Hemingway’s Cut
The Rings of Fire
The galaxy sat out there in the dark, its rings burning like campfires in the cold. Nine of them. No one had seen that before. Space had seen plenty of rings, one or two wrapped around galaxies like a lasso, but nine? That was something. The astronomers looked at it and knew it had been through hell.
Somewhere, sometime, another galaxy had come barreling through, ramming into it like a bull through a corral fence. The force of it sent shockwaves rolling outward, pushing dust and stars into circles that still burned in the black of space. Time had not undone what violence had created.
A History Written in Light
R5519 was its name, though names do little in the void. It was old but not beaten. The rings told its history. Each one a scar, a wound that never closed, a memory pressed into the fabric of the universe. A man could understand that. Some wounds don’t heal, but they shape you all the same.
The astronomers said this discovery changed things. They had thought of galaxies forming one way, slow and steady. But this was something else—a thing born of collision and fire, molded by force. It meant the universe was not as gentle as some had hoped. It was a place where things crashed and burned and still carried on.
What the Rings Tell Us
The rings stretched out, marking the place where the impact had sent its ripples. It was like a stone thrown into a lake, only the lake was endless and cold, and the ripples never faded. The stars caught in those rings were young, forged in the aftermath, newborns in the wake of destruction.
Astronomers studied it, trying to understand how such a thing could be. They knew galaxies changed over time, but not like this. This was a thing built by catastrophe, shaped by something brutal yet precise. A man could learn from that. Sometimes all you can do is take the hit and come out the other side, changed but still standing.
The galaxy burned on, its rings hanging in the dark like the marks left by a bullwhip. It had been struck hard, but it had not broken. Space does not weep for what it loses, and neither did this galaxy. It carried its history in its rings, and that was enough.
