You know black holes aren’t real, right? They’re not a fake- they might “exist”, but they aren’t real. Never has one pressed down upon me or anyone I know- until it happened to me recently.

I’d bungled together dinner, mostly rice and pasta sauce, and walked, with a cautious hand out towards the back door towards the out-house. I thought to myself ‘there’s going to be a black hole in the doorway’. And there it was, a perfectly clear mirror of black. No infantesimal sucking vacuum of gravity, no crushing void, it was a lake top at midnight on a cloudy night time evening. A deep pool. I turned around quickly soon realising. I had anticipated the black whole, like a soothsayer, fortune teller clairvoyant, I anticipated- projecting into the moments from now future. Back peddling, I walked back to the kitchen and decided to doodle on my phone. I took a picture a minute later and sent it to my brother and sister through shared group chat. They didn’t respond, but I figured they were both ok after I saw that they had seen it too. I hesitated going out to the out-house. My bladder was terrible and my toes were squirming. I’ve noticed that my brain changes when I eat sugar or need to go to the bathroom or skip breakfast and have a black coffee. Psychotic. Clear in mind, seemingly, bug scrambled in action. It all competes; I walk into the laundry that links the buildings somewhat, I see the clear pool, like an opal, surprising, final and in my way. I tap my foot and rock on my heels and go back to my phone. “Black holes”, I look them up. Nothing. Only theory, nothing to work with or use. I consider climbing out the kitchen window, strange because the lounge window is lower to the ground and bigger- the front door is an obvious option which comes to me last. I walk to the door, past the lounge room, past the t.v. I stop. I back peddle and go to turn it on, the screen gently mirrors my setting if it was monochrome and covered in dust. ABC turns on, the channel it was on when I last turned it off, RAGE maybe, followed by a high pitched squealing that nobody complains about, black holes are everywhere the reporter is saying. I knew this, feeling that somehow they were always there, if you look around and feel enough they are there, staring right back at you. One in each eye, rents of uncanny peace. Hitler had one extracted from his heart after his mother died. They are made up of atoms, the same as you and me but pressed in such a way that they can never open. That’s why they most commonly appear in your eyes, your heart and the doorways between the kitchen and the out-house.

I walked out again, knowing that by the time I had explained it, taken a photo and checked on the news, that it would have moved on. The whole idea, once pointed out tends to wink from existence. Are they real? Absolutely not, that’s why I see them everywhere. Each doorway, candles (looked at from above), the handkerchief cupped in the hand of a coughing tuberculosis patient, the Chertsey Inkpot of Shakespeare and TNT. There is no explosion with dynamite, it’s a reaction between two neighbours open their doors into one-abother’s path. Parity disruptions, and boom. Hard to explain outside of comic book strips. But that’s black holes. I knew it would be gone, I explained to myself, the more I thought about it and shared how it was, the more it waned- clear as fresh laid tar. Fabric knitting in on itself, closing over on itself, wrapping and shrinking, soaking up and fading like the love child of a broken television and a dusty raisin. Wishless as the first star, and tragic as the last- gone until forgotten, only to be remembered.