Random Story :
One in a Thousand
Author: Mina Major Tom Valence knew it was a one-way …
…And Back Again
Author: Roman Colangelo
I’ve been thinking about quitting.
I’ve been thinking about spending the rest of my life with you.
The ship warped us to the crest of the Andromeda. They told me that they had found the face of God, asked me if I wanted a piece of it. We saw the galaxy illuminated and colored through the ship’s display. I asked them to uncover a window so that I could see it with my own eyes; they said no, said that I would only see darkness looking out. That’s what so much of space is: black, silent howling. You would hate it.
The trip was cheap. Warping took us out of space, out of time. Millions of light years in an infinitely small blip. Two versions of myself suspended in the continuum, and I was the winner of that coin toss. He kissed you on the forehead on his way out the door. I felt the worn fabric of your cheap hoodie; your long hair draped over my wrists as I cupped your face. It was damp outside, and the sky was gray with rain clouds. I took the extra forty minutes to walk to work, treading on the bald outsoles of shoes I refused to replace. I wanted to walk until I felt the tremors of exhaustion in my calves, my body worked to an uncomfortable warmth.
I took the longest walk of my life when your mother called to tell me she was pregnant, that I would soon have a niece. I left my apartment at nine in the evening and returned at two in the morning. It was fifty degrees outside; I felt soft winds brush against my face as I went nowhere in particular. He thought about what he would say to you, the clothes and presents he would buy for you. He tossed nicknames like “Bug” and “Sparky” around in his mind. I found something painful in the minutiae of being a family man. I couldn’t quite fit you into the future I had envisioned for myself, the chance to be an uncle forking away from my doctorate, from my ambitions. I followed the path I’d carved out for myself, and it led me to the passenger’s seat of the warp engine. He was there, and then I was somewhere else.
I don’t think any of us are the same people who left Earth. We were seamlessly blipped from there to here. In that boundlessly small point in time, we were at both points. Now I am here, but he is not there. My life’s work was entering the maw of the universe and facing absolute obliteration. This is my great prize: to be masticated and spat out by time and space. Now we’ve found God, and it does not seem to matter. I cannot ask it for answers of any sort; the singularly binding, penetrating force of the universe could never fall so deeply as to entertain itself in the realm of language.
I will return to Earth, to you. I will be what I always should have been. In the void, I can only hope to see the brightness of your eyes again.
I love you.