Deep Sky

1/1

She lived in a small apartment off 3rd Bridge. From the window in her living room she had a view of a neighbouring apartment complex and an electrical pole. Thick black cables stretched from the circuit box, bisecting what little sky was visible. She had a couch in front of the window and if she couldn't sleep she'd sit there and stare out at the building and the cables but mostly at the sky.

Tonight she couldn't sleep. She'd taken a pill, and it was hitting her harder than usual.

Her friend had a friend who knew someone at the Institute for Applied Research. This was a quasi- governmental organization based in the capital, and one of its many branches produced psychotropic medication. At the moment, the pills were undergoing clinical trials. They were supposed to help with anxiety, and maybe they did, but that's not why she bought them; the side effects were much more interesting.

Her fingers moved over the chill glass, tracing the outline of the building and the power cables. Within these confines the sky pulsed and throbbed like an organ behind living tissue. With a complex hand gesture that came to her spontaneously, she brought the sky into the room.

The sky hung suspended in the air in front of her, still pulsing dully, a deep, muddy purple, the tone a result of the town's reflected lights. She ran her hands over its surface, felt the sharp, heady cold of the thing, so at odds with its colour. Still touching it, she glanced again out the window: where this piece of sky had been, only a black hole remained.

This was neither terrifying nor funny; she felt at ease, one thought slipping serenely into the next. She returned her eyes to the piece of sky in her living room, brought her face toward it. It grew, beating between her hands, and she was falling off the couch, out of her apartment, into the muddy abyss.

Around her, a morass of stars. They fired and glowed, untroubled, resting in the purplish ether. She thought she closed her eyes, and saw herself from above, lying on the floor of her apartment, arms upraised, fingers twitching. The floor was the colour of the sky. Slowly her body began to sink, or else the sky bubbled up, like water, swallowing her legs and torso, and then her head, her shoulders, her chest, her arms; her fingers remained, moving like the antennae of a flesh-coloured insect.

Again she was in the field of stars; again she closed her eyes; again her body was swallowed by the sky.

Words formed at her lips:

"There is another moment just like this one," she said, her fingers playing invisible strings. "And just like this one.
And just like this one.
And this one.
And."

In the morning her eyes fluttered open. Her throat was very dry. Webs of pain extended backwards from her temples.

She tried to get up, and could not. Outside, the sky was a deep, oceanic blue.