After we finished I felt a more violent, vortical sort of emptiness than usual. The distance constricted between my body and the walls, like I was about to get pancaked between the platens of a hydraulic press. I scrunched up my eyes and exerted the appropriate amount of oppositional mental energy: 1000 psi of uncut psychic force.

My partner was loose and pink and glistening with damp curls from head to foot. His name was Ed. Ed touched the tips of my toes with his and my neck wobbled; Ed nuzzled my shoulder and the millipedenous scuttle of his mustache along my acromion process stood my arm hairs on end. I was a video game bomb flashing red, each pressed breath another step toward detonation.

I want to be alone, I thought, or maybe said. I was having connection problems; it was unclear how much was getting through. I couldn't hold the platens apart for much longer.

Like you want me to leave the house? Ed said.

In my mind, I picked Ed up with a giant imaginary hand—plucked him right off the bed and flicked him into the hall. I assessed the volume of additional air his ejection undisplaced. The room still felt like a cupboard. One of those skinny ones people use for medicine bottles or expired teas and dusty spices. My chin jerked itself from side to side, an involuntary attempt to shake-to-erase the airless panic rising inside me. Couldn't he see my lips turning blue?

Out in the hall, Ed stayed loose and pink and damp. He was hard to flap. He had a shit mom and did a lot of therapy before, during, after, during, after, during, and after rehab. I could feel his loose dampness seeping through the wall. Still too close.

I said I want to be alone, I said.

My giant hand snatched him from the hallway and flung him into the street.

It was a sloppy toss and he bonked into a streetlamp and rag-dolled onto the curb. I felt a little guilty for being so disrespectful to his tiny, pink, loose, damp-curl-bedecked body. I knew he wasn't squeezing all the air from my lungs on purpose.

He looked dazed out there, naked under the streetlamp. His face shifted like a timelapse of the sky.

I swore I could still feel his heartbeat, like it was carrying through the sidewalk and the power lines and the walls all the way to the floorboards under my bed. Tell-Tale Heart meets tin-can telephone. His mouth was moving but no words were in the air. I reached for him with my giant hand, scooped him up and set him down softly, feet firmly aground, at the bus stop four blocks away.

The frame started skipping—where did he find pants?—and his soundless mouth moved some more. I couldn't hear what he wanted, but I knew it was too much. Back off, Ed, I thought. Can't you see I'm a fucking flapjack? Can't you see I'm a goddamn live grenade?

Ed reached up toward my giant thumb.

LikeÉ does this mean you need to take some space? he said.

I saw a ring between his teeth, pin dangling against his chin. I ka-boomed.

Alone! I said. Alone! I said I want to be ALONE! Not alone like you're not here right now, alone like you never existed. Alone! Alone-alone. Not alone like there's an empty space where you used to be, alone like there's no memory of you at all, no trace. Alone like actual Space—infinite, expanding. So alone that if I were a star and you were a sound, not one wave of you could ever reach me because your vibrations would peter out long before they found another particle to rub against. Alone like I'm a ravenous black hole and whatever fleck of spacetime you once occupied has been devoured, erased, irretrievably collapsed into the singularity at the center of me.

Ed blinked. The hydraulic press was so tight I thought I might shit out my own heart. There was no other choice: my giant hand picked Ed up and put him on the moon. I couldn't help giving him a little shove—I wanted to see him bounce. He did, four times, like a rock skipping across a river. I started to laugh but Ed went limp and turned a strange kind of gray. Oh shit shit shit. I forgot to put him in a space suit!

Unprotected, the body can survive on the moon the for less than three minutes. People think it's the cold up there that kills you, but it's the lack of oxygen and atmospheric pressure that gets you first. After you pass out, the death process is like a spate of biblical plagues unleashed beneath the skin—lymph and blood boiling in your veins, saliva burning away the flesh of your mouth, tears melting your eyes, oxygen expanding and bursting your lungs from the inside.

I lifted Ed, dead, back into cislunar orbit. I did my best trumpet imitation, squalled a few bars of "Taps," and released him into the vacuum of Space.

Fucking bodies, man. So finicky! Too much pressure from the outside, too much pressure from within. Finding the balance seemed impossible. I looked into my giant empty hand and felt sorry for Ed and me both. I hadn't meant to murder him on the moon! But when his tiny stiff gray body floated out and away, bronchioles shredded to confetti inside his petrified chest, I recognized the justice in it. A void for a void, a lung for a lung.


.