by Laura Joyce-Hubbard

In the centrifuge, I spin. Searching for staying-power like a trout searches for a midge, I hold out, hold on. I’m strapped in with a five-point harness.

High-G acceleration. I’m twirling like a ballerina on point: around, and faster, and around and faster, blood pooling toward my boots. My back pressed; vertebrae compressed.

The Air Force trainers taught me the anti-G strain-maneuver: thighs and buttocks squeeze as hard as you can, they said, everything below the waist to force blood to reverse course, away from the feet, back toward the brain.

Vision wanes into a swirl of gray streaks—smacked. G-Lock so close, it whispers in my vestibular, the middle ear—You’re almost gone.

A loss of consciousness one breath away. Drink your oxygen like a lady sipping wine, they said.

My skin travels the length of my face, like ripples spreading from a stone thrown into a still pond. They record my spin for proof: how ugly you look, trying to pass their tests. I can’t see them anymore: behind the glass, can’t hear their crass comments about weeding out.

Like a nautilus shell, my body curls inward. Squeeze. Press back.

If a mind can will a body, a current, a field-flow of blood, a consciousness: then I’ll stay with it, stay with me, breathe, stay with me, hold, stay with, stay, stay.

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Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s a fiction editor for TriQuarterly. Her work appears in Creative Nonfiction, Sewanee Review, Chicago Tribune, the Rumpus, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, Hippocampus, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry and nonfiction has been supported by Ragdale Foundation and the NEA to attend a residency at VCCA. She won Southeast Review’s 2021 Ned Stuckey-French nonfiction contest. Among the first women to pilot the C-130H in the USAF, Laura now lives with her family in Highland Park, Illinois.