By Annie O.
Hi. My name is Photon Gump. People call me Photon
Gump. My mamma was a deuteron, she said my daddy hit
her quick then done run away. She never did say what ‘hit’ meant (she did
mention ‘fusion’), but I think that’s how baby photons are formed. I don’t
know. I never asked. My daddy was a
proton. He wasn’t no good, my mamma said. She said
that her parents were protons too, so she knew real well what they was like. My mamma
said that life was like a random walk, you never know what you’re gonna get, so
I thought to myself I’d like to go for that kind of walk. So I did. I never saw
my mother after that. The old neutrinos from back home in the core that I ran
into said that she moved on real quick, turned into a Helium-3 and then met
another Helium-3 like her and they made themselves a Helium-4 or something.
They said I wasn’t nothin’ but a
gamma ray to her after I left. I said that I’d changed since then, but
they didn’t listen. They just kept on going.
Anyways, when I started on my random walk, I was just leavin’ the core. It was real hot and dense and dark in
there, and I couldn’t see myself much. Didn’t really know if
I was anythin’ or all. It was more fun goin’ through the radiative zone
doing my random walk. I was going about the speed of light through that place,
but it must of taken me a million years to move on – I just kept running in to
such crazy particles, never knowing who I was gonna hit – just like Momma
said. And it got really groovy in
there, the density was just less than that of water. One of the crazy particles
I ran into said it was a lot like goin’ from the
All of a sudden I was in the photosphere, and I came
face to face with two giant sunspots. The magnetic fields were real strong
like, and it was real cold, jus’ ‘bout 2000 degrees lower than the rest of the
photosphere. One of them spots was real negative, so I went into the positive
one, but I tried to stay away from the umbra – it was really cold. It was fun
for a bit, but the spot faded after a few days. It started getting hotter again
by the time I got to the edge of the red chromosphere.
From there, I was supposed to go to the piping hot corona. So I went. And then
there were all these particles gathering up for a CME, so I went. It was like
no eruption I’d ever done seen before. This magnetically charged bubble of all
these gasses just burst out into the sky for a few hours. And wouldn’t you
know, that thing done shot me out of the sun so fast I could’ve killed
somebody. I kind of miss the sun now, there were so
many fun cycles. Magnetic cycles, sunspot cycles, convection cycles, broiled
cycles, cycle sandwiches, cycle creole, cycle kabobs…
That’s about it.
So I ran to the end of the CME, then I ran past
Mercury’s orbit, then Venus’s, and I thought I’d just keep going, but I hit
this satellite and it stopped me. I would’ve thought somebody might have
complained, but I didn’t hear nothing from them. I
went down to the earth, landing on a plant near this ol’
bench in
I don’t think anyone would of
believed me.