2025-2026, Other Fiction
"Andromeda" – Özge Uzman '27
The blue-hot comets emerge from behind roiling clouds of pink and purple and gold, their trails stretching out like fingers, connecting with asteroids, with ice and fire, each blow softening their exterior to stardust, and a glowing ember rain cascades behind like blood from a wound, stitching itself into the shape of an arm, melting up and around and down into a shoulder, a neck, a chin, a chest, weaving golden strands of hair into the dark tapestry of hydrogen and helium and dust and dark matter, and light burns in every direction, those shadows of fingers gripping the outlines of a misty pink and purple disc hanging suspended two and a half million light years away from home
and Andromeda pulls herself out of the rubble.
This is her earliest memory—at least, that is how she describes it. In truth she can never tell whether a memory is actually a dream, or a dream actually a memory.
Sometimes, her dreams go like this:
Salt. It invades her body, seeps into her skin, up her nose, worries itself into the wounds on her wrists.
And everything is cold. Cold rock, glossed in seawater beneath her heels. Cold air, sending daggers to her bones—she releases a sob—they took her clothes before they chained her. Cold metal, biting at the soft flesh where her hands meet her forearm. Blood trails down her fingers.
Nobody is coming.
She sinks to her knees, tugs her hands forward, harder, harder.
As long as it hurts, she is alive.
She cannot feel pain, here in the dark of outer space. She has never known it.
She learns through dreaming.
She knows the stars. She knows Alpha Centauri and Regulus and Beta Draconis and Atlas and Sirius and Capella.
She knows the planets, Kepler-62f and Gliese 876 b and and TOI-6109 b and Proxima Centauri d and Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, all the way to what humans call our Sun.
All she knows are the human names.
She knows she is Andromeda, المرأة المسلسلة, 仙女座, Andrómeda, एंड्रोमेडा, Andromède, Persea, Cepheis—
Most of these mean nothing to her. But there is one name. Mulier Catenata. The Chained Woman. Her diamond tether to Earth.
She casts her fingers outward, watches them dissolve into stars and planets and dust and ice, then watches the particles slowly coalesce into the tentative silhouette of a hand once again, and she knows she is not human. There is not a chain that can moor her.
She supposes she is chained anyways.
Her closest neighboring star system is 150,000 light years away, and it shares her name. Andromeda I. There are Andromedas II and III a little further off, as well. To human eyes, this is how close they are. Their distance is not even significant enough to earn individual identification. They are the Andromedas. They are hundreds of thousands of light years away.
Over time she comes to an idea about why she is so intrinsically connected to Earth. She mouths out the vowels carefully, and the taste of salt reigns heavy on her tongue. She glances at her star-dappled wrists. There is a story, she thinks.
There is a story about me.
The idea takes root and each time she emerges from the sluggish dredges of a dream she senses that it has spread. And spread. And spread.
They are still telling stories about me.
She hangs suspended in her golden-pink disk, traces her fingers along the cloudy ridges of the dust rings that ripple outward from her body. There is not much she knows about the circumstances of her creation, but this she knows for certain: there are no stories to be told, out here. There is nobody to tell them to.
She thinks about oceans.
She floats in her own ocean, in a way. Her dreams are often nothing but ocean, saltwater brutishly foisting itself down her throat, swarming her lungs and her pitiful heart, its icy grasp unwavering. When she wakes she touches a tentative palm to her chest, then pushes it in, rummaging through for any icy particles that may have gotten caught. None.
All things considered, she should be scared of oceans, of the vulnerability of her trembling body—the Mulier Catenata’s body, she reminds herself; she cannot get hurt—dashed against the rocks with each wave, spending her days waiting for solace—but she is not afraid.
She thinks about raindrops joining streams joining rivers reuniting infallibly, eternally, with the ocean, and she thinks maybe the water is not so bad.
She says this out loud, vocalizes (as best as she can in a vacuum) her musings on the interconnectivity of life on Earth, the seamlessness with which all natural bodies meet one another.
There is no response.
She knows she cannot feel pain. She can’t.
She wonders what she is feeling.
She wonders what it is she waits for.
There is no sound in space.
She lies motionless, hands neatly folded over her stomach, hair dispersed in a halo around her, fading into stardust at the ends.
There is no air or water for the sound waves to pass through.
Why is it always waves?
She rolls to her side, sliding a hand over her eyes.
There are no stories here. There is no opportunity for thought to take flight, hatching like a bird from between one’s lips and soaring, lit aflame, until it reaches a nest, and the words are received, and the story can rest a little while, until it is retold and retold and retold and the cycle repeats and there are no birds in space and there is no sound and there are no stories.
She spends her time waiting for somebody to reach her.
She spends her time waiting to be saved.
She supposes, after some thought, that this is her connection to Mulier Catenata. Purple dust swirls around her wrist and she toys with it a little, flicking her fingers through the cloud. She wonders what it was like, to look at these wrists and see only a death sentence.
And certainly their situations are far from the same:
The Andromeda of the myths was rescued.
There is not much that the Andromeda of the stars must be rescued from. She is comfortable. She is ineffable.
She craves it anyway.
Perhaps she has always been selfish like that.
Perhaps she has always been lonely.
There are sound waves and there are ocean waves and there are birds and there are story beats and there are heartbeats felt so weakly in one’s bloody wrists and there is Andromeda at the center of it all.
She lets go of her humanoid corporeal form, rearranging the flames of stars and comets and dust and ice and gold into the misty, pink and purple and gold-rimmed outline of a bird. She spreads her wings and glowing ember rains cascade from between her feathers like water droplets to be consumed by a stream and a river and a sea, and she tastes salt on her tongue and she feels ice in her heart and softly, hesitantly, almost hopefully
Andromeda begins to sing.