Watching the FracturesPixie Bruner
I am watching the fractures. Some are a month old, some unfolding in real time. A kind word is a cudgel on the wrong day. A drive-by-shooting in the dining room from mouths loaded with armor-piercing rounds. The wrong angle, bare feet, and the roomful of hard eggshells, straight-razors. The fractures are the worst trick ever! The tablecloth pulled right out from beneath the settings. Everything is in its place, snap the wrist just-so, like this Say a magic word you fight for like “Abracadabra” or even “Sorry”. This year, we’re rife with rifts in reality that create new solipsistic universes spontaneous ruptures on the seams of everything. The fractures may even evolve to social media transmission, language is still a virus, resentment, baby teeth, lost socks, the division of labor, the division of sealed boxes into his/her/them and labeled filled with the indivisible things we forgot all about, long nights, that hanging silence milliseconds after the car crashes, fully racked vials of tears, dried ink, and time itself. The ice was always posted with warnings we ignored. We magically, sweetly, naively imagined permafrost. Time would stand still for, eternally and nothing would ever change, despite the only constant being Planck and change. The vacuum possesses infinite energy. That is what frightens me most- The antimatter of matters. I see them under the ice plates. The cracks are molecular and the cleavages were sudden. Things broke, shattered atoms and mothers' hearts. odd physics of humans and our stupid body/minds. I have watched the space between increase, the crack, become line, becomes gap, I warn you to “mind the gap” as you slip right in and straight down, gap becomes chasm, and chasm to gulf and eventually gulps worlds liminal space between heart and mind by via any wormhole, only worms. I’ve watched them for an unmeasurable time. You don’t know me, but I’m your fairy God-Auntie . (Godmothers and mothers were replaced by the new tech). I smell of roses, over-steeped black tea, tomato leaves, fresh grave dirt. You hear me in the darkness as I whisper in your nautilus-sleeping ear, “Run, smart girl, hold your head up, and never look back or down, lovey It you start right now, it’ll be a far off some-day before you ever join me… |
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Pixie Bruner
Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA) is a writer, editor, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their deranged cats. Editor of Memento Mori Ink Magazine’s “Morsus Vitae”, her Elgin-nominated poetry book The Body As Haunted was published in 2024 (Authortunities Press). Her words are in/forthcoming from Space & Time Magazine, Hotel Macabre Vol. 1 (Crystal Lake Publishing), Amazing Stories, Star*Line, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Abyss & Apex, Penumbric, Spectral Realms, Baubles from Bones, Strange Horizons, Angry Gable Press, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are her fault. 2025 Rhysling Award Chair Survivor
Read more from Pixie Bruner:
- "The Oubliette" - Baubles From Bones: Issue 5
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