Naked, she wanders the space between galaxies in
silence.
Floating towards a spiral galaxy above her head,
she enters it at an angle, such that she intersects with it along a
slanted plane. Stars twinkle around her like little jewels.
She is of impossible size. By rights, she should
not exist at all. The speed of her nerve signals alone should (and
does) break the laws of physics. And yet, she persists regardless,
unperturbed by such restrictions. She is.
For centuries, civilisations – those that
survive, anyway – will speak of the night part of the sky was
blotted out by a distant silhouette. They will never fully be able to
accurately map and illustrate the shape of her, to render the
dimly-lit, shimmering curves and crevices of her body in the
immaculate detail with which they behold them. But their history
books will be littered with approximations of her form, with the
portents and suppositions of what this apparition must have meant.
She moves through the stellar medium, points and
motes twinkling around her like little fairy lights, basking in their
warmth.
A luminous star flattens and bursts against her
body, a water balloon against her stomach. The hot ball of plasma is
extinguished in an instant, ripped apart by her gravity well, burning
against her skin like cigarette ash. Reflexively, she brushes it
away.
Where her fingers skim what remains of the
annihilated star, she makes nebula; some millennia from now, a radio
telescope will discover a cloud in space with four distinct
striations running its breadth. No astronomer will be able to
understand how a distant star somehow went nova before being so
cleanly snuffed out.
With a finger, she reaches for a tiny yellow sun,
cradling it in the palm of her hand. Her hair flows out behind her in
long strands, encircling and engulfing asteroids, clouds of dust, dim
pulsars and white dwarfs.
The yellow sun is encircled by planets. She
counts maybe five or six. She regards them with eyes wider than the
elliptic of the inner, rocky planets that now divert from their
orbits, interrupted by the gravity of fingers far wider than their
equators. She looks down at them. She wonders if they are populated.
If they are looking up at her.
Of course, this is folly, and she knows this. The
light will take minutes or even hours to reach them, and they don’t
have that long.
Firmly, she grips the little sun. It burns her
hand a little, but as she balls her vast hand into a fist, the star
is compacted and crushed. It bursts like a grape, its core squeezing
out white-hot plasma that dribbles through her fingers.
She watches as a sun dies, and with it, a solar
system.
She smiles with arousal, placing a hand on her
hip, as she surveys her work. Her fingers, still warm with the heart
of a star, follow the in-line of her thigh, and find their place at
the base of her trunk.
Among the stars, she exults.
She orgasms, crying out in jubilation, running
her other hand between her breasts. Her pelvis bucks and thrusts as
she ejaculates, and then she ceases all movement, gasping and
sweating in the abyss.
Spreading her arms wide, she bats celestial
bodies into oblivion with the backs of her hands, obliterating them
as though they were bothersome mosquitoes. A million apocalypses
glitter against her skin, all in service of her sex.
For some time she drifts like this, recollecting
herself.
Rubbing an eye gently, she yawns. Teeth,
light-minutes across, glitter in the dark.
Moments later, an aperture opens before her, one
that spans almost half the length of her body. She drifts through it,
and the doorway seals behind her, leaving in its wake stars cleft in
twain, the liquid cores of planets oozing into the cold emptiness of
space.
*
She steps out from the back of the closet and
stretches. She goes to the bathroom, cleans herself off with the
shower-head, then brushes her teeth.
She returns to the bedroom, brushes her hair, and
pulls on a light blouse and a pair of smart check-pattern trousers.
It takes her a few minutes to adjust. She grabs
her phone and flicks through emails – receipts and invoices for
various deliveries, a week plan from her overbearing employer,
special offers on skincare items at the beauty retailer where she has
a loyalty card...
Still slightly giddy from the transition, she
descends the wooden staircase, and flips the kettle on, measuring out
the requisite amount of coffee. She has a long day of work ahead of
her.
She’s not quite sure where the doorway came
from. She discovered it one day while clearing out her wardrobe. Her
initial reaction, of course, was one of fear and apprehension. At
first, she thought she should probably tell somebody about it.
Scientists all over the world would, in all likelihood, be amazed by
the discovery. She’d go down in history as the discoverer of
something that could revolutionise understanding of space and time.
But she doesn’t want to lose this, that’s the
thing. She enjoys keeping this little secret. Through trial and
error, she’s discovered that she can be in there for hours, but
mere seconds will pass outside. She’s never pushed it far past two
– she doesn’t want her colleagues to notice her ageing at a
faster rate than everyone else, silly as it sounds.
So she privately enjoys these escapades she
embarks on, every few days or so, before particularly stressful days
at work. She never lets anyone know about it, not even her closest
friends.
She felt guilty, at first, of course – ending
entire worlds, disrupting the gravity of galaxies, just for a sexual
rush. But as time has gone on, she’s found it easier and easier to
rationalise. After all, people step on ants without realising it
every day – when she is large enough to dwarf even the brightest
and largest stars in a universe, surely the destruction she causes
doesn’t count?
Yellow stars are her favourites, because they
remind her of her own Sun, so vast and bright and hot. She has always
craved to touch it. That she almost certainly never will only makes
her hunger for it even more. She wants this whole universe as her
playground, her dominion. Instead, she has to do menial admin work
for a tech company that barely acknowledges her existence.
Anyhow, she’s fairly sure that the universe in
there isn’t the same as her own. Though, she does wonder,
sometimes.
The kettle finishes boiling, and she sighs
resignedly, pouring hot water over the fresh grounds, and stirring it
with a metal spoon.
As she opens the fridge for the milk, she spots
it.
At first, she mistakes it for a floater in her
eye, some microorganism casting a shadow on her retina. Then, leaning
in, she regards it more closely.
There, orbiting her right index finger, is a
tiny, rocky sphere, blue and green, small enough that it passes
through the gap between her index and ring fingers with ease. There
are even cloud patterns shifting across its surface.
It must have enjoined with her finger when she
burst its sun. Now the warmth of her flesh is all that keeps it from
entering an ice age.
She glances over at the counter. The warm vapour
from the coffee mug exudes into the cool air of the kitchen.
Smiling, she reaches for the milk and pours it
into the mug.
She will keep the little world for now. In all
likelihood, its orbit will soon decay, disrupted by the movements of
her fingers, probably even before she boards the train. It will
explode into tiny fragments against her flesh, reduced to dust that
will be brushed off without another thought.
But that’s fine. There’s plenty more where
that came from, after all.
She reaches for the mug and raises it to her
lips, taking a sip.
Today is going to be a good day.