weirdo microfiction

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The stilling of the world crept in quietly.

First, the silver in your hair halted its march. You noticed when the moon did not set, when the tides flattened.

But I knew.

The eternal calculus of the universe had ceased when my heart no longer jumped to see your face.

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In the hollow weeks before the city fell, the lights went out.

Each night we climbed to our rooftops, alone together, and watched the stars appear, like dabs of paint against the sky.

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He wanted to stay, aloft in perfect celestial harmony. She disagreed, and fell, burning hot and bright.

A bruised eternity passed before they met again, this time in strange, soft bodies with dim eyes.

But their bones knew each other, carbon remembering still. #VSS365

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The door-creak startled her, but it was Ute, long hair dripping in her face like a mermaid who’d swum up from the sea, but found earth no better.

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“We’re never doing this again,” he says each time she dyes her hair, head bent over the sink. The kitchen is cramped, but his hands are gentle. He pours water over her scalp as color spools down the drain.

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In sleep, worries spill from her ears. She strings them on some thread, looped over her bedposts until the wood creaks, new handfuls added every night.

The constant heat and oil of her palms feeds their dull luster, until her fingers have lent each fear a moonglow.

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She had eaten nine books already, terrified of losing their knowledge to ashes. Weeping in anger, she swallowed them whole: treatises, genealogies, books of medicine, of mathematics. Of stars.

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She loved him under the artificial sun of mornings. At mealtimes.

But oh! he was never so beautiful to her as he was repairing their shuttle--floating in the silent dark, tethered to her suit, the gloss of his helmet crowned in stars.

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To save materials, medieval religious art collapses time on canvas. Paint was expensive--easier to cram five miracles into one frame.

I asked the museum docent if things ever got confusing.

“That’s just how time worked then,” he said, sipping wine from his S’well bottle.

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She’d ejected from her shuttle seconds before the explosion.

Now, adrift in the cold silence of space, she gazed at the stars, at the dismal needle on her airtank, and struggled to make her peace.

“Hello cousin,” sang the stars through her dizziness. “Welcome. Welcome.”

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“Fine. Bring the godspend, if you like,” Ava snapped, one eye on the fast-darkening sky, the other on the child--plopped in the dirt, fingers crammed in his mouth, ignorant to the sentence of his blood.

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Mara’s child is a seed, swallowed down. It is glass, weighing down her stomach, making her stumble as she runs, always running.

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The life of a goddess was quieter these days. There were so few penitents, and too many were wicked.

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Wide-legged pants were popular among young revolutionaries.

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