Infinite & Improbable Shapes
Stories in the Tiny Worlds Sketchbook are like a pencil sketch with words; loose, unrefined and not wholly a thing. But I like them and think there’s something here you might like, too.
Her arm tingled. It happened a lot lately. She mindlessly stroked the sleeve of the heavy suit in a soothing motion. Beneath, she knew every shape, every outline of the tattoo that started at the base of her neck and twisted down her left arm—a continuous patchwork of the visions behind her eyes.
For years, her mind had swatted at and grasped for infinite feelings, trying to capture them in her notebook—fragments of dreams, thoughts, and intuition that transformed into improbable shapes too complex for daylight.
Sitting in the chair, sweating, another dream flowed into her skin. The fire of the atomic age of rocketry became tendrils pulling at the nape of her neck, winding through the history of spaceflight—Mercury, Apollo, Luna, Muses. These were the colossal advances of a species reaching out to touch its nearest moon. But as history slowed, the images shifted. They were no longer from textbooks but from a future unwritten—a future only she could see.
Her mind continued to invent, bewitched as she slept: outlines of gorgeous mechanical birds with pearlesque eyes leaning, searching deep into the galaxy. Each epoch of a new space travel story flowed seamlessly into the next, etched down her arm.
When she was invited to join—a visual laureate among engineers, linguists, and cartographers—the images stretched to the back of her hand, filling every inch.
At first, she hid the markings. But with no privacy in space, she grew more comfortable with the questions. One by one, her crew noticed and remarked on how the intricate details she wore extended to the craft and equipment they now used. How could she have envisioned all of this over the years?
In her own way, she described the thoughts that inspired them, showing her crew the notebook—a chaotic rush of words and sketches. Some she could recall in vivid detail; others lingered only as ephemeral mist, caught between dream and sleep.
Now, she floated, the meandering Earth too far to touch. The space outside—and it really was space, not solely in the metaphoric sense—held a breadth of mystery cloaked in constant night.
Looking off, she was transfixed. How could you not be?
The stars didn’t seem closer here—the nearest some 90 million miles away—but they were brighter in the black. For the last few days, she had watched the shapes continents spin by, their outlines often obscured by weather. The oceans, she learned, made the best reflective surface—so much so that the roundness of home appeared only as a hole punched in the dark.
Out here in the cold, she sometimes felt a constricting breathlessness for just a moment. With a deep swallow, she’d catch herself.
Her dreams in ink, stretching from her elbow to forearm, now surrounded her in metal and circuitry. But only time could divulge if the images, these dreams, once manifested only on her body before being made real would come true.
She wondered, as the constellations outside became unrecognizable, what delights lay beyond the infinite?
Music to read by:
Low Light - Peter Gabriel
Low Light was the perfect soundtrack for this mysterious piece. Excellent!
There is a school of thought that says everything that will ever be created already exists in the infinite consciousness that is the source of all creation,only waiting to be revealed by one who is open to it. Your story speaks to this notion. It also brings to mind the drawings of DaVinci that previewed inventions which appeared hundreds of years later, not unlike the main character's tattoos. Your wondrous ethereal prose brought magic to this tale, J..