would be sealed away in a separate bag held closed with a rubber band, to keep the rot (and smell) down to a minimum. And anything even remotely moist, like the wet wipes, were left out to dry, every last drop having become an invaluable commodity, almost as precious as Pettit’s chiles. In time, the moisture would evaporate into the air and get caught, cleaned, and distilled by the recycling units. Expedition Six would end up drinking the “wet” from their wet wipes—along with their breath and sweat—sometime later in the week, perhaps boiled up in a nice cup of tea.
    ·   ·   ·
    These were the sorts of lessons they learned, the hearts of their new routines. By the time Expedition Six neared a month in orbit, their days on station had taken on the pleasant rhythm of a cross-country drive, an almost reassuring sameness. Morning, afternoon, and night, the temperature remained a perfect constant; the views were reliably spectacular. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had each begun to master the art of living in his brave new world. They had learned secrets and shortcuts, and each had begun to practice his own magic, finding enough ordinary comforts to ground his extraordinary existence. Bowersox had found that his exercise blissed him out like yoga might, especially when he put on his headphones and disappeared in his music; Pettit had come to like eating his breakfast in bed, maybe checking his e-mail between long stretches of looking out the window; Budarin busied himself with learning a little more English each