Author: K.T. Frasier

When my sister dies, she leaves a nebula in my brain. An upside-down Pillars of Creation right where my temporal lobe used to be. They discover it when my fiancé brings me in for an MRI, worried when I seem to know where all the elements in the universe reside. Astrophysicists and neurologists alike salivate at my brain scans.
“We don’t know what will happen if we try to remove it,” a doctor says.
“It could kill you.”
“We want to try, though,” my fiancé promises.
“Do we?” The other woman in the room is a particle physicist with so many letters after her name it looks like math. For the first time, she is embarrassed that she has a dog named Pluto and a daughter named Andromeda. Her eyes fix on mine as if asking me for guidance.
My nebula feels infantile when I feel it at all. I was once made of the universe and now the universe is made of me, a mother’s blood passing through her daughters from Neanderthals. Their atoms, too, were mostly hydrogen.
At night, I scroll through NASA’s public databases, body humming. One small step for man becomes apocryphal when gazing across lightyears. What are our reaches into space but a toddler’s gummy hands, still sweet from breast milk, not knowing for what it grabs?
“It could kill her.”
“It could kill all of us.”
Head shaved to make way for sensors, I smile. Their talks to remove the nebula are quaint. How often have we shunted metal into the universe? How often has it caved to our touch? Yet it remains hospitable, despite our clumsiness.
After their first attempt, they show us the video, the white bone of my skull carved open to make way for their instruments, the fleshy gray of my brain made even duller by the oranges and purples of the nebula. Their scalpels move through my atoms, swirling the astronomical dust that makes up my memory. When they remove their tools, it slowly rearranges itself, resuming its comfortable shape.
They are at a loss. They don’t know how to fix something that isn’t broken. There are subsequent surgeries, and I trace my constellation stitches with featherlight fingers. I traced my sister’s stitches this way, too, when we curled around each other in grass that had grown too long, her right eye the same color as the sunset’s wake. Her arm draped across my belly to pluck at the clover beside my hip. She had already become a neutron star, collapsed so deeply into herself that her weight was magnanimous.
I would have carried her anywhere.
My sister’s lover built her supernova word by word. This, too, was inherited down the matrilineal line.
Late at night, the particle physicist rewatches the videos with me, arm curled around my pillow. I lean my head to press scalp to palm, touch starved, craving warmth instead of latex. We re-listen to the quiet chatter of amazed doctors. One, a German, swears so impressively that our giggles shake the gurney.
“What if you’re immortal now?” the physicist asks. “What if you grow dense and become planetary?”
“What if I contain another Earth?”
“What if we shrink down to inhabit it?”
We consider each other and do not ask the bigger what if. We do not wonder at our own Goldilocks life, balancing on the edge of a scalpel in the middle of infinity. We do not muse on the matrilineal line, mostly hydrogen. I rest my cheek against her hand.