![]() ![]() “It’s illegal to kill them” you’ve heard someone say. One of them is something you’ve never seen before. When you look back there are more, pressed between the glass and the screen. A large spider is splayed across the glass. It’s the middle of summer, and the sun has set.You close the curtains and turn the air conditioner up. Deep down you know it’s still going to find you. When did you get that tan? You’ve been inside as long as you can be, hiding from the bone-dry heat.They never come off You can’t tell if they’re looking at you when they talk to you, or if they have eyes at all. The sun is reflected in the sunglasses of strangers.You’re starting to wonder if they were even really there. The last time you’ve seen clouds feels like forever ago. A celebration of the sun’s disappearance for the day The sun rises are a sickly yellow-green, and only a warning of what is coming. The sunsets sure are beautiful, they say. ![]() You know with every part of you that it is there. You feel the universe expanding, flowing as if from your fingertips, reaching for something, some endless light beyond it all that you cannot see. You know that the silence and emptiness you are experiencing now are childsplay, that getting swallowed with the light will burn more than the fire of any star could. You have yet to encounter a black hole, but you are bracing yourself.You see planets, bold and looming, you feel yourself being pulled into their orbits against your will. Instead you feel compressed, you look at the vastness and feel it pulsing inside of you, the bright stars calling every molecule home. They say we are all made up of stardust it is supposed to make us feel sacred.You are floating somewhere inside Ursa Major, and while each bone is light years from the next, you cannot help but feel like you have indeed been swallowed by some great beast, devoured whole and left to decay in the everlong darkness.You can never really tell what’s real, out here. Radio broadcasts from an earthly war long past bounce between the stars, and occasionally you catch a glimpse of one, full of static and desperation–or, you think you do. It is a silence so crushing, and then there is a whisper. It is the silence that suffocates you more than anything, more than the lack of oxygen, the pressure on your lungs that feels so foreign.It is beautiful and yet there is something creeping at the edge of your vision, floating behind you and twinkling like a distant star, always blinking out of existence as soon as you turn your head. You know it is breathtaking and beautiful, so striking that you are not sure you believe it even though you’ve never known your senses to lie.I see your regional gothic and i will raise you: outer space gothic “It’s not that big a deal,” you hear fading in the distance. “Everyone goes through this,” you are told, as your uterus breaks free and crawls forth from under your skirt, pulling itself along the drenched soil with its fallopian tubes like an octopus, dragging you behind it. “You’re being dramatic,” you are chided, as you vomit onto the earth, bile mingling with the blood soaking the dirt. “It can’t be that bad,” you are scolded, as your legs crumple under you.It is on your birthday and your best friend’s birthday and the vacation you planned and the fancy dinner and it knows. You feel things lashing, squirming, sloshing. Is it pouring out of the taps? The red spins and spreads. You haven’t even gotten into the bathtub yet. Red patterns swirl and spiral and bloom in the water, all the water.Your purse is full of empty drawstring bags with friendly pink and purple patterns and flowers on them. there are people like you, and the world is not always so lonely, and the dark is not always dangerous. There are people like you, and their eyes are not empty. the snow comes and melts and returns again. you sing with the voices of the wind in the eaves. you make new maps for the new roads that appear. You aren’t scared of the eyes in the dark anymore, and the sleeping mask is buried in a nightstand drawer. the new owners make no attempt to reclaim the rotten wood of the old house, and the light outside manages itself-like clockwork. The abandoned house with the light that turns on each night is sold by a realtor, and they put a trailer-house out front. green grass from the other side of the fence held in your flat palm, you apologize for how long you were scared. it is still silent, but you visit it often. The black horse still lives in the pasture. accepted, it tells you, and you print out three copies for luck. You send in a college application, and you receive an email. ![]()
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