Escape Velocity: A Fable
*
The best minds believed there was no life without the Sun. That without photosynthesis, nothing could exist, except nothingness. G. knew, though, from the depths of all her hiding spaces, that she was still breathing, and that even on the most cloudless days, she could cease to exist, without there having been a catalyst, a misfortune, a perpetrator. Science is always science, until it isn’t, the oceans capped with ice on Saturn’s moon say with a humble tide.
*
“The existence of escape velocity is a consequence of conservation of energy.” G. pulls the solar storm doors closed and sits back down, bruise to bruise with the floor that’s hardest at the bottom of the stairs. She used to have protection, ozone amulets fastened to a chain of garlic, oil of dragon’s blood dabbed on like SPF 50, pulse points standing to receive their gift of armor. She knew what to invoke, but never built a shield. Now, there are weapons but the room won’t stop spinning.
*
Orbit is a trap, a marriage forever uneven. That it begins with an “or” is her only hope.
*
But she has propulsion. The math becomes more complicated without a static gravitational field, and she is certainly full of potential: her sixth-grade model solar system placed third, which wouldn’t get her into NASA, but she has seen the solar flares from the windows of ships that never took off, and she knows they mean to vaporize her.
*
We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.
In the space flight of her heart, that stray died softly into its shallowing breath, its bohemian mongrel head resting pretty on its front paws while watching the planets rise, then falling with them. G. took the story lightly at first; in her bones, the dog’s death was pure purpose. A 1957 Russian science death, and oh, G. wanted to be useful, so the first few days after she learned the name Laika, the Sun didn’t feel so hot. She whimpered for warmth, but it was her puppy, her shepherd mutt, who got too close, absorbed the Sun’s elbow to the chest before she could stop it. Quickly, the weight of that sanctioned sacrifice hit G. in her left lung while the mutt heaved, then settled under the bed. Laika haunts her now. She should already know there are no easy ends. We should all be sleeping on the ground, G. thinks, not the patch of Sun sneaking past the broken aluminum blinds—the tinny sound they make when they fall not a lullaby, but echo of Laika lapping dregs from overturned garbage bins in a Moscow ghetto at dawn. Soon, an astrophysicist would stumble away from his own tin can and spot her breathing happily, tail wagging, orbiting an earthly patch of shade. It’s said he was later sorry, but the Sun is a beer-breathed husband who would never apologize.
*
What happens to the cornea when it even deigns to rest on the Sun. What happens to the pupil as it tries to take it all in, but is confined to a finite field of white. Snow blind is not how G. came to the Sun, but how she stumbles through the cold, tricked by the heat into not wearing a coat and retinas now fixed, now afraid of the stairs back up to the closet to find a covering by feel alone.
*
Like watching grass grow
If she had a super power—not one she’d choose, like flight or the ability to transpose her skin with another’s, one less prone to sunburn and prickling to a touch she can’t discern will be tender or tenderizing, but one karmic, assigned and DNA-appropriate—it would be time lapse. Planting is such delayed gratification. The only haste in G.’s world lies in the path the hurled hate travels, supersonic, toward her center of gravity. In their yard, the annuals she bare-rooted on a complicit day in May decompose, sink unfruitfully, finally, into November terrain, that hospice. Given the water, given the light, given in spades the Sun, still they perish without the dirty veil. So slowly, considering especially how many times he’d mowed around their plot, avoiding also the headstone chunk of mica and quartz she’d placed there so something rightful could languish, deathless, surrounded by blades.
*
In pagan ritual, a blade is called an athame, masculine, represents the element of fire, black handle to absorb power like black tar shingles drink the Sun, double-edged but here’s the thing, never used for cutting, used for holding, storing, directing energy. The gentle, white-handled bolline is the cutter, travels in sacred space against the herbs it frees from root. So, kitchen knives and sorcery knives—what G. has to wield against the interstellar throwing knives of alpha, beta, gamma.
*
Is G. the Earth? Earthy, earthly, with her legs in the air, held up by scapulae and the haphazard arch of her back? The Sun is home from work and wants his due; it goes down with the singe of how she acquiesces. He is a man with hands aflame, trying to plant a tree, and after, she is ungathered, buzzing with this and that possibility, a thickness of fireflies to catch, with no thought that it’s winter and there is no net that can contain such minutiae.
*
Just by being the most smoldering thing, renders everything ice hurtling through oblivion—the back porch door with those broken blinds that never go down. The fact of such violence’s reach from 93 million miles away is so demoralizing that even suicide would feel like throwing paper airplanes into crematories. The Sun enters like clockwork and G. is not the Earth at all, but ash standing in cheap shoes, solar wind dispersing her—the only way she can be anywhere but here.
*
Knowing, though, while continuing to smolder, that the largest structure known to science is a cluster of galactic nuclei spanning 4 billion light years reminds G. to believe in pieces, nearly infinite smoldering pieces charged by black holes. Charged by nothingness, pieces, but widely regarded as a singular entity, and the fact of that being pure possibility. Plus, there are weapons.
*
G.’s body, all women’s bodies, this and that breast, astral bodies pulverized so long by war, marriages, solar winds—they are sand grains of sand grains. Pulverized so long that numbers fail and we can’t fathom, just as we can’t fathom all the blades ever over women’s throats, bodies uninvited in our bodies, poison mantra of this is how it’s always been even as it changes, as we know it hasn’t, can’t be dust without having ever been something to dust. This is endurance—piles, craters, piles, craters, piles, craters, endlessly, an accumulation with a plan. This is moon, immune, minute and cool, sure of its pull.
*
G. has no way to measure her kinetic energy except in the commas of fingernail clippings and trimmed bangs in the bathroom sink. She gathers them on the cracked altar of a bedside table when the Sun goes down to the corner bar. On the autumn equinox, she sweeps them into an accumulation, feels heavy and knows her gravitational potential energy is next, but has no idea how to affect it. Decides one impossibility at a time, but is she adding ritualistic steps, or subtracting them from the list of steps to be taken? She will ask something higher than the Sun, something ancient and warmer that is not destructive. It is just a reverie, but she moves an amethyst around a wooden wheel, calls the corners of the land and sky into a oneness in her back left molar, and the space between her fingertips begins to crackle and charge as suddenly, she remembers: to birth an orbit entirely her own, she must keep up, burn parallel with how the Earth—which she is not, is not—moves around the Sun. The energy she saved—this is where it will go, nearly all of it, like migrating alongside raging rapids water to find civilization earth, fire or how the mother seal tethers to the white shark’s tail, too close to be eaten and hoping only to disorient, out-maneuver the predator as they dance primal below and above air the surface. Moving through space, the closer one gets to the speed of light, the less time passes, the smaller one becomes. The combined energies must equal zero to achieve escape velocity. She must be nothing, dressed in the sky, before this will work.
Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Versus (BlazeVOX, 2011), Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (WordTech, 2010), and three chapbooks, most recently antidote (Winged City Press, 2013). Her poems have recently appeared in Barn Owl Review, Best of the Net 2011, Fourth River, North American Review, and Mud Luscious, have been nominated for Best of the Net 2012, three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and are forthcoming in Knockout and Crab Creek Review (2013 poetry contest honorable mention). She co-founded (in 2006) and co-edits the online literary blog Blood Lotus and runs a poetry blog called Versify for the York Daily Record/Sunday News, where she is also books editor and a web curator.
