Sessily Watt

Atoms Never Touch, the debut novel from micha cárdenas, is built on a nifty speculative premise. Every time Rea becomes deeply intimate with a lover, she shifts from one universe into a second, alternate one in which she and her lover never met. Over and over, at the very moment she grows closest to those she loves, she loses them.

Beyond the pale, the pallor and slow-burn violet death: the burrowing spiders, backs the size of satellites, orbiting your hair a halo webbed and weaving and electric bright with roots of neon to spear inside that soft spot under your ribs they’ll tickle and preen, tickle and preen and yes I crushed a fistful of mushrooms between my teeth and lay on my bed for six straight hours stuck under this dark belly looking up at legs gathered together like popsicle sticks hot-glued and holding and her...

There was always more than distance. There are trajectories, orbits, the delta-V of any object in motion. There are equations which will predict these motions; cold hard facts that show that comet Swift-Tuttle will not return for x years. Its debris will still cause the meteor shower I am watching again, and I will understand, only vaguely, how it is that the whole universe moves. Twenty years later, thirty years later, my birthdays have gathered and these meteors still fall to the earth.