Sunsets and Silencers

"The Big Bang" Flash Fiction by Michael Hart

The Big Bang

For a moment there is calm. Cocktail conversations align in arrangements. Solitary fits of laughter orchestrate into arpeggios. A brisk autumn breeze turns still. The flat October air takes the floral scent of May. Time is stoned. In a burst, their lips meet, and in an instant there's a cosmos shaping somewhere between this synapse. Electrons and nuclei form into atoms, the soft glow within closed eyes. Flares of light reveal particles, drops of color. Laughing under sunshine on long celebrated avenues—in Paris, Rome, Santiago, Tokyo—hand in hand on black sand beaches, on summits overlooking verdant valleys, on lawns under weeping willows. They are following the shadows of their branches, dendrites with endless paths, and when one ends, there is another within an easy leap, a gentle skip between boulders on a stream. They whir and glide, ebb and flow, sway onto stages of productions grander than ever imagined. Productions with cathedrals, palaces, rooms upon rooms, characters entering and exiting stage, serenades and symphonies. The universe expands, expands, expands and the endpoints become little beacons, billions of light years away, stars in lonely corners of the midnight sky. Between them, vast, eternal space. Their lips part to discussions of stocks and office politics and goose bumps rise as the mercury falls. They look around and space contracts, contracts, contracts, until the endpoints are flickering bulbs slowly burning out.

Michael Hart works as a writer and editor while pursuing a graduate education in psychology. He resides in Louisville, Kentucky, where he feigns a keen taste for bourbon and tries to make sense of horse racing. His stories have been published in Diverse Voices Quarterly and Fiction at Work.