Quantum Sight by Claudia Monpere

The physics professor who fucks you tells you that sometimes you are an alkali metal and sometimes you are a noble gas. He calls you Rubidium in the rare moments he is tender. He calls you Neon the rest of the time, but you wish it would be Rubidium always. Rubidium Rubidium Rubidium, his voice a stream ripple in a sun glazed meadow, and even though you are only a freshman living in the dorm and a virgin until meeting him you know fervor. You want to devour his voice ‘til it is your own, that voice that says sherbet and etcetera correctly, not  like your family. That voice that is all prefrontal cortex, no messy limbic system oozing blame and rage and misery.

Your unending dorm hallway has infinite doors on both sides, each with a pair of open eyes. Some of the eyes are crudely carved into the wooden doors, others painted with such detail you can see different shades in the iris and count the lashes. There are also cartoon eyes. And Picasso eyes, all sharp angles and bizarre positions.

The physics professor who fucks you has heterochromia iridis. His left eye is light blue, the right one brown. In the rare moments he confides in you, he tells you he used to be embarrassed by this. You can’t imagine him ever being embarrassed by anything. You stare at his dazzling eyes until it hurts.

You let your roommate coax you into dinner at the dining hall with her three friends who are the perfect 3 bears: one cold and bitchy, one too huggy and pert, one just right with eyes that are warm and just as you’re relaxing with her, The Telltale Heart eye appears on your dinner plate: a pale blue eye with a film on it. It’s large and jellyfish like, covering the food and slopping over the sides of the plate. You let out a shriek and it’s gone and you pretend you were just stung by an insect but everyone wants to see where and what kind and do you need cortisone and you know they’ll name you the weird one only five weeks into your first year at university.

The physics professor who fucks you teaches without a slide deck because his voice and his eyes are enough. When he lectures on harvesting and applying human kinetic energy, you know that in bed he will talk limb swing, joint rotation, force application, organ motion, and fold stretching. When he lectures on dark matter and dark energy, you know that in bed your bodies will attract and repulse. And because cosmic expansion is getting faster, you know how this will end. Already, the moments when his eyes bond with yours are retreating.

You try to discover a pattern for when The Telltale Heart eye will reappear, but there is no pattern. Twice in one day: on the ceiling above your bed as you awaken and in the middle of the night on your pillow as you return to bed after peeing. You try to be a curious scientist instead of a terrified girl. You touch it and it jiggles like gelatin. Then it’s gone and you wonder if it was a dream. Days of nothing. But the eye appears a week later on page 38 of your physics textbook.

The physics professor who fucks you listens as you tell him to stop calling you Neon. (He’s never called you Miranda.) He listens as you tell him you are Rubidium only. “I was waiting for you to stand up for yourself,” he says. “It took 72 days.”

“I am not an experiment,” you say. 

“Ah, but the things you can do as Rubidium,” he says before pulling you toward him. His brown eye looks longingly at you, but his blue eye appears cold.

Sometimes your fellow students and dormies have buttons for eyes. Marbles. Tiny spinning globes that make you dizzy. Raisins pressed into their faces where eyes should be. You play games with yourself guessing who will have which eyes. You judge the aesthetics of the buttons which are quite varied. Your favorite: the green and gold glass dragonfly buttons on the Just Right Bear Girl who it turns out doesn’t think you’re weird or maybe it’s just that she’s weird too and the third time you two kiss, you lean in and flutter your lashes against hers and you both laugh when your noses get in the way.

The physics professor who used to fuck you is now stalking you since you told him it was over and you tell the Just Right Bear Girl that you’re tempted to go all Rubidium on him and she asks how that would work. What would actually happen?

“I’d turn soft silvery white,” you say. “Then burst into flame once exposed to air. No, maybe I’d invite him to swim, then cannonball into the pool and explode. Hmmm. No. The best, I think,  would be to wrap myself in melted sulfer. The violet flames, the sparks of molten metal. So bright—quasar bright—he’d have to shut his eyes.”

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CLAUDIA MONPERE — Claudia’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Trampset, Milk Candy Review, The Forge, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has a story in Best Small Fictions 2024 and a micro forthcoming in Best Microfictions 2025.

Art by JOANA SOLÀ —Joana (@sisaliks) is an illustrator from Barcelona, Spain. With a background in engineering, she didn’t start taking art seriously until she entered art school in her late 20s, and has now made her long time dream of working as a full-time artist a reality. Her love for sci-fi and fantasy started young, reading her father’s books of classic authors and never stopped. Her art focuses on cool, relatable, and interesting female characters, concepts with an edgy vibe, and often features eerie or dark themes.