Andromeda’s collection:
I keep
universes under my bed. Mommy says I shouldn’t, but they look so pretty I can’t
resist. They magically appear in my room every morning, so when the milkman
leaves the bottles, I rush to get one and catch the universe. I don’t like to
name them, it offends them. Some look like marbles, others like the night sky
from the roof of the house, sometimes they’re just black, boring cubes. Daddy
used to help me catch them, but he went to look for a Momma bear and her cub,
and never came back, or so Mommy tells me. I don’t have any neighbors, so I
watch how some universes become very small and disappear from the bottle all
day. One time a bottle exploded in the kitchen; from that day Mommy told me not
to collect them. They don’t last very much, maybe one day—three at most. If
they last long, I take them out at night and compare them to the sky. Orion, my
dog, usually wakes me up when he sees them. I keep the brightest out at night,
to keep me company; the dark scares me. There’s another time that I didn’t have
any bottles, so I snuck in the kitchen and took a big clear jar to catch the
biggest one so far; it had so many bright lights with different shapes. If I
wake up before the sun gets up, I wait for the universe to slowly grow in one
place, then I look for the bottle. I hope everyone gets their own universe with
tiny little bright lights and colorful auras.