The Space Between the Dust Motes

Content Warning (click to expand) 

grief, loss of a loved one, animal death, violence against women

 

by Helen French

I see dust motes everywhere. Their fall and rise are mesmerising.

Perhaps I should clean our house more often. It isn’t dirty, I think, looking around my living room, with its great open arch into the dining area. It’s simply too empty for its own good, so what you focus on is dust floating in the air rather than furniture and knick-knacks.

There’s a knock at the door, rat-a-tat-tat, breaking my reverie, and I want to ignore it. All I have to do is pull apart the strands of dust and step into the gaps in the universe, and they will never find me.

But I live on the edge of a quiet town called Formby, in North West England. Most people here know not to bother me. That someone has come all this way means it’s an urgent matter or someone who doesn’t know any better. 

I sigh, but open the door and say, “Hello, can I help you?”

My visitor smiles. He is wearing a long brown coat and a wide-brimmed hat. A short beard covers most of his face, and I focus on that rather than the eyes, because the eyes are so unsettling. A cold blue, as though his insides are a block of ice, drifting through northern waters. “Good day, miss. I’m new to town,” he says. “Just wanted to say hello. Can I come in and introduce myself?”

“It’s not a good time,” I say, lacking the energy for chit-chat.

“Maybe you can point me towards a restaurant then,” he replies.

“There’s a few. The Left Bank is good.” My eyes fill with tears the moment the words are out. We used to go there, you and I. Before.

“Thank you,” he says, and kindly does not mention the tears. “Perhaps I’ll come back another time.”

“Perhaps,” I say as a farewell, though I hope he never bothers me again.

Afterwards, I find my way into the living room and sink onto the couch. The curtain is open just enough for a shaft of light to cross the room. It’s all I need. The dust dances for me, suspended on strings of something or nothing. I sit, as if I might be playing a harp, with my arms outstretched, fingers stretched out too, getting ready to play.

It takes a minute or two for my eyes to focus and unfocus so that I can see what lies between the dust particles.

I thought I was losing my mind the first time I glimpsed that nothingness, the edge of it peeking through — that grief had shattered me. But perhaps it simply gave me another way to look at things.

My fingers find the microscopic spaces between the dust, between the oxygen and anything else that lurks in the air all around us. I start pulling apart what is, so I can enlarge that very peculiar space that isn’t.

Once it is stretched large enough, a yawning chasm, I walk into it. For a short while, I am nothing. The loneliness and emptiness I have carried for so long that they have become huge jugs of pain, pour away.

If you were here, I’d explain that there’s nothing to see. I exist. I rest. It’s a void, I suppose. Another world that isn’t a world at all. Time does not elapse here — I will return to our home in the same moment that I left it — yet somehow resting inside this void helps me heal.

At first, I thought I might find you here, but I haven’t yet. I will keep looking.

You can move through this nothingness if you want to get somewhere else, but as you can’t see where you’re going, you must concentrate very hard to keep your goal at the front of your mind. So far, I have only been able to move from one point in the house to another.

When I feel like the hurting is less, like I will be able to take a deep breath without wanting to cry or rage, I decide to return.

I pull up a picture in my mind of my bedroom. I imagine the dust hanging in the air there, how it might separate to let me out. I push in its direction, a thoughtful urging, and I emerge breathless from the darkness, which closes so quickly behind me it is as though it were never there at all. I clamber into bed.

Sleep is not the comfort it once was. I can’t find my way there anymore unless I am completely exhausted or have spent time in the void, away from this world. It takes time to slip into it.

When I wake, it is more like coming to after an absence. As I contemplate disappearing forever, the doorbell rings.

I get up and pad towards the door, realising that I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes. A glance into the spyhole confirms this could be an issue: the brown coat appears once again.

I open the door anyway.

“It’s still not a good time. I’m tired,” I say, hoping he’ll feel rude and uncomfortable and make his excuses.

A horrible grin emerges. “I know,” he says, and I realise he’s changed. Yesterday was pretend; this is who he really is. “I felt the ripples of what you did halfway across this little slice of nowhere. You tore apart the stars, young lady.”

“No,” I say.

“You reconstructed the air about you. Do you know how few people can do that? How valuable it is?” His grin gets wider.

Unable to speak, I stand there as he shoves a card into my palm: Victor Garde — Extraordinary Science & Enrolment. The text is in white on a black circle on a foil background.

“Keep this, and my friends will come and pick you up tomorrow. We can train you. Show you things you have never even dreamed of. Your ability to climb between atoms makes you special. You must not waste that.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. “Must not?”

Whatever he offers, I do not want it. I am still wading through murky waters, figuring out how to exist without you.

“I’m very sorry,” I say, “but I’ll decide what I waste, or don’t.”

Victor’s demeanour changes. His icy eyes grow colder still, narrowing to laser me down almost. “You are very privileged to be possessed of such skills.”

“I’m not possessed,” I snap. “I learned. Anyone could do it, I’m sure.”

He scoffs. “Unlikely. Doesn’t matter. I’m not going home without you.”

Something shifts in the air between us. This won’t end nicely.

I slam the door shut — as shut as it will get with his foot suddenly in the way — and dash inside.

Peace is required to do what I do in-between the dust motes, and running for your life isn’t peaceful, so there’s no easy escape available.

He chases me like a dog through the house, but eventually he stumbles. He hits the mantelpiece above the fireplace. I turn to see what’s happening. Your urn crashes down onto the parquet floor.

The container shatters. Ceramic shards scatter.

Bone dust, gritty and dirty, flakes apart, rising high into the air. I could almost inhale you.

I can’t let Victor destroy anything else.

As I watch you disintegrate further, time slows down. I could get angry or fall apart. I could stay here and try to piece you back together, or I could run. What would you do?

I must find some peace.

I flee the house, running into the wind as fast as I can, down the long road that leads to the beach.

Victor is catching up quick. The only advantage on my side is that I know the territory and he will not. I take a sharp left into the woods. The ground is rough, the trees indistinguishable from one another, but I came this way a hundred times or more as a child.

I stop only when my calves feel like they might burst. But where there should be silence, I hear the heavy panting of a man in pursuit.

That damn bastard won’t leave me alone long enough to tear a way out of the world.

The woods won’t save me, so I turn to the roar of the ocean, faint to my ears but ever recognisable.

Pinewoods turn to grassy sand dunes, which turn to beach. The sea stretches across the horizon, the sun dancing upon it.

The tide has recently gone out, so the sand is nicely hard when I run across it. Remember when we used to walk Rex here?

That was before Rex jumped into a lake and you tried to rescue him, of course. Never follow a pet into danger, I tell people, on the rare occasion I ever talk about it.

At the water’s edge, I look behind me. Far in the distance, but never giving up, is Victor. I barely know him, but I know the type. He thinks the world exists to mould to his desires. If he works hard, everything will fall to him in the end.

I don’t want to fall to him.

I wade into the water. It is so cold that I gasp. The ocean floor disappears. I could die in these waters and join you, my love. In all honesty, it feels like a betrayal to keep on living when you’re not at my side.

But though I am quite ready to end this charade, my body has other ideas. It fights where I would not.

I start swimming until I am too far out to get back easily, but also too far out for Victor to reach me without risking himself.

“Wait!” he yells. “Just wait one moment.”

I am exhausted, so for once I do as he says.

His voice carries well over water: “You will break the universe if you don’t learn to control what you’re doing. Come with us and we will maximise your potential. You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you? Come with us!”

The thing is, I don’t believe a word he says. There might be bits of truth, but only to lure me in.

Skills like mine might be dangerous, but I trust myself. I don’t want to be maximised.

I close my eyes as I battle to stay afloat and think about how I see the dust at home, how I wish I could escape between it now.

Victor enters the water. I don’t have long.

Of course, it was never about the dust specifically. That’s simply how I spotted how the world is made. Is water that different from air?

I reach out into the cold water. I see through it and around it, and yes, the spaces in-between. I peel away at the edges of its atoms, and whoosh, I am in darkness, my secret second world. It’s as if I have lifted the ocean above my head, as if it were a blanket on the floor and I have found a way to go under it.

I can’t see Victor anymore, but I think there’s a good chance he will die during his swim. The currents here are stronger than they look. He is very desperate, and I am so far away now that he will never reach me. Goodbye, Victor.

Inside the void, I pause. I don’t know what to do next. Inside my house, I understand the boundaries, where I can aim for next. But here… what if I were to get lost?

Would I cease to exist? Would I wind up next to you again, my love?

And then I feel you. It’s a certain, sure thing. Not a guess. Knowing. As if questioning you in here brought you here. Brought reassurance to my side.

It’s difficult to describe. It’s like you’re holding my hand without squeezing it. Like you’re resting against my back without touching it. There’s nothing of you to see, nothing to touch or feel. Just a certainty that the man who loved me once is sharing some of the same nothingness that I have stolen into. I don’t think this is your home because I’d have met you here before. But maybe you’ve been looking for me in all the places you shouldn’t, just as I’ve never quite stopped looking for you.

That feels right.

And now that you’re here, you remind me without speaking that we used to sit on the beach where I was just a moment ago and see Blackpool Tower in the distance. You whisper, without making a sound, that if I can enter the void in my house and travel from one room to another, perhaps when I am in the water, I can travel from one coast to another. That if I don’t want to return to Formby just yet, there is another shoreline just a little way away.

Sure of two things — that I need to get away in case Victor has survived, and that I can come back to your presence now any time that I want — I plan my exit and follow your suggestion.

I think of Blackpool, of the bright lights, the arcades, and the cheap rides, and all the cafes selling fish and chips to hungry tourists. I fix the town into my mind, all its noise and glory, and then I can transverse through space, through this nothingness, in a single instant, and the next thing I know I am climbing up out of the water, and lying back on the shore, and I am laughing.

Oh, Jonathan, I am laughing like I have not done in months.

Because if I can bend water, travel through it like it’s nothing, then I can go anywhere, do anything. I can even rest without time passing. And they, whoever they are, will never catch me.

Because while I miss you and mourn you every day, now I can be close to you every time I squeeze between some atoms.

Because if I’m not going to die, then I need to find a way to live, among all the things that bring me that bittersweet mix of pain and joy. Maybe this is it? In tearing the universe apart, I have found escape and release and a reason to keep on keeping on.

I lie on the beach, my back cold on the sand, and laugh some more, and if I cry a little too, then I am the only one who sees it.

This is a beginning.

This is good.

About the author and the piece (click to expand)

Helen French collected 35 rejections for this story before we took it. She grew up in Merseyside near the coast, and now lives in Hertfordshire, UK with her family. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as Mythaxis, Saros SF, and Stupefying Stories, and she is currently buried in novel writing.

 

©2026 by Helen French. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.