Clair Willden
A photo of a bronze statue. It’s a young masculine person stripping a skintight wrestling suit off their very muscular body. Gray and yellow hand-cut stars surround the figure. The bottom of the page reads “The New Face.”
Across the top, white text on a brown and black outer space background says, “An eye on the heavens.” Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man–a long haired, angry man drawn in charcoal on yellow parchment with his arms out in front of a circle–is below the heading. Handwritten text on top of a black background of blurry galaxies in outer space reads “a zine by Clair Willden. Cover art: Nureyev Half Life, 1990 by Richard MacDonald.”
At the top of the page is a small square background of blurry galactic lights. On that square, bold white text on a black background reads “Austere Geometry.” In the middle of the page, blackout poetry bordered on top and bottom by images of gray outer space reads, “An outside observer would never see you promptly burn up when you cross. You just pass through, unaware you’re now lost to the rest of the universe. You will grow stronger. The pull on your feet, if you’re falling feet first, will be so much greater than the tug on your head until you’re ripped apart. But pieces of you will reach the bottom.”
The background is a pale-pink and black cloud in space with pinprick stars all around. At the top of the page, blackout text reads, “Objects in the universe radiate energy. Exploding supernovae, for instance, are extremely hot. The clouds of dust and gas from which stars are made come to a standstill. The birth of planets occurs. The swirling fog rotates around newly born stars.” At the bottom of the page, a black swirl cut out of a painting of black and yellow stars in space has the bold text “The last wild place” laid over it.
An image of a brown-haired, bearded man whose eyes have been overlaid with a strip of blurry galaxies in front of black space holds his hands to his mouth in a prayer pose. The caption reads “Left: Guillaume Néry wears a Panerai Submersible Chrono Guillaume Néry Edition watch.” Bold text over the left corner of the image says, “Awakenings of hunger.” Blackout poetry atop a square of dark space says, “Each one has a very distinct physical appearance.”
At the top of the page, blackout text reads “In the cold universe, it was a curving, indirect route.” Bold text beneath reads “Leaving home.” In the center is an image of three astronauts with white space suits whose visors reflect a coppery gold. At the bottom of the page, four squares of pink and black nebulae stand in a line. The second in from the left is tilted to the right.
Four squares of black, blurry images of stars line the top of the page. The second from the left is tilted to the left. In the middle of the page, a photograph of a person hiding all but their pale hands in a green hedge is captioned “Bzince pod Javorinou, Slovakia” by Adela Zatovičová. Under the image, bold text says, “The Invisible Revolution.” Blackout text reads “In particular, they’re looking for the presence of the sorts of places where the curtains of dust and gas shroud galaxies, swirl around stars, and stretch through the expanses of interstellar space.”
At the top of the page, on top of a background of dark purple space with stars, blackout text says, “You start out with the formation rate of sunlike stars in the Milky Way. Light, without much interference, adding earthly noise arriving from the heavens.” Slightly below the text, black text on a gray background reads, “Something is there, at least in a mathematical sense. Something not just small but also unimaginably heavy.” In the background is an image of a medieval knight in silver armor on a brown horse (also armored) in front of a black background.
The background is images of space–gray with white stars. In the center of the page sits “Pat in Black Underwear, Seated”, a pencil scribbled drawing by Claes Thure Oldenburg that shows a vague outline of a sitting person who is wearing dark underwear. Blackout poetry text reads, “Something might be alive there, but what it might be like is very hard to guess. These distant moons search for life.”
In the top right corner of the page, an image of the moon in front of black space. Bolded text reads, “What will your legacy be?” Behind the text, an image of a greening bronze statue of an armored warrior of ambiguous gender and their dog. Descending diagonally from left to right, three phrases read Role reversal, “Self” destructs, picking up the pieces. At the bottom, atop a dark green background, the word “Knowledge” is written in cursive.
In the middle of the page sits an image of a person with long hair, a blue shirt, suspenders and tan pants, and a cowboy hat who has their back to the camera. Above it, text reads, “Our star, the sun, will die a quiet death.” Text runs vertically next to the image of the cowboy, but it only provides background.
At the top of the page, bold text reads “Anything crossing the event horizon–a star, a planet, a person–is lost forever.” Under that, an image of a naked woman’s body in black in white and draped in gold fabric. At the bottom of the page, blackout text reads, “We live in a vast collection of universes. It’s possible to give birth to a new universe. Our universe began. The moment before, everything was infinitesimally small–a singularity, the seed of a new universe. To escape our universe, move faster than the speed of light. Look to your left. Look to your right. We may be living.”
An image of blue fabric runs in a strip across the top of the page. Blackout text reads, “The same quest has lured her to poisonous life.” Inside a spiral cut from yet another picture of space sits an image of “The Fool,” a tarot card with a young man in a tunic on it. At the bottom of the page, overlapped by the spiral, is an image of lemons for sale with a sign that says “3 pour Rs 25.00.” There are two bright red flowers above the sign.
Several squares of gray space with stars form the background. At the top of the page, blackout text reads, “It’s actually a community bound together in their lifestyle.” Under that, an image called “Aileen in Morning Light” by David Hettinger depicts a naked woman combing her hair in front of a bright window. Over where her vagina would be, text reads “The star has become a black hole.”
The background is an image of many naked people laying a distance away from each other on top of white fabric. On top of that, a strip of dark space runs vertically down the middle of the page. Blackout text reads, “Beyond stars, you’d have fine approximations of reality. But something is there, at least in a mathematical sense. Something not just small, but unimaginably heavy. Don’t bother imagining what. We will never know what’s inside.”
At the top of the page, a strip of gray space and a picture of a dark green shrub are the background for Michelangelo’s David—a marble statue with, forgive the joke, perfectly sculpted muscles. In the middle of the page, blackout text reads, “So it’s crucial to distinguish biological from non-biological, as long as you don’t do it literally.” Under that, atop a background of stars, the bolded words “Confronting Paradox.”
In front of a background of gray stars, blackout text reads, “The taboo is deciding the most promising way to be out.” In the bottom right corner, a blue clay pot with yellow and black pop-art knives on it holds the phrases, “Gender-neutral,” “The star-studded reaches of measureless space,” and “Womanhood.”
Bordered by images of stars, “The Archers” painted in 1770 by Joshua Reynolds sits in the middle of the page. It depicts two young men in dark green tunics with bows and arrows in a forest with a sunrise behind them. Blackout poetry text reads, “The final step: At the opposite end, they’re working at two different locations. Combining their signals, they functioned together.”
Blurry, NASA-provided images of stars serve as the border for the blackout text here which reads, “That means that life ended up trapped inside and survived the journey.”
A swirling pink, blue, and black supernova is the background for the words “Insatiable Force.”
Clair Willden (they/them) writes fiction, poetry, and games from the cold in Fargo, North Dakota. See their work in the Indiepocalypse game zine or forthcoming in voidspace and Misery Tourism. They're always working on goofball content for their comedy writing website, Sad Goose Cooperative (sadgoosecoop.weebly.com). Find them on Twitter @willdenclair.