Tiny Galaxies
i) Did you know, she said, There’s a theory our universe might exist inside a black hole?
Really? he replied. Pass the salt.
The flurry of salt he shook onto the already seasoned steak flaked the surface like snow. When he sliced the meat, she felt it, almost. A slit down her spine. Her meal remained untouched.
Something unexpected in the rotation of the galaxies, she explained. The way they are helixed or collapsing, I think.
Angels dancing on the head of a pin, he said.
Later, in bed, she nudged him awake. This black hole, she said, It’s also inside me.
Hush, he replied, tucking her under his arm, Don’t let gravity win.
*
ii) The tide shifts by an hour each day, as the moon slings its way around the earth, pulling the oceans towards itself, like a dancer gathering her skirts. Gravity is a strange force—shifting allegiances to the biggest body. The expanse of space too beautiful and terrible for the soft grey folds nestled beneath the shell of our skulls.
We were not designed for this, she thinks, as she walks the dog, who noses among basalt rocks for rotted seaweed, disturbing clouds of sandflies that pinch at the air; or while she vacuums, dust billowing in an explosion of tiny bright galaxies; or while washing rice, milky liquid draining away leaving the rasp of polished grains; in the long, long hours while she waits for him to come home.
There is a boxy feeling to her days, the way packages arrive in oversized cardboard, the items inside taped in bubble wrap, or swimming in a sea of biodegradable packing peanuts which dissolve in claggy streaks when run under a tap. Always a surfeit of space in these boxes. Sometimes, when she slits them open with splayed scissors, she imagines air captured at the warehouse escaping in a secret puff. It is her own form of time travel, she thinks.
*
iii) When she learns the volume of bacteria colonising her body outnumbers her human cells, she does not sleep for a week.
*
iv) She hasn’t always been this way. She was a child too, once. Sloppy pig-tails, a bike with pink streamers, skin shiny with sun. The first time she saw a doctor about it, he asked what was bothering her.
The dark unknowable ocean. The secrets of the dust mites that live in her bed. Those galaxies and universes, and strings. Planets that were demoted, and space is a vector, and what is a vector, anyway? And have you ever really examined your iris, up close, the striated rainbow of it, primising into your pupil, which let’s face it is just another black hole? There are invisible gases that might kill you, and visible people that might too. So many people, a world without end.
She said, I don’t know.
They talked some more until he wrote a script she didn’t fill, and she never saw that doctor again.
*
v) She had a job, once. Before the looping took over her mind. A journalist for a suburban paper, she covered unimportant stories; a new roundabout, delayed rubbish collections, reduced parking limits at the local mall. She attended high school prizegivings, Rotary Club luncheons and openings of supermarkets. For a time, she lived almost exclusively on sausage rolls and milky tea in brown glass cups.
The job had given shape to her days. An alarm to ring, hair to wash, clothes to iron. A commute, such as it was. Plastic containers of salad for lunch: lettuce, tomato, cucumber, boiled eggs. She soon stopped the eggs—too much like the sun—jellied whites orbiting the bulb of the yolk, the egg’s secret heart.
After a time, people turned frightening: the local board member with slugs for eyebrows, a Daffodil Day collector with veiny hands, a real estate agent with hair so high it seemed surprised. Many of the people she interviewed asked her questions back, but she was not the type with answers.
It happened on an ordinary Tuesday, sent to cover the overflow of a stormwater drain at the beach. Raining for three days by then, the sky pewter, the sea turgid. Council had staked a Do Not Swim sign around the spewing drain, as though planting a flag on the moon. Foam-laced water gouged the sand, meeting the waves in a smashed-up brown.
The photographer snapped a few pictures, before retreating to the van. Waves webbed with whitewater, wind roaring like a black hole. It smelled of shit. The sudden urge to do something overwhelmed her and she cast around for a spade, a piece of driftwood, anything, but all she had were her two hands. She set to with her fingers, forming a moat to prevent the oily water from reaching the sea. As fast as she built, the barrier collapsed. Up to her knees in runoff, the swell worsened. The photographer yelled from the van to leave it. She couldn’t. A strange compulsion drove her on.
The torrent raged, the tide surged, rushing her in cold. Rain drove straight at her face, but she kept digging, chaffing her hands like sandpaper. She didn’t see the photographer on the phone, but it must have been him who contacted her husband, who pulled her, shivering, from the murk. At home, he stripped her like a child and sat her in the shower, where hot water peeled away the mud and sand, fine sediment catching in the drain. He scrubbed her skin with the blueberry bodywash she liked, but she could smell the shitwater for days.
They agreed she needed a quieter life. Her mind was not something to be startled.
*
vi) Some people’s moods are weather dependent, but she’s spent enough afternoons lying in the unflinching sun to know that light is not her problem. You feel emotion in your body, everyone knows that. To her, despair feels like a thin sheet of metal pushed up her spine, severing the cords of flesh. When it reaches her skull, it presses behind her eyes, as though they will be levered out. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all, and other times like a black hole—more frightening than all the levered eyeballs in the world.
She doesn’t speak these thoughts. They are incantations, saying them would cast a spell. Instead, she tells the latest doctor—the one after the beach—that exercise helps, and he prescribes a daily walk, along with a script she doesn’t fill.
*
vii) Her husband worries, of course he does, but he’s busy with his invisible load. The cost of being a man, of working and striving, and the necessary tasks of man-ness—the after work drinks, the unpaid labour of following a sports team that always loses, mowing the lawn, keeping the car washed. She knows these are real struggles, as real to her as lead in the pipes and plastic in the ocean and icemelt and algae blooms and forever chemicals in the Himalayas, and Voyager all alone—those golden records of human sounds; greetings in fifty-five languages, footsteps and laughter, Beethoven’s Fifth—hurtling through the loneliness of space.
*
viii) It hasn’t been all bad. There are silvered mornings on the beach. The way the dog holds his paw over her arm when he’s sleeping, as though they are holding hands. The smell of jasmine on hot summer nights. The slight dimple in her husband’s check when he smiles.
Just the other day, researchers filmed an octopus hitching a ride on the back of a shark—sharktopus, the headlines named it. Portmanteaus and loan words, the expansion of language like the expansion of space.
There is lying in bed in her slant-roofed room, while the wind gusts. Chocolate, the darker the better. Red berries that explode on the tongue. The blanket of the sea, the shine of the sun. Once, by accident, during a solar storm she photographed the purple haze of the Southern Lights. There’s kawakawa tea. Holding her breath. Shampoo that smells of apples. Apples, the icy white crunch of them. Her husband beside her, a counterweight to her slightness. The sun always rises, she always takes the next breath. Plunging her hands into stiff dough. Boiling fruit to make jam. The perfect glass box she keeps her rings in. The glossy leaves of her monstera, the only thing she’s kept alive other than the dog and herself. Wild yeast. Mushrooms, the miracle of fungi, extending for miles under the ground in a lattice of the world’s largest living thing. Speaking of giants, Te Papa has a colossal squid; shrunk a little in the preserving, a bleached colour—she imagined them larger, and fiery red, until scientists filmed a baby, transparent, purple and luminescent.
Hundreds of articles in a small suburban newspaper that she could point to and say—I lived.
*
ix) Come, look, he said, and she followed him into the garden, where, beneath the clothesline a tiny pile of mushrooms had sprouted. Thin-capped and pale as a bloodless moon.
Are they poisonous? she asked.
Perhaps, her husband said, but probably not.
Will the dog eat them? she worried.
As though he’d heard, the dog sauntered over, pressed his nose to the grey ribs then turned away.
What do we do? she asked, but her husband was already tapping away on his phone.
Salt. We sprinkle them with Epsom salt, he said confidently.
He went inside—to the bathroom, she knew without asking—where she keeps a jar next to the bath. Magnesium helps her sleep.
When he returned, rectangular crystals already cupped in his palm, she stayed his hand.
Let’s leave them, she said.
The grass was damp and smelt of earth. The sun, though risen, doesn’t reach that side of the garden, a secret world of moss and sex.
Did you know, she said, that fungi connect under the soil? Huge webs spread for miles. The caps are fruit, popping up to reproduce.
It didn’t seem true, but it was.
I suppose it can’t hurt to leave them for a bit, he said.
She took the salt from his palm and tossed it over her left shoulder, far from the tender periscopes, for luck. She’d have a bath tonight, she decided. Steep herself. The water cure, the ancients called it. It usually works. At least until time grows its teeth and bites.
*
x) She is a nesting doll, selves stacked inside; layer upon layer, encasing the small hard nub—the doll too small for detail or decoration. She has a set of these dolls, handpainted, bright red. The smallest, no bigger than her thumbnail, has no features, merely a smudge of flesh, black dots for eyes. She keeps it with her, the tiny doll, pressed into the hollow of her palm.
The universe is trapped in a black hole, and inside that black hole, somewhere in the forgotten outer reaches, she is nothing but a small wooden thumb.
Anna Woods is a New Zealand author living in Tāmaki Makaurau who writes short and long fiction, and occasional poems. Her story ‘Pig Hunting’ won the 2023 Sargeson Prize, and was published on ReadingRoom. Most recently, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story, ‘So Clean.’ Her short fiction has also been published in a variety of journals including Landfall, Geometry, and takahē, as well as the anthology Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand. Her poetry has been published by the New Zealand Poetry Society and Poetry New Zealand.