The Big Crunch

By Daniel Finkel

The beast scrabbled at the one-dimensional walls of its pinprick prison, its unformed mouth keening, desperate to escape the heat, the pressure, the smallness, until finally the subatomic structure cracked and fell and the beast was free, expanding out of nothing into nothing with sharp gases scintillating in its stomach, galaxies unfolding like beach umbrellas, and stars forming and flaring and dying like macrocosmic clockwork, until at last the fabric of eternity is stretched too thin and the beast collapses back into its molecular egg, where it sleeps for a time, with the memory of solar systems circulating in its bloodstream.