Cosmic Expansion

By Catherine Niolet

/ Fiction /      

Daffodils bloomed early in our backyard that year. My son and I noticed them in our morning wanderings: he, gripping a borrowed basketball squarely between two banana-slick palms, elbows wet with oatmeal and whole milk, and I, wearing a too-large coat and beginning to sweat. 

At first it was only the shoots that were visible, and we watched them each day as the stalks emerged and later unfolded. We plucked them when they were beginning to gooseneck and positioned them around the house in places the cat couldn’t reach: atop my son’s dresser drawers, in the bathroom above the cabinets. Only cautiously did I allow them on the table during mealtimes, and took great care to move them after dinner. 

Small wonders arrived in great measure in those days. A lizard basking on an unseasonably warm stone, a pregnant chocolate lab roaming the park. While the world was taking shape around my son, I was waiting for something. Another baby, or perhaps an e-mail informing me that a well-intentioned cybercriminal had hacked my laptop and submitted my manuscript to the agents at Clegg, who’d decided to take me on as a client. In short, I was supervising my son’s luminescence, cataloging the way he said “acorn” and “ladybug,” and doing little else. 

After months of trying for a second child, my husband and I sought the counsel of a reproductive endocrinologist, who suspected secondary infertility. Are you stressed? she asked me. Overwhelmed? But I shook my head, no, and considered where we’d go for lunch. She encouraged us to keep trying, so my husband began working half-days on the days I ovulated so that we could spend the mornings in bed together. I’d rest with my hips elevated for half an hour sipping Crystal Light through a straw while my husband got dressed, humming a Dawes song. Each month culminated in a negative pregnancy test and a state of the union after bedtime during which we discussed our options: intrauterine insemination, adoption. 

Some mornings I took my son to the Museum of Natural Science near LeFleur’s Bluff. We’d walk the trails and sneak up on the animatronic dinosaurs installed there, my hands worrying the rocks he’d stuffed in my jacket pockets. The dinosaurs would screech and roar, a pleasantly terrifying way to spend a Monday. If it rained we’d visit the Swamp, an indoors exhibit that housed bleating tree frogs and miniature alligators. The alligators brought forth a flutter in me: their unblinking eyes reminded me of a fetus, and the glide of their bodies through the thick green water was reminiscent of a birth canal. 

Writing became difficult, as did exercise, as did cooking. I began to purchase pre-made casseroles from a widow at our church who made them in bulk and sold them on Facebook, transfer them into our own glass Corning Ware, and pretend that I’d made them myself. I’d review the preparation process in great detail with my husband each night, asking if he picked up on the sage, the thyme, the dried basil. 

Meanwhile, the same story, submitted to literary journals over and over again, each time with minor edits. Some profanity added, then removed. A draft written in first person, then the third. In this way, the months passed: wet wind that gave way to cold sores, a bulging Word document, a load of laundry, the lingering stench of the diaper pail we all tried to ignore. 

On the day we traded out my son’s crib for a toddler bed, my husband told me he wanted us to see a therapist. The baby monitor pulsed green and then red. I checked the screen; our son had pulled his Tonka Truck blankets from the new bed and was rolling around in them on the floor. Engulfed, he paused to wail, looking like a sausage. He’ll figure it out, my husband said. 

He was right. Our son, our baby, found his way back to the bed and straightened the blankets there before falling asleep. We, like gods, watched him squirm and run his fingers over the wooden headboard, across which were painted bright yellow lightning bolts. Already I couldn’t wait to get rid of the thing, but it had been a hand-me-down from my sister-in-law, and I, having no income, found myself powerless to request an upgrade.

I didn’t like therapy. The weeks we met the therapist I found myself unable to sleep and wandered our small townhouse. From the junk drawer I pulled hundreds of loose ponytail holders, encircled with dust bunnies, and wrapped them around my wrist. I cleaned the guest room closet, lugged a trash bag filled with too-small bridesmaids dresses and moth-eaten cardigans to the trunk of my car like a dead body. I thumbed through old novels I’d read in college, winced at the loopy, late adolescent handwriting pencilled in the margins, and put them aside to drop at the Little Free Library outside the pilates studio I no longer attended. 

I’d arrive at the therapy appointments bleary-eyed and with coffee breath, making things look worse and like I was the problem. My husband, on his lunch break and wearing a tie, brought up our son’s traumatic birth, the NICU stay, my inability to breastfeed, as if a tongue tie was to blame for the version of me seated next to him in a thrifted sweatshirt and off-brand Wallabees. 

The therapist was not sympathetic to the little that I did share. Teaching job remote during COVID, pleasant enough to be at home. Son conceived and delivered, the difference between my salary and the cost of childcare negligible, a decision not to return to work after my maternity leave. It led to a bit of a slump, I guess, I said at our third session. She shrugged, sort of grimaced. Other than that, she’d nod and write in her spiral notebook and recommend date nights out of the house, or at least a weekly walk together in the neighborhood, perhaps while our son was napping? 

But nap times were when I slept while my husband went grocery shopping or for a run. This only increased the insomnia, and eventually, having thrown out the cakey spices and rendered our closets skeletally sparse, I began to spend the hours between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. online. 

At first it was shopping. Rarely did I make any purchases, only gawked at the absurdity of what could be bought on the internet in 2025. An electric sodium-flavoring fork, a mirror that made its object appear 10 pounds slimmer. I sucked on popcorn kernels and imagined myself the recipient of a six-figure book deal, a science fiction novella in which every American possessed mirrors of various airbrushing capabilities, made edits to their appearances as simply as deleting a comma from a first draft, until, for one woman, nothing was left to change but a bleeding, beating heart. 

The shopping led to chat rooms about shopping: Redditors reviewing their own ill-made investments, busybodies on Facebook Marketplace alerting would-be purchasers of BOGOs, Tumblr health nuts inquiring as to whether a specific spatula was or was not likely to release carcinogens into the air when used on a specific nonstick skillet. I was especially drawn to the back-and-forth between commenters, people who argued over the efficacy of a polymer-based sponge or debated the ethics of sourcing an item directly from the manufacturer rather than purchasing from a third party. I reveled in my superiority to these midnight posters; even with popcorn dust on my knuckles and half-moons purpling beneath my eyelids, I at least found my days sufficiently purposed to the extent that I didn’t have to resort to justifying my credit card purchases to strangers on the internet. 

These forums bred a strange type of evangelism, it seemed. People who considered it their life’s mission to convince faceless avatars with AI-generated handles of the supremacy of their spending habits, of plastic-free living, of toe socks on city streets and a phenomenon called “sensory feedback.” It became a game; each night I’d look up the handles of my preferred commenters and see the fresh rage they’d sown during the day, what old threads they’d revived with renewed pleasures or panics. New content was more salacious to me than gossip, than the cryptic prayer requests shared during Sunday school, than secondhand information from my husband regarding the third divorce of his coworker, Brian. I was overwhelmed by disappointment when my commenters didn’t post, and found myself creating scenarios that would have taken them away from our shared virtual reality. Childbirth, a murder-suicide, a motorcycle accident. It felt like being stood up, and I’d enter the new day bereft, anxious about what other reliances could falter. 

Days passed, I attended therapy, we potty-trained our son. I thrummed in bed next to my husband, waited for his breathing to slowly tide into sleep so that I could slip out of our bedroom and log on. He could’ve figured it out, if he’d cared. White cat hair from my nights on the couch clung to my black pajamas each morning like styrofoam, and we were constantly running out of tea bags. The coffee table was often sticky with early morning rings of honey, and my pillowcase, which had so often throughout our marriage been spotty with drool stains, was always dry. But it didn’t bother me. I was content to lurk in my secret cyber clique. 

It was true; the whole thing had taken on a certain tone of “you can’t sit with us.” My judgment of the citizens of Jackson was pervasive; I assessed women in the Whole Foods parking lot for their viability as rat-faced Reddit avatars, considered whether the police officer waiting at the stop light next to me on Meadowbrook was capable of the vitriol I’d seen posted by DustPatrol281 on Witfire the day before. I decided my husband was insufficiently curious and lacked the inherent strangeness required for the posts I’d so come to cherish; I even found myself disappointed in my son upon finding that his quirks, when Googled, were apparently textbook “developmental milestones.” Worst of all was the fact that since I didn’t post, I was among the excluded. 

Eventually nights grew so long I couldn’t help myself. My first post was benign enough, a paragraph about a recent chemical amendment to the recipe of my favorite strawberry licorice that, I felt, altered the taste. Forty-nine upvotes quickly followed, as did the adrenaline. 

My posts became popular, my creative writing degree finally put to good use. Plugged into the blue light of my laptop each night, I became electric. Swim lessons I spent on a folding chair in front of my notes app, my son thrashing before me, and composed paragraphs about the merits of pinstripe towels, canned poppyseed filling, epoxy glues.

I began to draft content that I thought might solicit a response from my favored posters: multiplex_256, Plantarfasciitis420, junohipsterxo, BrydeBaller-08. For multiplex_256, who shared my insomniac tendencies, I crafted effusive praise of a crowd-funded eye-covering pillow; with junohipsterxo, I engaged in some back-and-froth on the topic of artificial intelligence in the automobile industry. Plantarfasciitis420, a proven alt-right crunch supreme mom hell-bent on cosleeping and outlawing vaccinations, I provoked with a comment on a sound machine that implied I’d sleep-trained my son. 

BrydeBaller-08 mainly posted to Witfire, a message board that functioned as a GoodReads for graphic artwork and antiques dealers, with a product review section and a buy/sell page similar to those I’d scoured in grad school in search of a secondhand rug. His posts were short, kind comments directed toward aspiring artists, and I noticed he had an affinity for paintings done by adults with disabilities, whose work was marketed and sold by a New York-based nonprofit. 

My efforts to get his attention were reminiscent of the means I’d employed in college to catch the eye of my now-husband, in pursuit of whom I’d purchased an Atlanta Braves baseball cap after he mentioned attending a game over spring break and binged Twin Peaks after overhearing him say it was his favorite show. For BrydeBaller-08, I experimented with rhyme, iambic pentameter. Once I attached a PDF of one of my son’s finger paintings of the daffodils to a review of a vintage terra cotta planter, and Pothead356 offered to buy it for $600. Instead of selling, I pencilled in an $800 price tag on the back of the glossy white paper and wedged the painting in the frame of my bedroom mirror, an inside joke with myself, and with BrydeBaller-08, if he ever asked. 

Even in light of his indifference, still my momentum built. Still I was a force. I could feel the universe’s regard for me increasing. The alligators in the Swamp glared at me, their marbled eyes like parallel globes, and I found myself engaging in staring contests with the snapping turtles, daring them to blink. 

One night I opened my computer to a hydrant-red notification in the top right corner of my browser: a private message. A beat, a quickening in my chest. The subject line said: An Offer. 

I could feel my face blotch as I read it, as if I’d received a handwritten letter from an old lover and not (finally!) a solicitation from BrydeBaller-08. Huge fan, it read. The artwork is supreme, as are poetics. Interested in collab? Let me know. I’m in Belgium, so please excuse any delay in response times. 

I looked at the clock. Still early, 1:18 a.m. A quick Google search told me that Belgium time was 8:18 a.m. The workday’s just begun, I thought. 

What did you have in mind? I wrote, then hit enter. 

Bubbles appeared below my delivered message, indicating BrydeBaller-08 was typing a response, but dissipated as quickly as the ones in my son’s bathtub that evening. The night passed in this way: the grey bubbles appearing, teasingly, then disappearing. But I was well-versed in the art of time biding, and found myself flipping through long-abandoned volumes of poetry, hand-washing the dishes, cutting my toenails. In between chores, I watched the screen, my eyes slowly turning into dry seeds, pelting Chex Mix into my mouth. 

By morning, I was dehydrated and cranky, with the day stretched before me like a still river. My son screeched in his carseat, and I handed him a stone from my purse to pacify him, keeping one eye on the road and the other on the rearview mirror, watching him repeatedly turn it over in his hands. We arrived at the Swamp looking like a family: both red-eyed and wrinkly, with hair the color of dirt and matching dusty New Balances. 

My son crawled atop the concrete lip of the alligator pond and leaned against the glass screen installed there, fixated on the algae that had gathered in the still waters below. I half-heartedly held the neckline of his sweater and read BrydeBaller-08’s response. 

It’s an art piece, he’d written. A little avant-garde. Some textiles, some language. I’m still working through the specifics, but it’s likely that I’ll need some supplies delivered to my apartment in Brooklyn in advance of my return from Belgium. I’ll be including some stained glass, an assortment of metal fragments. I’m especially interested in materials sourced from the natural world in the Southern region of the U.S. I can tell from your vernacular you’re from that part of the country. Would love for you to source some of the items I’m considering and send them to my place. I’m thinking sand dollars, the leaves of a pondberry tree, a taxidermied brook trout (though the latter, I’ll admit, might be difficult to source, due to the animal’s near-extinction). 

I sighed at the message like BrydeBaller-08 could hear me, like he should somehow know about my son, the grocery list, our remote position on the waitlist for the mother’s day out, the distance between my townhouse in Jackson and the beach, or a mountain, or anyplace worth visiting to gather “materials sourced from the natural world.” The best I could do was a clump of Yazoo clay, the red dirt that ran beneath our city and turned magnolia roots into speed humps for low-riding sedans. 

A cry, my son’s gravitational yield toward the pond pulled me from the message. He’d leaned too far, spilled a Ziploc of Cheez-Its into the water. The alligators had begun to swirl tornadically ten feet beneath us. A Swamp worker in an official-looking green jumpsuit quickly approached us, her mouth covered by an 80’s era walkie-talkie into which I heard her speak the words “epidemiological threat.” I raised my hands over my chest, admitting defeat, and gathered my son, who’d begun to mewl like a cat. 

We spent the afternoon in the courtyard on an outdoor blanket gifted by a distant relative during my pregnancy. My son pulled at grass by the handful as I read to him from a stack of rented board books. My husband arrived home from work late in the day, and we were still there, knees patchy with dirt. I’d not cooked anything for dinner. 

Out for sushi, two episodes of a popular 90s sitcom, an assortment of hand and face creams. I bent over while brushing my teeth so that my husband could give me an estrogen injection in a certain, pronounced paunch of skin that the fertility doctor had identified as “a reservoir of subcutaneous fatty tissue.” I fingered the tenderness there as I responded to BrydeBaller-08, my husband sleeping soundlessly in our bedroom. 

Interesting, I said. What’s the time frame for all this? 

A lengthy response immediately followed, as if set to auto-reply. Unfortunately I’m in a bit of a rush. I understand if you’re not able to make a contribution that would result in a temporal setback for the project, but I’d be happy to credit you for the language I plan to use for the piece. You’ll likely recall drafting the attached in reference to a surge protector:

Capturing Alligators

My son tells me they did it with electricity. No, that can’t be right

that this came from my son, who is three. He doesn’t understand

electricity, but he understands dinosaurs, which means he understands

ancient things, which means he understands tortoises, the rings

at the center of a beloved, dying oak tree. Gingkoes and redwoods

come naturally to him, as do conifers, stalactites and stalagmites,

though I can never recall which is which. So perhaps it was he—

with the inevitable memory and the coordinated confidence—who told me

they captured the alligators at the nature center the same way a surge

protector is powered, the sxme way a heart is broken, the same way a baby

is birthed—with a burst of lightning, a silent descent into the water,

an extrapolation, a re-homing. They never blinked, couldn’t have felt a thing

as they were transferred from the riverbed to the translucent, siltless waters

in which we now watch them swim on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

I remembered them. The words had come to me as they always did: fitfully, anxiously. They’d been impetuous, scrawny and slippery; writing them down had been like trying to fit moonbeams into a jar. Glaring back at me now, bearing BrydeBaller-08’s name, they looked formal, mature. Abandoned sea monkeys he’d taken to feeding in my absence. I could tell by the syntax they hadn’t been edited: they bore my precious em-dashes; recurrent, senseless caesura; random typos characteristic of an insomniac parent of a three-year-old. 

The next day during therapy I told my husband I didn’t appreciate my words being used against me. We were talking about work, his and mine, and the reasons I’d thought it best for me to take a step back. The therapist moderated, but my husband’s side was quickly taken. You promised, he said, not to become one of those women whose life is ruled by her kids. You said you’d use the extra time to write. I’d begun to grow weary of the fertility treatments, and I said as much. This led to an altogether different argument: if I didn’t want to be a career mom, if I didn’t want to write, then what did I want? Was I just depressed? 

I wanted to show him the posts, the upvotes, the messages from BrydeBaller-08. But my phone felt like a black box, the code to which I’d lost, or forgotten, or thrown out to sea. His knees sat broad and square on his side of the couch while I pulled mine to my chest, socked feet on the cushions like little birds. At the end of the session we grabbed coffee and agreed to put it behind us. 

Thoughtfully that night I drafted my response to BrydeBaller-08: I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with my work being used in this way. I’ve not been successful in publishing my poetry in traditional circles, and I don’t know that this is an appropriate way of introducing my work to the market.

Again I received a rapid response. I’m sorry you’re averse to the proposition. Unfortunately, Witfire is unique to other message boards in that users do not retain the individual copyrights to written (or, for that matter, hand-drawn) posts. Posts, once published, are the property of Witfire users writ large; that is to say, anyone who pays for the service retains a level of ownership over the words posted there. My request was more of a courtesy. I can delay the display of my piece for a few days more in order to give you some more time to think about it. Though I nonetheless intend to move forward, I’d appreciate having your blessing. 

I tried to stay off the internet the next evening. My laptop glared at me like a caged animal; I’d stacked a few novels on top of it to create some illusion of a barrier. I piddled and paced, opened and closed the refrigerator countless times before finally putting a sheet of buttered saltines in the oven at one o’clock. I sat on the patio and wondered at the cars that sped past, even at this hour, and considered where they were driving. Perhaps the airport. Perhaps the hospital. Perhaps a woman in that car was in labor, right now, perhaps with her first, the contractions tumbling through her body like a pinball through a machine. Perhaps she’d describe them to a nurse as diluted. Perhaps the nurse would listen; perhaps so would the doctor. Perhaps the father would agree when the laboring mother told them she’d noticed a sharp drop-off in the baby’s kicks, that the thing would wrestle in her womb like Jacob with the angel and then go still, that the cravings had stopped, the taste for coffee suddenly returned. 

Perhaps this woman would be spared, then, the child’s dusky face and silent withdrawal from her body. Perhaps there would be no heat lamp, no intubation, no concern as to whether the child would ever sing or even speak. Perhaps there would be subsequent children and a happy marriage, a career filled with meaning, a flower garden and ripe tomatoes, wild rice casseroles and rapid postpartum weight loss and fifteen months of nursing and sex during naptimes and beautiful, sparkling glasses of wine in the yard during summertime. 

I allowed myself a few moments of screen time just before my husband’s alarm went off at five. The message from BrydeBaller-08 pulsed at me like a star against the galactic background of my own desktop. In this strange, new context, my own words reflected back at me looked like the rock tower my husband and I had once built on a hike in the Rocky Mountains. We’d been delighted, then, by our new marriage and by one another. What had that woman to be afraid of; what had she to fear? 

Feel free to use the poem, I wrote. Work can be attributed to Shannon Murphy of Jackson, Mississippi. I look forward to seeing the finished piece. I am sorry I couldn’t be of more help in pursuing the materials you’ve requested. 

My laptop pinged with an error message, and a red notification appeared beneath the sent words, stating: THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DISABLED. 

The dew was annoyingly lovely that morning. The daffodils had long-since wilted and returned to their bulbs, and the tickseed that replaced them bent strangely toward the earth as if magnetized; blossoms that had once stared boldly upward now seemed heavy and ashamed. The air was hot and weighty, and early summer’s mosquitos had begun to hover even in the dawn. I commented to my husband that it would be a good day to visit the Swamp, considering our yard’s atmosphere was indistinguishable from that of the alligator habitat. My son went along happily enough, his pants cuffed expectantly. In his diaper bag I packed a sippy cup of milk and an as-yet unbruised peach. 

We arrived at the Swamp at the beginning of feeding time, during which Swamp staff carelessly tossed frozen mice and live, flapping fish into the alligator pond. My son climbed to his usual vantage point atop the concrete lip, while I took a seat on a park-style bench in front of a waterfall, from which brown water trickled and settled against a colony of algae. 

Above the pond was mounted a television, the kind substitute teachers had once rolled into classrooms on wheels, a sharp contrast to the touch-tech flatscreens with which I knew modern schools to be outfitted. Typically it displayed educational programming—Sesame Street, science experiments, travel documentaries suitable for children—and was known to broadcast the occasional rivalry football game on a rainy Saturday afternoon. But today it was turned to the news, one of the national conglomerates my husband often watched while getting dressed. The sound was muted, but closed captioning scrolled rapidly across the bottom half of the screen, informing the viewer, first, of a hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast, and then, of an apparent terrorist attack in a park in Brooklyn, New York.  

I’d not been to New York since before my son was born, before the pandemic. We’d still been in school, my husband and I, he studying for the CPA exams and I applying to teaching jobs. The trip had been meant to take us away from the stressors of academia, the caffeine haze in which we spent the majority of our days. We’d kissed in since-closed used bookstores, eaten eighteen-dollar novelty hamburgers grilled beneath a tailgate tent, seen the Book of Mormon from Row XX, a fact we’d laughed about from beneath our shared comforter late that night, after a late dinner of sangria and deli sandwiches. But we’d not visited Cadman Plaza, which, according to the stills displayed in the overhead broadcast, was littered with cherry blossoms this time of year. Its black chain link barriers were unfamiliar to me, as were the bystanders interviewed, still holding their picnic baskets and half-drunk bottles of wine. But before cutting back to the broadcaster, the channel displayed a photograph of the alleged terrorist in a bordered black box in the top left corner of the screen, the same image I’d come to associate with the Witfire profile picture of BrydeBaller-08. 

“A man identified as Mark Bryde from Yonkers, New York self-immolated in a popular public park in Brooklyn this morning. He was transferred to Mount Sinai’s emergency department in Brooklyn Heights, where he succumbed to his injuries. Not destroyed in the event was an unlocked, flame-resistant steel security box, from which police have recovered a collection of natural objects including a dried monarch butterfly, a fossilized shell of a snow crab, and a void tortoise shell. 

“Sources close to Mr. Bryde tell us that he worked as an attorney in Yonkers’s legal aid department, specializing in environmental equity, and that he had recently returned from the Climate Chance Europe Summit in Belgium. Authorities have begun to assume that Mr. Bryde included these materials due to their anticipated, impending extinction in light of climate change. In addition to these talismans, Mr. Bryde’s box included a manifesto containing the work of an as-yet unidentified and, seemingly, unpublished poet, quoted in the manifesto as Shannon Murphy, with whom Mr. Bryde seems to have been working in concert.” 

From my back pocket I could feel my phone begin to buzz. I silenced it and turned my attention once more to my son, who continued to lean, lean, lean over the pit, dangerously close to the caged predators. I would give him one more moment’s freedom before telling him it was time to go home.