My mother has been around more than 13 billion years. Once she was helium hydride, forming the first stars which were hotter and brighter than the sun. My mother—imagine! But now she is just hydrogen, the lightest element, the one with the simplest atomic structure. She can bond with every other element. It is her job to bond with everything and everyone around her, to never consider what kind of bond she herself wants. My father is polonium, rare and radioactive. No stable isotopes. Who wouldn’t be tempted by this? He thinks his silvery gray appearance makes him look distinguished and benign. Just one gram of Po-210 can kill 10 million people. Like his atomic number, there are 84 ways he destroys. He thinks I called him Popa as a loving nickname. He is delusional about many things, but this perhaps the most. I call my mother Hyoma. It is a beautiful word, like music. No harsh puffs of air like when I say Popa. Hyoma reads me a fairy tale each night before I go to sleep. I am a noble gas. I don’t react. But some nights, hearing about cozy cottages and glistening fairies, I turn to warm, silvery liquid. My mother tells me that when she and my father were PoH2, they were liquid love. Oh, those times, she says. We were a winter river glinting in sun snow. We were slick, glowing fish. Wave spill with meringue crests. It’s never cold enough anymore for Mother to turn liquid. But she could escape, my mother. Her low molecular weight, her high speed. She is 14 times lighter than air. I imagine her fleeing the gravitational pull of Earth and Father. She will bond with me, only me, and we will return to the stars. Father will rage and weep and ruin. But maybe at some point he will look up at the spiral galaxy for a luminescent nebula where Mother and I will be newly born. Perhaps he will be sad. Perhaps it will be the last star he ever sees.
Claudia Monpere won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025. Her flash collection, The Periodic Family, comes out in 2026 with Cowboy Jamboree.