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from a deep gash in her forehead, and her vision swims, but suddenly, Eliana understands, watching the tentacled entity beat at the cage.
    It is trying to birth, but cannot free itself. And through the haze of her own floating blood, Eliana sees not the trapped tentacled entity, but knows it for what it truly is. Her son has come back to her. He has found her at long last. Tears well in her eyes, but now, after twenty years, finally, she sheds tears of joy. Her son has come back to her.
    Eliana sets her jaw, straightens her spine and pushes off the cracked viewport with one steady hand. She floats her way back to the cabin’s pilot seat and settles in as best she can, grabbing for the helmet that dances away from her in the weightless air, everything bathed in the intermingled glaring reds of the struggling entity and the Lacrima ’s alarm system. She adjusts the helmet over her head and snaps it shut with a violent twist, her suit filling with refiltered air. She closes her right eye against the sudden rush of properly flowing blood as it courses down her face, filling one half of her vision. Strobe-lit orbs of her blood still speckle the cabin, intermingling with the ever-present sparkle of her globular tears, filling the otherwise-empty space.
    With the barest nudge on the control panel, Eliana sets the Lacrima ’s impelling engines roaring to life and the battered ship slides forward, gaining momentum as she revs the hulk up to ramming speed. With a look of absolute joy on her face, Eliana sends the Lacrima slamming into the immense, tentacled creature’s egg, shattering it. Sheer portions of the collapsing egg fall away and shear sections of the Lacrima from the main body of the hull, opening parts of the engine room and auxiliary fuel dumps to the void of space. A thick, black, quickly-globuling leak of engine coolant and fuel bleeds out into space as the ship depressurises and portions of the hull begin to crumple inward.
    Eliana is thrown forward from her seat by the collision and slams up against the cabin view-port, this time full-bodied. She lingers there, watching the tentacled foetus within the egg breach, its massive tendrils ripping at the collapsing barrier. With each stroke, it reveals itself more fully until it is free.
    She watches as her son stretches tendrils to the distant stars, light radiating from its pulsing, burning core. Radiative heat boils off the stellar entity, its external membrane burning a bright, pulsing red. Eliana forces her eyes to stay open as her retinas burn with the brightness of her son’s awesome new form. A swell of pride blooms up within her. His new body will not succumb to the ravages of disease, nor age, nor infirmity. Here, in the limitless black of space, he will live, undying.
    For a moment, the tentacled stellar creature swells, drinking in the ambient radioactive energy of the deep black around it. And then it turns its spherical mass upon the wreck of the Lacrima , the ship collapsing in segmented stages, one portion of the hull after another crumpling in like an accordion. Drawn by the bleeding heat and light of the dying ship, and the meager warmth of the entity within, the interstellar entity falls on the crumpling hulk and wraps it in a tentacled embrace.
    As the cabin is bathed in burning, pure-red light, the tentacled mass of her newly reborn child crushing up against the already-weakened glass, Eliana exults in her son’s final embrace. Metal crumples and folds in on itself in sharp, swift strokes, pinning her and crushing the breath from her lungs. And as the tentacles scythe through the hull and find purchase on her form and close tight around her, cracking bone and turning muscle to pulp, one thought repeats endlessly in Eliana’s mind.
    He has come back to her.

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    By Luso Mnthali
    Luso Mnthali  was born in Malawi, grew up in Botswana, went to university in the United States, and now lives in beautiful Cape Town,