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First, he wrote a paper on Technetium. How the spectral striations of light from stars proved that they are the birthplace of Technetium, this silvery radioactive metal. It has a half-life, he learnt, of 4.2 million years and is astonishingly rare on earth. He wrote this paper carefully, before Sara miscarried. He wasn’t there when it happened. He was writing this paper about Technetium — how its discovery was accidental. How it was artificially created in a laboratory. It was between the hours when he was wrote these round, shining words and when he was huddled, beating forwards against the wind, walking past the bowling alley, the clinic, the church. Later, they sat in the bathtub, talked of things we only understand by seeing. Talked of Technetium and the stars. |
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the night-lit road was covered in a fine powder nearby a small heron skated across its surface shredding dust behind it he watched carefully from his rear-view window drew the ice-cutter across his windshield bombarding crystals of ice his daughter would have picked up & licked giggling he noted carefully the dark basaltic hoar frost at the dip in the road thought about the repairs he had made on the observatory’s largest mirror and how to fund the impacted crack in the base the egg-shaped dome casing seemed to blur with his daughter’s dusty ballerina’s studio tiny bombardments of matter on sphered surface scattering infinitesimal showers of cells the impact wasn’t hard with no atmosphere to stop him there is no atmosphere on the moon matter doesn’t erode but on earth bodies collide cooling down the blood and settling into minerals & powder |
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ELIZABETH WELSH is a freelance editor, originally from New Zealand and now living in South London. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in numerous online and print journals. She is currently writing a chapter for a collection of Katherine Mansfield essays and is a doctoral candidate. |
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