26 | Psychopomp Magazine
carved more splooge from her astral cavities.
Ursa Major didn’t know what it all meant: the beeps, dings, dishes, scopes, or knobs but knew she was dimming. Never mind science, time was littler and Ursa’s seeking for Mama Huitzilopochtli grander. She must expedite pursuit toward her genetics of light. First, Ursa had to unstick herself from gravity’s stuck. A liminal, nebulous, unmoving space isn’t so bad when the cosmos produces pheromones of raspberry. Besides, the quest should be easy. Mama is the largest density of all solar fields. Mama casts the widest nets of electromagnetic radiation that ripples the universe. How could Ursa Major not find her? And yet, there were cases like Cassiopeia (in his own paternal seeking), who white dwarfed before sizzling into edges of a black hole. Many don’t know but black is sharp. It’s sharded and hurts to scape against and its never-ending is always because it moves not at all. Black holes possess the allure of stickily webbed oxygen. Thus, Ursa Major must be cautious and quicken pace. She had to hitch a ride with the Swift Tuttle now or never at all. There are always asteroids to ride but these aren’t reliable and fare catastrophically high. Plus, so swift was the Tuttle that passengers ionized into vapors of gas leaving only sparkled trails of luminosity if anyone dare open a window.
Ursa Major boarded the Tuttle while flickering from dim to weak phosphorescence. Climbing the Swift Tuttle’s second rung took two billion years. The conductor said, “No rush. Everything runs on time. Everything is divinely planned.” Ursa thanked him and gave a short-circuited smile. “Where to?” the conductor asked.
“
The conductor doubted the coordinates. He stated if she was looking for Mama (the conductor frequently transported generations of galaxies in maternal pursuit), then Ursa Major was searching in the wrong hemisphere, wrong axial tilt, wrong oscillation, wrong orbit, the solstices and equinoxes, latitude and longitude, all wrong. He asked a most gigantic question. “What, really, is your destination?”
,” Ursa said.