Zachariah Claypole White

Black Hole Kitchen Blues

Laureate of The Fifth Corner Dark Fiction Prize Fall 2026
2026 Pushcart Prize Nominee
Submitted For The 2027 Best American Short Stories

When do you first notice the black hole?
I think it should be a workday, don’t you? Monday feels a bit too on-the-nose. Let’s say a Tuesday or Wednesday. Whichever you prefer.
You’ll be getting ready, probably running late. You’ll be pouring the last of yesterday’s coffee into a thermos when you glimpse the black hole’s accretion disc—unwashed plates crowned in its stolen light. Or perhaps you’re rushing to catch the morning bus, closing the door as you see dust snow-globing over the counter, caught in the singularity’s time dilation.

How does the black hole find its way into your kitchen?
Well, we’re dealing with quantum mechanics here. Things just appear and disappear, don’t they? Everything becomes entangled with itself (and you). Particles are nowhere and—conversely—in several simultaneous wheres. Maybe the black hole has always been lodged in your kitchen counter. Maybe you brought it in. Perhaps black holes, like pollen, stick to your clothes and stain the apartment for weeks to come.
Regardless of how it arrived, you have classes to teach, papers to grade, and department chairs to placate; the black hole is an issue best left for the weekend. Besides, it’s only the size of a grapefruit or closed fist. We’re being as precise as possible, but measuring the hole proves more difficult than anticipated. Tapelines snag on the event horizon and unspool in atomic thread as they slip through reality.
You learn that black holes, like children, grow in fits and starts.

You begin to notice a slight sagging in the countertop surrounding the black hole. You attribute this to the singularity’s gravitational pull, curving spacetime around itself. It could also be the sink leaking again. Either way, you hope the landlord doesn’t notice.
You suppose that the most pertinent course of action would be to consult an expert. There’s always an expert in stories like this, isn’t there? An overlooked man at a nearby university, whose dissertation helpfully examined the hypothetical interactions between black holes and Formica. Perhaps you even find such a professor. But experts are expensive, and renter’s insurance will not cover an astrophysicist.

Something you glean from scientific and popular depictions of blackholes: despite appearances, they should not be used as trashcans. It would be best to avoid adding more mass to the singularity.
The black hole, however, sits in your kitchen like whiskey in an alcoholic’s cabinet, or if we’re feeling literary, like Chekhov’s gun. Here, then, is an (admittedly incomplete) list of things that you will toss into the dark:
• Chicken bones, coffee grounds, banana skins (the garbage starts to smell midweek)
• Bills from your insurance
• Political flyers
• Beer cans (only on weekends though, as you’ve told your therapist repeatedly)
• An empty bottle (or two) of gin
• Scraps of half-written stories
• A letter from your uncle, dated two weeks ago

The black hole is growing. This should not surprise you (or us) but somehow, we all thought it wouldn’t happen. [It was only a few letters after all, no more than a handful of trash, right?] The accretion disc is now as wide as your forearm is long, and you yank the smoke detector from the ceiling (the disc’s heat keeps setting it off). Even when you sleep you feel the singularity’s pull, the dull ache of its gravity.
Every now and then you let the dishes grow too high and a knife or fork is drawn, inexorably from the sink, into what has now become the dark heart of your apartment.

Here is another list of things that will find their way into the black hole, also incomplete, but perhaps more honest:
• Instagram videos from the latest massacre (wherever it might be)
• Instagram videos from its aftermath
• More beer cans than you will admit
• Emails (from whom is not important)
• News of your uncle’s death

How might this all end, you ask? I suppose it depends on y(our) understanding of black holes, which is to say, of course, reality.
It’s tempting to think of the black hole as a metaphor. In this version of y(our) story there could be two endings. One) the black hole, driven by the mass of all that you have buried, swells and swells and, inevitably, consumes you. Two) a white hole (only theorized to exist—mind you) is discovered in another kitchen, not too far away. Everything you’ve fed—accidentally or otherwise—into your black hole has been deposited inside someone else’s apartment. Perhaps they find you through the address on a spaghettified letter. Perhaps they come to your door with a sack of everything you’ve discarded. This all feels a bit obvious though, doesn’t it? And, if we’re being honest [why shouldn’t we be?], a bit Freudian.

There are other ways of understanding.
Perhaps, as some have suggested, all of this—you, me, these words between us—exists within a black hole of our own. Perhaps, in a kitchen not dissimilar to yours, someone is tossing envelopes and pickle jars across an event horizon, and somewhere within the swirling quantum void, that matter has become [or is becoming] us.

Still others have argued that a black hole might eventually “bounce.” In this scenario the black hole does not end in a separate white hole but rather—as the fundamental equations of our universe fracture around the singularity—space time reverses and the black hole itself becomes a white hole.
I think this is how y(our) story should end.
Why?
Because (as you will surely recall) time is relative. It is in a constant pas de deux with gravity, and the two dance oh-so-slowly within a black hole.
In this ending, you scatter the memory of a man across the Schwarzschild radius, and a billion years pass. But to the memory, chasing a falling star through the end of time, and then back towards what was once your kitchen, only a few minutes have passed.
The memory steps out into the future, stumbles over the remains of gin bottles and unpaid bills, and stares up at a new sky.
It remembers you, just as you once recalled it.
In this ending, nothing is lost; no one is forgotten.

AfterImage

We are—all of us—entangled in language: even the dead; even the forgotten.

Zachariah Claypole White was born and raised in North Carolina and currently resides in Philadelphia, where he teaches at the city’s community’s college. His work has appeared in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus, amongst others. A former Jane Cooper Poetry Fellow, Zachariah has received awards from Palette Poetry, Flying South, and The Fifth Corner. His poetry and prose have also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net, the O. Henry Prize, and the Best American Short Stories. You can find more of Zachariah’s work at zachariahclaypolewhite.com