Meredith McCarroll
DARK MATTER
“You know how dark matter is like the absence of space, but it, like, takes up space?”
“OK.”
“Well, what if dark matter could be contained and it’s like an anti-gravity solution. In a gas form. It takes up the space that is the absence of space.”
“Dark matter?”
“Yeah. Which is different than dark energy.”
“I don’t know what dark energy is.”
“Oh. Have you heard of the Big Bang, Mama?”
He is fourteen. I am in the bathtub. He is wearing the new sweatshirt he saved to buy that is still so soft on the inside that I rubbed my cheek against it when he asked me to feel it.
He is four and he explains centripetal and centrifugal force to my mom. She records it on her flip phone that is stashed now in a drawer with misfit cords, lost memories, and unanswered texts.
He is eleven and we move him from his childhood home. He stands in the center of a magnolia tree that touches the ground all around him. He slowly pulls red berries from the cones, their white threads stringing behind, and shuts quietly down.
He is twelve and the red berries sit on his bookshelf with the pottery shards from before and a handful of sea glass from now. He stops asking to visit, and learns to ski.
Some nights, we lay together and cry. About algebra, but always eventually about distance and loss and why Mom had to die and that magnolia tree.
“I like to imagine that our energy disperses and mixes with other energies when we die. Some part star. Some part tree. Some part mosquito.”
“Is that why you don’t like to kill mosquitoes?” he asks.
“No. I just figure it’s not my right to kill another living thing.”
“It’s not like you think it’s your granny or something?”
We laugh.
“Maybe it is like that,” I say as we grow quiet.
“Yeah. I think we just die and that’s that.”
He is one and I am nursing him. He grins at me so that my nipple slips out of his milky mouth. I guide him back to nurse and his eyes flutter shut. I rub my hand over his soft head, brushing the wispy dark hairs away from his face. He drifts off and I pull my shirt back down, propping my arm against the sofa so that he can rest against me for as long as he will.
“Anyway, you know about the Big Bang?”
He isn’t sure where to rest his eyes, so I lean over so only my bubbly back is visible.
“I mean, I know the theory, yes.”
“It isn’t a theory. And the way we confirmed that the Big Bang is true is that we were able to confirm that everything ever is constantly expanding outward, getting faster and faster. Dark energy is the name that we’re assigning to the force that is doing that.”
“We are?”
“We are.”
Meredith McCarroll is the Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Bitter Southerner, Avidly, Southern Cultures, Still, Cutleaf and elsewhere. McCarroll is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (UGA Press) and co-editor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (WVU Press). She lives in Portland, Maine. Meredith McCarroll’s flash nonfiction piece “Dark Matter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.
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