three microfictions
Quinn Rennerfeldt
The Set-Up
I sleep on the cold slab, constantly rearranging my limbs in hope of comfort. The alien doesn’t seem to mind unnurturing surfaces; perhaps feeling right in their own skin is comfort enough. They approach what might be morning, or might be a millennia dawning. Consciousness fills me like a cup. Every time is the same. What are you today? Probed by this needle-mouthed question. I suction my face to a porthole in the side of the ship. I feel more akin to the blanks between stars. After hours, or perhaps within the same moment, they take my hand. It feels like sand running through my fingers. The alien turns towards me, but I can’t be faced. I will never finish removing all these masks. Silence ripples across my expression. The cosmos is doing its comic thing, stars winking to each other like so many inside jokes, and I am on the outside, unable to hear the punchline.
Circular Reasoning
We sink deep into space, like a splinter. The roundness of all we pass becomes oppressive. Everything shaped like an eye, everything with its sights on us. My hair lies dead on my head, my fingernails grow long. The alien is subjected to persistent rants about stalagmites and triangles and categorization. Facets and meridians. My talking slows time, atoms appear and gambol before our eyes. Outside, galaxies plod on. I am an ouroborial menace, circling significance, rabid with angular obsession. Puncture me! The alien, knowing better, retreats into bed and body. I remain glued to the blank orbit of the mind.
Off
Something feels off, like a floating egg, or discolored skin at the rim of a wound. The thesis of our space-time trajectory is lack. A wriggling gap, undulating at its edges like a flatworm. Living shadow, doom-shade. I crave terra, would shovel dirt into my gullet if I could touch ground. But the ship floats like a strand in the cavernous expansion of absence. Our skin stretches at the never-ending fringe of existence. Space surrounds us, the color of crusted blood. It emits a dissonant chord the length of sempiternity. In response, sphincters tense: mouth, anus, pores. Sometimes, it is confines that I find comforting. A rigid four-walled cell. Gravity’s constancy. Pressed up against the glass eye of infinity, I become terrifyingly unfamiliar.
Quinn Rennerfeldt is a queer poet, parent, and partner earning her MFA at San Francisco State University. Their heart is equally wed to the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Her work can be found in Cleaver, Mom Egg Review, SAND, elsewhere, and is forthcoming in A Velvet Giant and Salamander. Their chapbook Sea Glass Catastrophe was released in 2020 by Francis House Press. They are the Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills, a graduate-run literary journal with SFSU.