Assimilation (7)

Declan McCullagh

He now remembers the path forgotten all his life: it leads to a ruined door through which everything vanishes, even the key that opens it.

Assimilation (6)

sirocco

Human emotion reduced him; every passion wore off a layer of skin, every rage took a subsection of organ. Eroded, he walked through walls.

Assimilation (5)

bincabonca

Part of him was lost,two fingers from the right hand. His music suffered. When he played the piano, there was a shadow in the treble, a deadness.

Assimilation (4)

Chiharu Shiota

The walls of the house have thickened, the rooms grown smaller; the foyer is just the size of a mailbox, and he gropes there for his bills.

Assimilation (3)

Javier Marin

What he touched penetrated skin and clung, but he did not want to release the pen, sofa, wallet: they defined him as the boundaries faded.

Assimilation (2)

Jake Longstreth

Lovers had become landscape--the woman he knew that ancient summer was lost in a hedgerow, flowering, leaving, framing what could be seen.

Assimilation (1)

bas princen, photography

Even his fingerprints vanished. His skin smoothed like river stone; his grip on the world diminished. He was sliding someplace frictionless.

Observatory (8)

aknacer

Over great distance, the mechanism flattens what it reveals: dark matter, an arc of stars, under an arch of oak limbs the lovers, made one.

Observatory (7)

soap bubble

Light gathers in the perfect lens. Its restlessness is such that it cannot remain there, even in perfection: it moves to clarify or destroy.

Observatory (6)

Mark Lawrence

Two lenses moved randomly in her mind until they fell into the right relation. She saw him clearly then, and cursed the perfection of focus.

Observatory (5)

black hole

Safe in the great dome, at the end of the tube, she watched her lover at a great distance enter the black hole, and the universe imploding.

Observatory (4)

anonymous

Tiny figure against the expanse of firmament, seen through the magnifying gaze of something godlike with a cross-hair and an ounce of lead.

Observatory (3)

Ergül Cengiz  

We lifted the brass tube: moons came into being, planetary rings, such distances that our bodies faded to shadows in the obliterating lens.

Observatory (2)

Stanko Abadžic

A bountiful harvest season, everything ripening at the decisive moment, whole galaxies tipped like so many apples beyond the event horizon.

Observatory

Silke Otto-Knapp

Clear night sky scribbled to the margin with stars--that's the problem: everything is written, no room even for a black hole. And God reads.

Empty House (8)

Beth Dow

Soon, but not yet, the incremental creaking of hinges, the end of molecular bonding, release of form: shapelessness in the door frame, soon.

Empty House (7)

Vincent Desidero

That characteristic turbulence, elemental disturbance in the aether, the tureen vibrating on the sideboard invisibly in the vacant hallway.

Empty House (6)

Rod McRae

A crack at the center, where even the intelligence of cockroaches was tested: rain eroded the foundation and a simple domesticity entered.

Empty House (5)

Andy Smylie

The cleaning finally ended. If there were beds, they would never be made; dishes would stay stained in eternity, and gravity be abolished.

Empty House (4)

Bibliodessey

After the journey, months of wandering through landscapes of bone and salt, we came at last to prairie, a rotting expanse of Persian carpet.

Empty House (3)

Empty Room

In a bathroom drawer there are artifacts: molecules of talcum, dried smear of cat's blood, a lingering odor of unidentifiable ointment.

Empty House (2)

CanisLupusMoon

A wind in the desolation of the closet, incremental movement like the shifting of tectonic plates, while in the wall a mouse skull settles.

Empty House (1)

Wendy Burton

Silence in the house, people gone out, cats sleeping, leafblowers put away, the half life of the crawl space ticking down toward zero.