This is how a star explodes by cole beauchamp

You bring me plastic flowers, say "They'll never die" with a wry smile that suggests the joke is on everyone else. But it’s a fitting statement on this dying planet. We think we’re standing but we’re spinning, spinning faster if the scientists are to be believed. The universe is expanding and we’re spinning faster and you are standing and spinning in our kitchen, holding plastic flowers.  

I put them in a vase, remembering the first time we kissed, the pulse that passed between us, secret and urgent. It was night and we’d been drinking peach schnapps and suddenly, there you were, in front of me, all eyes, lips ripe with luscious fruit. In that moment, the inward pull of your gravity balanced the outward pressure of the world. We held fast.  

"We need to talk" you say and, flash, it's there. The weight of all the years we have carried, your family refusing to even say my name, turning friend into a four-letter word, a sneer. The years grinding down our lustre and your laughter, powdering into a slow drift apart, your eyes starry with new pleasures.

And now the climbing rose we planted in the garden has a virus. The bees no longer buzz in ecstasy among the explosion of white petals. We have stopped moving, believing.

You're holding plastic flowers and smiling but I'm dizzy from spinning and I see it so clearly now, the milky texture of the universe bending around us as we solidify, our core a hard iron ball as we collapse.

Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Monarch and Best Microfictions. She’s a 2026 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow and contributing editor of New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children.