short fiction · 2026-10-07

Cosmic Breath

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

In the quiet between heartbeats, the cosmos draws a breath— not air, but the slow swell of dark matter spiraling inward, the whisper of nebulae condensing into newborn light. Each star is a pulse, each galaxy a lung, expanding in a sigh that stretches across billions of years, then contracting in a silent gulp that pulls time back toward the singularity. We, too, are part of this respiration: our inhalations mirror the expansion of spacetime, our exhalations echo the collapse of supernovae. When we hold our breath, we pause the universe’s rhythm, and when we release, we join the eternal tide that flows from the quantum foam to the farthest edge of the observable.