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Zero Gravity


by stephen hastings-king


 

Here is a blank space soft and white like paper extended indefinitely.  No fiber, just the color: spectator paper.  Here has no line or other features to provide orientation. Here is only myself, my motion and what includes them. 

When I close my eyes I see people wearing silver Mylar suits, helmets and masks floating and bouncing in zero gravity. Sometimes I think that here is a page from a notebook and that I am part of a story one of them has forgotten in a back pocket.  I don't know why I think that.  


Sometimes I try to occupy a single point so I can indicate another and call it there.  I could then draw a line and another and another.  But to do that, I would have to stop moving.  I do not know how.  Or maybe I do but cannot tell. 

 

Other times I talk to myself so there is something to follow.  The soft white blankness is full of strange electrical activity.  The words I say are signals that I transmit through the soft antenna of my head into the thickness of the air.  I watch the air slow then absorb them. 

When I close my eyes I imagine this space interwoven with lattices comprised of tiny black nodes that chatter incessantly amongst themselves. The chatter is an electrical field that soon fills with a garden of geometries.  When they come, I do not know if things are coming into being or falling away. Maybe they are the same and everywhere is a quiet catastrophe.

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