Hothouse Literary Journal Issue #5 (2013)

DILATION DYLAN BYNUM She is so beautiful you might not even notice, like a blank night sky secretly full of stars. Like you step out onto a dark balcony, and your pupils are still hiding behind strained irises because they don’t yet realize you’re no longer inside. Back inside is a dinner party—or, “our little soirée” as the hostess always insisted on calling it. Back inside it is brightly lit with electric lights glittering through crystal chandeliers down onto gleaming marble and polished wood countertops, onto glittering backless dresses that hold up glittering faces all stretched into toothy smiles, onto glittering top-shelf liquor bottles behind the open bar that are the life of the party. The aggressive glittering is shushed as the door closes behind you, but your post-traumatic stressed eyes can now only make out the sharp crescent smile of the moon just above the trees. It smiles at you kindly, though the rest of the sky seems rather empty and dull. Except . . . except for that point of light there, a single speck that might be a candle flickering at the peak of some invisible mountain. Another flame lights near it. Then another. Then another, and another. And pretty soon, your eyes can’t seem to focus fast enough as you come to realize that above you lay the sacred remains of a great archetypal diamond that long ago exploded across this deep expanse of midnight velvet canvas. And they all glitter–the moon, the stars, the sky itself; but not in the purposeful way of the long-forgotten party behind you. These glitter like they do it because there’s just no other possible way for them to exist.

So you stand there, unlit cigarette dangling between your limp fingers, staring out into the nothing that is really everything.

This is her beauty and how you notice it: a blank night sky, secretly full of stars.

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