Nikki Stein | 11
is finding out now: that it’s garbage, all of it. And so they destroyed their governments, their buildings, their industries, and they dissolved back into feral solitude, back into the animal womb of time.
Boy, I say, I sure hope we’re smart enough to follow suit.
We’re not, you say, and the bartender doesn’t give us any more free drinks, but at least he stops making eyes at you. I could tell from the start that he didn’t understand a thing about black holes.
When we leave the bar, Jeremy is the one who asks for your number, to keep in touch, but you write it on my palm, like in a movie. I go home with him and that night in bed I search for the cosmos between the ridges of his spine, but I don’t find anything aside from rivers and roads, all dead ends, and I fall asleep on the far side of the bed with your phantom limbs wrapped around me, astrally projected across two dozen city blocks and a history of human horror that even the possible collapse of civilization won’t fix.
In the months that follow, I don’t tell you about the solar systems I see on your skin; I don’t tell you even when the summer turns us both into volcanoes erupting into mazes of specks, even when I begin to see constellations emerge on your shoulders, even when I run out of stars that I know and begin to name the new ones myself. I name every one without telling you, because I know you’d hate me if you found out I was claiming you like this, skin cell by skin cell. That, or you’d become afraid of me.
But the first time I take my shirt off in front of you, you inform me that my body is full of dimples—on my lower back, my shoulder blades, the crevasses on either side of my neck. Men’s bodies don’t smile at you like that, you tell me.
I ask you if you’ve always wanted women, and you tell me that you were born into your skin, into your eyes and nose and all the other things that