Gravity

Curled up in bed, Ingrid scrunched her knees to her chest, allowing her quick breath to warm the tent she had formed under the blankets. She had been there for what felt like hours, since her older sister had tucked her in, singing the lullabies that washed over her ears and seeped into the corners of her cheeks and belly and toes. Around her, the house sighed, its walls creaking inwards to squeeze Ingrid reassuringly.

But tonight, Ingrid could not be reassured, did not want the walls to contract so tightly just yet. The words of her sister’s song danced in her brain, and Ingrid hoisted herself up onto the tail of her dragon, ready to soar into the night, to meet alien queens. The ecstatic twinkle of the stars outside Ingrid’s window hinted at worlds in which words would gush from her mouth, would form beautiful melodies just like her sister’s.

Tentatively, Ingrid allowed one toe to exit the tent of her bedcovers, then pressed her foot fully onto the cold floor of the bedroom she shared with her sister. She tiptoed towards the door, a flickering light seeping into the room through the crack under the door. As if in a dream, it creaked open, illuminating Ingrid’s awestruck face. For the cosmos awaited her, its swirling wonders dancing before her eyes. Ingrid stepped through the door, then turned to shut it, but it had gone. In its place, the great sphere of sky had split open above her head, its deep, swirling blue-black posing as a backdrop to the droplets of fire and gas that flamed ferociously from the depths of the universe. Ingrid’s bare toes curled into the damp earth at her feet, and suddenly she was standing atop a great hilly mound, grasses sprouting all around her, brushing her little legs as they bowed before the wind.

There was another soul atop the hill, a man. Large and solid, he gazed up with the same wonder Ingrid felt blossoming somewhere between her lungs. She ran to him, drawn by the gravity usually reserved for celestial bodies. When she reached him, she realized he was much larger than she had thought from a distance. Standing at his feet, Ingrid had to crane her neck to see his face. At first, the man did not notice her. Ingrid studied his face, sure that she had seen it before. That those ubiquitous brown eyes had watched her while she grew within her mother’s womb, that they now resided inside her very skull, that they stared back probingly when she looked into a mirror. Suddenly, the man looked down, and his eyes met hers, old friends meeting each other once more.

“Ingrid?” he gasped, a smile breaking across his face. “I thought I’d never get to meet you. Come, let me show you the stars.”

“But… who are you? Where am I?”

“Ingrid, you know me. I named you; surely you know me.”

And she did. Since the day she was born, his photograph, faded but tangible, had lived in the folds of her mother’s underwear drawer, worn and frayed from the countless times it had been lovingly caressed. She had been told his name, hadn’t she? Father. Ingrid, this is your Father, they had told her. But the name was foreign to her, unfamiliar on her tongue. She tried it out once more, wanting to please the smiling man.

“Father?” she asked, searching his face for a sign of recognition. The word drew out a thread of familiarity that stretched, tenuously, between the two beating hearts on the hill.

The man named Father took Ingrid by the hand and withdrew an extendable telescope from his pocket, where it grew a tripod and lowered itself to Ingrid’s eyes. The pair huddled closely together, sheltering each other from the terrible beauty of the universe. The man’s arms swallowed Ingrid, and she knew that she was safe. Even if she had wanted to leave, the curious gravity of the man’s body bound her closely to his side. His warm embrace sealed in the heat and the light and the moon and the stars. Through the glinting eyepiece of the telescope, Ingrid watched Saturn’s rings contract as the particles of stardust and the creatures of the sky spiralled in closer and closer, reentering their place of birth.

The pair sat together for hours, the man painting pictures of expansion and peculiar velocity, pulling Ingrid’s eyes and mind across the Virgo Supercluster, through dark matter and shifting cosmological constants. Soon Ingrid could no longer tell whether she was real or not, whether the warm body beside her was a star or a galaxy, an atom or a human.

But soon, vaguely, slowly, Ingrid felt the gravity of the man begin to release her. Without a star, he told her, planets spin out of control. Ingrid squeezed his hand, reassuring him that she was there, sturdily there. Around her, the sky began to lighten and the galaxies to fade. The man’s radiance was fading too, drained, perhaps, by the centrifugal force of the spiralling galaxy. Ingrid felt her stomach clench when, all at once, she was delivered to the door of the bedroom she shared with her sister.

It opened for her again, inviting her into the safety of her bed. Walking into the room, Ingrid noticed the rising sun behind her windows’ sparkling panes of glass. Turning once more, Ingrid walked down the hall towards her parents’ room, eager to see the smiling man again, to swim among the stars with him. She opened the door, peeking in with curious brown eyes. Her mother, haggard in sleep in a way lipstick could cure in the day, lay on the far left of the bed, seeming too small in the sea of blankets and pillows. She was alone.