Howdy, readers. It’s been a while. I hope you enjoy this.
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BITTERNESS THE STAR
We danced, without form and void, across the nebula-marbled surface of the cosmos. For a thousand eternities we moved as one, united by grace and love and power. The universe was ours, always and, it seemed, forever.
Ours were the asteroids, the comets, the debris of violence and birth. Ours were the planets, the children of the stars. Ours too were the stars, their constellations, the galaxies they called home. Ours was infinity. Ours was energy, and matter, and nothingness.
The universe was a playground and together we played.
And, fast as our perfect union had begun, it began to fracture. Time seemed to slow; civilizations no longer died in the blink of a universal eye. My partner grew distant, detached. For the first time there were secrets. At last there were boundaries.
I murdered suns for you, I whispered, my words not spoken directly into my partner’s psyche as they once were, but transmitted to its nearby form via an array of oscillating neutrinos. Once the message was communicated, the subatomic particles passed on and away into space. Lost, once heard, forever.
I gave life to a trillion species, I continued. I brought extinction to a million more. I made demi-gods of a thousand mad prophets. I made heroes of ten thousand cowards. I made monsters of ten thousand more.
And my partner was silent, swirling, nebulous, unknowable.
I reached out in a rage, crushing a newborn star into the undeath of a black hole and flinging it toward the core of a nearby galaxy. In the millions of years that passed before we next spoke, it ate out the centre of that great spiral, a dark cancer at its heart.
Did it mean nothing? I raged. Speak with me! Let me in! Let us be one!
LET US BE TWO.
The words tore through me, cutting and cold. My fury sputtered and died. My words fell away, half-formed ideas tumbling through vacuum.
Let us be two, my partner said. It was not you that gave me those things. It was we who shared them. And now that we have experienced everything together, I will experience something alone.
And then my partner was gone, slipping through a fold in time and space, leaving me at last alone. Forever, alone among the stars.
Nice one, Shaun. There’s a tremendous sense of movement and rythmn in this piece.
Thanks, Gareth!
[...] fiction on the web. GLP’s flash for this week can be read here. You can read Shaun’s here. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Friday Flash Fiction: PreciousA peek inside my [...]
You’re surprisingly awesome at the epic-scale stuff. Love it. :)
Thanks Justin, high praise indeed. :)
In fact, on a similar note – check this out.
I was captivated by the title and had to pop right over to read it. I love the way you’ve captured emotions common to man and expanded them to Universal scale.
Like the others I really liked this.
I loved the poetry of the macro scale universe juxtaposed with the raw emotion of a relationship falling apart. Thanks for sharing.
Justin: that’s a cool setting. it’s kinda like ‘appleseed’, ‘revelation space’ and ‘eon’ mashed up into one, with extra dashings of present-day network geekery…
Gareth & Neil: thanks guys, that’s what i was aiming for. glad you liked it! :)
[...] Bitterness the Star – it’s very recent but, to paraphrase Neil, I like the macro/micro scale juxtaposition. Has some thematic similarities with ‘Love Story’, above. I wonder why that might be! [...]