The scientist’s statement confuses the youngling, and draws its attention away from me.

  It confuses me too. Grandfather. The voice had used that same word explaining how I could travel from the black hole, which I am, to the ship, where I can be.

  The scientist, too, I start to perceive, is a grandfather. The youngling is not. It is too young. Maybe one day it will be a grandmother. She. The youngling. He. The scientist.

  Do I have a gender?

  I wait, but remember the voice is not here to tell me that that life is gone, so I can think about it a little more. I was him. Or I was her.

  I tune back in to the conversation on the ship, where I am even though I can’t feel it, exactly, because I can hear the conversation, or I guess I can feel the vibrations of the air around the space I’m situated in.

  I can feel the discreet, gradated pips the vibrations etch as they pass me in the way they bounce around the room. I hear a he. Is that about me? Can they hear me?

  -He was doing experiments like ours, the scientist said. When I tell you little one that we don’t belong here that’s what I mean.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I’m having trouble following the conversation, but he explains how the scientist long ago, in another universe maybe, was it my old one, it was hard to tell, came across the black hole. His grandfather, was it in this universe or that one or both, ended up in this one.

  The black hole and the scientist had merged?

  I want the voice back to help me understand but it’s back at the space of the black hole while I’m in this humanoid-shaped space here, meaning nothing’s in it.

  All the universe is a thread, and I’m losing them.

  The black hole and the scientist, now here, long ago. It, he, settled on a far away planet, opposite from Planet X.

  I had not seen or looked at it, had not felt the threads of the universe between it and me to know it at all. That’s why the species of the scientist and the youngling weren’t familiar. But why hadn’t I looked at it?

  Now I was in this bottle, this humanoid-shaped bottle of negative space on the scientist’s ship, in my pocket universe.

  I want to go back. I want to go back home. Where?

  The black hole that the pocket universe I am in right now is in.

  I had a different home I don’t always remember that I don’t remember anymore.

  It’s not my only home anymore.

  The scientist finishes telling the youngling the story, and I feel a void in my understanding of it.

  Because I am still in the pocket universe, and it is in me.

  I want to go back home.

  I let myself go.

  I can feel the void of the humanoid-shaped space getting smaller, filling up as I feel myself seeping into the space coming in, becoming it and then the ship, the pocket universe, and me.