Celestial Bodies (and First Light Zine)

Reading time: 5 minutes

A SHORT FICTION RESPONSE TO DAVID KETLEY’S CAMERALESS PHOTOGRAPHY

WRITTEN FOR FIRST LIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHY WRITING NOW: ZINE PRODUCED AND EDITED BY THE AUTHOR FOR OPEN EYE GALLERY/WATERSIDE ARTS, MAY 2021 (BUY HERE)

It’s a star-crèche, The Traveller thought. 

He drifted through it: a dazzling cloud of gas and dust almost unbearable in its scale. He could see protostars, hot baby stars in the first stages of their development. Like diamonds, each one needed a tremendous amount of pressure. The cloud’s own gravitational collapse would push and press them into existence over a long, long time.

It was a drunk perspective: a blue and red mist that dispersed confusingly away from him against layer upon layer of filmy deposits – which, he realised, were other galaxies behind it, hundreds of millions of light-years away. And behind these lay a bottomless blackness, a black-black material that the stars ate away at, burning hydrogen into helium, hungrily, burning helium, then, into carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

Stars sculpt the shape of their cluster. They sculpt the world around them.

Every star had a different brilliance, something to do with the magnetic field interacting with the gas. His ship tracked and logged every budding sun: its dimensions, velocity, and all dust devils left in their wake – a trail of celestial crumbs.

Waste dust becomes planets. He lingered on that for a moment. He had time.


He clenched and unclenched his fist to let the tension out. The insistence of life was too much – the cloud just went on and on and on. Oh, to live for 10 billion years! And what a death: a supernova to rattle the gods. His would barely make the news.



What’s it like to know, to be certain, that your light will never be extinguished? Confident in immortality? When these stars croaked, their death-explosion would be seen years after the event; imprinted on strange eyes, separated by vast distances, and themselves condemned to the lifespan of a flickering candle.

The Traveller keenly felt – not knew, felt – the possibility of worlds within worlds. Did that make him divine matter, whether he lasted 100 years or 100 million?

He blinked, exaggeratedly, to wash away the imaginary supernova. Every blink left an inverted afterimage in black and white.

Drained of its colour, the universe before him flattened into an ancient, 2D surface, eroded, battered and scratched with repeating tiny patterns. He gripped the panel in front of him. Nauseous, he leant forward, suddenly feeling very, very small. The view distorted from star cloud to petri dish, from nebula to primordial soup. He was part of a dizzying string of micro and macro events.

The Traveller swallowed, hard, licked his lips.

Prehistoric parasites occupied his warm, wet mouth. He could sense them wriggling about, manipulating his immune system, his gut, his teeth, his bad breath.

Anticipating a retch, he spat, and the saliva dribbled down his chin, so he did it again with more conviction, and this time a satisfying gob slapped against the cold floor.

It was corrupted by mouth flora that he couldn’t see, but he knew they were there. A bacterial community, previously on tongue and tooth, were digesting the starch from his lunch into energy. Like stars, they had an insatiable need to consume.

What was the difference, he thought, between in here and out there?

He swallowed again, took a breath, and accelerated forward.