Ultraluminous

by Katherine Faw Morris

Every girl at the gym has a tattoo but very few have fake boobs.

I can’t stand having my feet touched. In the pedicure bath I cringe and flinch and what I want to do is kick the girl in the face. It makes me feel unguarded, like she could murder me. On my fingernails I get upside-down hearts, matte black like chalkboards. The points of my nails are their tails.

At the gym I take a dance class. At one point all the girls around me drop onto their hands and pop their pussies in the air. I stand there with my hands on my hips. I have stripped out of necessity, as a means to an end, and that’s

In black-hole theory if someone fell into one, like an astronaut, he wouldn’t feel a thing until he hit the bottom. That could take seconds or lifetimes. It is unlikely he would realize just before he was crushed to nothing that he was strung out like a string. I realize it, theoretically.

“As I’m sure you know, the universe is expanding, spreading thinner and thinner. Eventually it will spread too thin for physics. That’s when everything will pixelate.”

From the TV I order Hollywood movies. Something is always going to happen next until it’s not, which is the end. I keep hitting the button to see how much time is left.

I open the gold curtains but not the sheer and stand back from the window at a distance. A month is a twelfth of a year and a year is a hundredth or a sixtieth or a thirty-third of a life. I’m giving myself a sliver of time to wait for true happiness to come again. It’s only a temporary evasion.

I was wrong. He’s not like the Qatari man. He’s like the men who blame me for their own emotions, which is not the worst kind.

* * * In a closed system nothing is created or destroyed, so every iteration exists always and what it does is change form. That’s a justifying explanation.

A thing rich men have taught me is that it either has to be prohibitively expensive or it has to be free.

“There is a planet covered in creatures who do not accept that they will die. They are constantly surprised.”