Fiction from Claudia Monpere

Photo: Chris Barbalis

Solar Flare

You interrupt your husband doing the crosswords to show him how much the sun weighs: 4,385,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg). You don’t know how to say these numbers, so you point to your tablet.

He grunts, then asks you for a five-letter word that’s part of a ship’s hull under the engine room. “Bilge,” you say, then run for the bathroom to vomit. You shouldn’t have eaten those pancakes. You’re in the minority of women who still have nausea in their third trimester. You’re forty years old, sick and exhausted. You sit on the bathroom floor afterward, wiping your mouth with a towel. “Baby,” you say. “Oh Baby, Baby, Baby. You’re right not to trust me.”

When you come out of the bathroom, your husband has a glass of ginger ale for you and a warm towel for your face. He brings you a cozy blanket as you lie on the couch. He’s tender, unlike your first husband. When you’re feeling better, he opens his laptop and suggests the two of you look at ovens to replace the thirteen-year-old one that heats irregularly and now has rust. He’s very organized and has made a list of all the things that need to be done before the baby’s birth. “We were thinking about a convection oven, right?” he says.

You ask him if he knows that the convection layer of the sun is 4 million degrees Fahrenheit. “I don’t know. And sweetie, I don’t care,” he says. “What I do care about is your obsession with the sun. It’s gone beyond irritating.” He suggests a game of Wordle. “And please, don’t start with solar.” You tell him you’re going back to bed. You need to sleep.

Some scientists refer to Earth’s sun as our luminary. How lyrical. How benign. Especially since it’s middle aged: a typical G-class star in mid-life cycle. Born 4.6 billion years ago. A lot of living left to do. Baby kicks vigorously. A lot of living? Baby is not a yellow dwarf star like the sun. You rub your tummy. “Baby,” you say. “I love you, Baby. But we’re all keepers of secrets.”

When you wake up around noon, your husband is painting the nursery. That soft pastel blue you picked out together. You take pictures of him standing on the ladder, waving. This makes him happy. Later, he rubs your feet and sips a Corona. You don’t tell him that last year for the first time ever, a spacecraft entered the sun’s corona where temperatures spike upwards of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Temperatures spike quickly inside a parked car.

The sun is mostly hydrogen and helium. Like a child’s orange balloon.

That night you awaken around 2:00 am and can’t get back to sleep. You take a bath. This makes Baby active. You watch your belly ripple. That moving lump is probably an arm or leg. That firm round area, probably Baby’s head. After a while, you get out of the tub and make some herbal tea, then bring it outside in the warm night and lie on the chaise lounge, looking up at the sky. Soon it will be dawn.

“Once,” you tell Baby, “a mother drove to work. She and her husband were young and stupid and always rushing around. There was confusion that morning about who was driving the 22-month-old to daycare.” You rub your belly gently. You sip your tea and watch the sunrise. In a few hundred million years, the sun will swell to orange. Still later, it will expand to become a red giant, on the cusp of death. It will gently shed its outer layers, expelling glowing gas, a dazzling nebula. Fifteen years, four months, and two days ago you shed your motherhood, your husband. You smoldered shame and learned a new language. You sing this story to Baby.
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Claudia Monpere‘s flash fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Pidgeonholes, The Forge, Fictive Dream, Trampset, Ghost Parachute and elsewhere. Her poems and short stories have appeared in such places as The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain. She is a recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart. Her flash was shortlisted for The Smokey 2022 and awarded second place in Vestal Review’s 2022 food themed flash fiction contest.