ACCRETION

ACCRETION

Hunger is coming.

I saw Mother Mouth in Podsister’s skin
when sunlight eclipsed—
a moment so quiet;
the universe stilled across
Vessel’s glass.

Through the smallest filaments of angel hair,
light swirled,
shimmering in fractal color,
dissolving from itself.
A white flash of heat in her wide eyes,
like blindness,
where twin quantum-thin lenses protect her
from extreme emissions.
I have them, too.

I need only make new memories now—
fill all my spaces with
the expanding emptiness
of the future.
Fill my body with the
squelching force of
some unknown thing.

Vessel hums,
its walls soft as skin,
soft as the sac where we first learned
to breathe.
Through our only window,
heat-strengthened glass,
I see the blossom of Mother Mouth
opening endlessly.
A supermassive yawning
of galactic ectoplasm
opening and opening and opening.

Behind the reach of my padded elbow,
Podsister shucks off the protective nylon
that shields the veins in her right arm
and pulls fluid
from a catch there.
Her breath sharp in my ear;
a crackle of static between us.

A flush fills the vestibule
like oiled egg whites.
We both make this fuel,
generated from gas exchanges
in our new lungs.
(Our splashing hearts.)

Once the release is done,
she caps off the vestibule
and holds it to the sun.
Like dust, the fluid snatches the light,
spinning excitedly in a vortex.
“Colorshow,” she says.
Her voice is liquid metal,
tickling the tendril
of my inner ear.

Indeed.
Haptomatic heliotrope.
Fleckled Smaragdine.
Atrovirens pearlized;
all clouded and milky;
happy to see the sun.

Mother Mouth is these,
gravity-bending serpentine black.
Her colors are slow and take years
to reach the eyes of earth.

I don’t know the colors there anymore.

Podsister hums happily as she refills
Vessel’s fuel receptacle,
a tender pocket stretched and empty.
Her body stills
as her fluid floats
in slick orbits
through Vessel’s skin.

Podsister and I are in our last cycle here.
We will reach the asteroid belt before our fluid regenerates.
When it’s my turn to pull,
she hands me an identical vestibule.
It fits in my hand like a cross. Like a gun.

I move aside the thick outer layer that coats my arm,
stretching the nylon away.
The catch is ready.
It doesn’t hurt, but it’s uncomfortable to leave it
filled so tight.
The needle goes in.

I hiss, softly.
When I hold my harvest up to the light,
something strange:
a ribbon of nanoblack
slow like trapped smoke.
The clouded colors still rouse,
whirling.

Podsister doesn’t say anything but watches it with me.
Before gravity shifts Vessel
and the sun disappears,
signaling our final sleep here,
I look to her–
her soulful eyes
lacquered like grease.

She won’t say it, but I know
she is afraid.
I am not.
I am already here.
I am already there.

---

Vessel approaches Acclimation gently
as we sleep interlocked with our toes
and hands curled together.
When gravity shifts again,
we open our heavy eyes.

“Acclimation” is a word
we have said too many times.
It means only,
we are almost home.

The surface is bright,
a kaleidoscope dome of atmosphere
floating above rock so cold
it burns real skin.
“Acclimation” is the
epicenter of habitable surface
within the belt.

When Vessel finally settles,
sighing into the dust and rock,
I dispense my fluid
into its soft bladder.
Enough to keep it near—
for Podsister.

We leave Vessel then,
its soft membrane peeling away
as we step out,
and the stars hang
in our eyes
like a thousand distant mothers.
I reseal it as Podsister
puts her glove to its
tender surface. Her hand follows it
as far as her arm can reach
as I send it to its
orbit.
It drifts off smoothly, calmly, until it is a close satellite.
Perfect and round and quiet.
Podsister watches and cries.

I remove my voyage skins, then hers.
Her colorful tears lift from her cheeks
as I slip the helmet carefully from her head.
I see my own face in the glass there: bony and wide.

The hydrogel of my space-safe skin is reflecting light patterns of amber.

Hunger is coming.
It is the color red.

---

I don’t say it—
but I know she feels
what I feel.
It hums between us—
the quiet thrum of something ineffable,
a pull so deep
it might crack the husk
of the universe itself.

Behind us, Mother Mouth roils—
starving.
A wound so vast in the Vacuum
we could crawl inside it
and disappear,
swallowed whole.
Her event horizon,
that thing we have watched
from the nocturnal lens of our eyes,
is a presence.
Its pulse a tremor beneath my ribs.
(Our ribs.)

Acclimation is made for only two at a time.
But it is full of open space.
A desert of rock and dust and sand meant to be walked.
Survived.
It leads to other places. I’ve seen them before,
Maps inlaid for my lens.
They were for me to memorize
while Podsister slept.
For my new memories
in my new home.

There is one thing I saw
at the precipice
of dreams.
I want Podsister to see it, too.

“We’ll go red soon,” she says it neutrally,
still standing where she last touched Vessel,
looking down at the awesome vision of herself.
Lean and unmarred in the plush of her augmented skin.
The lights lining her gentle collarbone, her long neck,
her breasts, her buttocks and thighs, her calves
and feet,

are darkening faster than mine.
Her eyes are swollen and working hard
to slick themselves
against the dry air.

Because both of us are naked,
I realize how small she is.
I take her exposed hands in mine.
“One thing,” I say.
Her eyes dart to the side quickly,
casting a flash of cold light
at me.
“One thing,” she repeats from her perfect mouth. Her sharp teeth.

---

We walk the path
mapped by my lens
along Ruins.
There is a place–
once marked on the corner of my
eye as an arrow with a name.
Pixelated satellite images.
Now we will see it for ourselves.
(Both of us.)

The Amphitheater:
a structure carved from asteroid rock
layered like the labyrinth of
some insect colony
alive with a wide silence.
Each seated row is the height
of me.

Once, cyclopean things sat here,
heated by the newly sheared asteroid.
Now, only an altar remains erect,
massive and empty,
fingers stretching toward the Vacuum.
Toward the thing that will consume.

Colossal hands rise,
carved from the very same stone,
pale as starlight,
wide as mountains,
opened to the expanse of her—
Mother Mouth.
They aren’t meant to hold, but to praise,
the blossom looming.
(The thing that pulls,
and swallows everything.)

Podsister and I labor
up each heavy step.
We are weakened by our journey
through gravity’s churn,
and by the limitations of
our (still) human bodies.
I have to rest between each pull,
as she moves forward,
peering down doll-like
through her loosened
and dark hair,
waiting for my outstretched hand.
She breathes as heavily
as me
but continues.
Her light is a dimming hue
of rust.

At the top of Amphitheater,
I stand exhausted
and awed by the perfect
regenerating
shape of Mother Mouth,
offered in praise.
Podsister laces her arm through mine

She says, “Tiamat.”

It’s a sharp and unexpected thing,
breaking our silence.

She is next to me then,
like a child.
And when I look to her,
forming the word in my head
pressing it into my tongue
the weight of the universe compresses.

“Sea serpent.”

Her eyes are
soft moons,
the light of some strange astral body
refracted. She is entirely red.
Pulsing like blood.
My heart splashes.
How does she know of the sea?
A force she’s never touched
tasted,
smelled,
seen?

Podsister knows something I don’t, now.

She coils tightly in on herself
and I see what else is there in her body.
Something I do not have.
A sheath opening just past
the translucent skin
filling quickly.

It’s acid. I smell it.

When she bites me, what comes out is
red like the light blinking
from her body.
Then it is black.

And she’s so quick, pinning me like love
under the shaking weight of her body.
I think of my last vestibule,
fluid spinning like silk
darkened by that ribbon of black.
I am paralyzed by shock,
blinking towards the atmospheric dome.
She smells like sweat. A mimicry of real human sweat.

Before I can be afraid of the static
swelling from my arms and legs,
she goes to my catch, releasing it with the blunt
point of her canines.
She’s pulling me
out out out
out out
out.

She pulls me hungrily,
swallowing desperately until I am floating in
that opened sheath
(a chrysalis),
dissolving into her.
Changing.
Making room for new things.

---

Podsister sleeps naked
her mouth smeared in hair

(hers and mine)
still at the top of Amphitheater
like a Titan.

It takes hours
in that sheath
until my fear is completely eaten.
Until all my knowledge and memories reshape.
My bones and skin and meat dissolve with me.

And when she unfolds from her rest,
stretching out,

she rises and I see it.
I actually see.

I see with our new wide and shining eyes
Mouth Mother is roiling white light
impossible colors bubbling and

collapsing

infinitely
with only space for the sure and empty future.