Gravitas
For March 6: Day 66/366 of the Story-a-Day Challenge
I was unstable and today I gave up the fight against gravity. I folded upon myself, collapsing into a singularity. You can imagine the amount of heat generated in the process.
It's tremendous.
Gravity is everywhere; it's relentless. I was tugged, stretched, and rolled into ouroboric concavity; everything just piled on, encircling me in an infinitesimally flat shell.
But the Earth, in motion, means the joke's on me, at the behest of that accursed Frenchman, Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis. His Coriolis effect gets me rolling West.
Damn you, Gaspard!
I follow the latitudinal vector along I-10, accruing mass and increasing speed. Will Houston collapse? San Antonio boil? Will Tucson, plagued by no natural disasters, undergo gravitational discombobulation in a flash of unnatural irony?
Phoenix thinks it's hot now! Wait till it gets a load of me.
I melt grooves in the asphalt as I roll, adding the very atoms of hitchhikers to my accretion. It's been said a black hole contains all the information of what it devours--that our universe is an information hologram.
It's true.
A young girl, a runaway named Paulette, is hitchhiking between Tucson and Phoenix. Assimilating her essence, I know why. I learn her story and can accrete her pathos and her story's gravitas--a common story of abuse and cruelty at the hands of someone she should've intuitively trusted.
Gravitas is stronger than gravity.
As I rolled West, she had hopped in, which is a euphemistic way of saying she became quantumly enwrangled in my 11-D gorgantuism when she sublimated into a holographic 2-D vapor.
She is special. Unique in our universe. Her story is special. Even after our universe dissipates, her story will be there in the data.
She gets right to my core.
I cool. Our dueling Bose-Einstein condensates mutually interfere, and Paulette begins to inflate at the speed of light.
Trust me, there's a thin line between quantum gravity and quantum gravitas.
Paulette bubbles out of my universe to become her own bubble universe. It's how these things happen. I roll on, with surprises for cities along I-10. I just hope the Paulette Universe is a kinder, gentler one so no one need--ever--give up the fight against gravity again.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: The companion poem to this submission is "Blowing Bubbles," at https://shopping-feedback.today/poets/blowing-bubbles%3C/a%3E.
About the Creator
Gerard DiLeo
Retired, not tired. Hippocampus, behave!
Make me rich! https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
My substrack at https://substack.com/@drdileo
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Comments (4)
What an engrossing voyage through the fantastical worlds of literature, where gravity and gravitas blend to make a strange and thought-provoking story that left me wondering about the meaning of life and the storytelling medium's potency.
I too hope the Paulette Universe is a kinder and gentler one 🥺 Loved your story!
This is incredibly clever, with a side of deep. "Quantum enwranglement" is now on my list of favorite phrases.
I do like to enter your fictional worlds, Gerard as they continue to astound and confound me.