Deep in a star system that spiraled at the rim of some galaxy was a planet. It was adorned with moons and plenty of rings and it spun. To avoid even a happenstance glance, space travelers added light-years to their flight paths, for the spinning, slopping, sickening mass was so terrible to observe. A shame, considering what a spectacular gift the planet held – held in it’s orbit, that is. On the surface the planet roiled like a hot mess of blackened plastic that spat ferocious bubbles of pure vileness. It was like the entire surface had been tarmacked ten times deep and then left to cook under the sun’s heat. Nothing lived on the planet. Not that it was uninhabitable. In fact an entire civilization of a species called riprops had used its mountains and its rivers for ten orbits of proliferation. Long enough that civilization had come of it, but you wouldn’t find a trace of it now, even if you squinted. During the era of riprop fornication, they did it all on the ugly, black planet: agriculture and sacrifices, religious persecution, world wars of the first and second kind, and within five orbits they were at the sciences. They achieved spaceflight, put non-riprop objects into orbit, and flung the first of their own kind up high. But the first riprop astronaut turned their little rocket around, took one look at the black, hot mess she’d come from, and fired right out of orbit – right out of the star system! The entire planet packed it all up – tables, windows, children, sidewalks, footprints, their hot meals, the very air they breathed why they scrambled the atoms so they couldn’t be read. To have occupied a congestive, sickly rock as this, it was embarrassment of a celestial scale and they fled quick in every direction so their origin might not be traceable.

Orbiting the hot, black mess were eighteen moons. Two of these moons were revolting and were undergoing trial for charges of mass entity-slaughter. So queasy were their geometries that an entire tour ship full of Andromeda royalty died from excessive emesis. It was a combination of a navigational mishap and a passenger’s expanding liver ailment that had driven the ship off course and into the sight of the two moons. They hardly twinkled in the port window, but the constellation view was totally fatal.

Fifteen of the moons are the result of a rounding error, and therefore are not real. A professor of autoastronumerology, Jub Luggins Zero-Three, was tired of counting everything in the sky. She wrote seven equations, only one survived, but its five pages of fractions and fractoids, out- and in-equalities, division and derisions, they did what was asked of them, for the whole cosmos they held inside. Nothing was beyond it: the chromatic arc of nebulae gases, the three-body chaos of a sun and it’s two dwarfs, even accounting for objects unobserved, such as the unpulsar, which is a star that never budges, not even a quark’s diameter. The scientist could not lift their necks, so adorned was she in medals and promotions and delegations. Astronomical labor was reduced down to a single astronomer per planet who’s job it was to refresh the binding on the five-page print-out of the great equation. But the equation did not accounted for objects of the vile. Sheer, putrid, revolting ugliness, no, this was ignored in the mathematical conclave. There was not a symbol left in their alphabet either to parameterize it, so strongly they believed it was impossible. When it was discovered that ugliness had materialized as a planet within the universe, the scientific community unanimously agreed to un-believe it. They un-believed it via records well-fudged, buried under psuedo-names and psuedo-data, like pseudo-orbital periods and pseudo-atmospheric records, its astronomical coordinates were false and pointed to an artificial planet that they had built there. This saved the lives of many a foolish scientist who ignored the warnings to never place their eyes on the grotesque world at risk of permanent cortical paralysis. And so, all this psuedo-ing left the hot, black mess with eighteen moons where it only had three.

Its third moon was a rainbow and the riprops called it, Bresmooth, and it was the most beautiful moon in the universe. The surface was in constant conflict over whether to organize itself vertically, stacking high its rocks into sharp features, or along its level plane and in spherical, unblemished perfection. Gravitational pulsations attacked Bresmooth from all sides and they were relentless. These originated from the bubbling babbles of the planet that held it. Overtime, the pulsations had gradually aligned the moon’s rocks along its axis, sorted according to density. The least dense rocks were purple, the most dense rocks red. Rocks of middle densities handled the yellows, the blues, the greens, and from afar it looked like the moon had been split through a giant prism. When the riprops had lived on their ugly planet, they were sometimes treated to moonsets where Bresmooth would flirt with the dying light of a horizon and bedazzle the atmosphere with pinks and greens galore, reds and blues abound. A moonset on the hot, black mess was considered a good omen. No good omens had happened on the ugliest planet in the universe for a thousand centuries because there were no eyes anymore on the ugliest planet to look upon these sets.

On Bresmooth, to witness a planetset is terrible. A bad omen a-hundred times over – to see the black, broiling ball in the sky smear the horizon with its hideous shadow. Many bad omens happened on Bresmooth because there were numerous eyes to witness these planetsets. In fact, Bresmooth had evolved an entire ecosystem. The ecosystem was composed entirely of sponges and sorted by color.

Camouflage was a useful trait for the Bresmooth inhabitants and the moon being a rainbow, it meant that the organisms were faithful to the colors of their region. At the east pole all the sponges were scarlet, red, and vermilion and beyond. While on the west pole perched sponges of purple, violet, and a well-plumed plum. And so on and in between. Sponges throughout the universe lack the following ability: locomotion. Where a sponge is first squeezed to life, there a sponge will die. Some sponges have eyes that allow them to see. On Bresmooth this is a very unfortunate trait. For when you are planted on a bismuth shrine that is unselfish in its wavelengths of light, when you realize it is the most beautiful object in the visible universe, it can only stand to be true that anything else you look out upon is the vision of a disaster. What a steep cliff fall from if what catches the eye of an idle sponge is the very catastrophe that is the great hot black mess that runs around the sky. Colonies of sponges spend significant resources to erect spires that bring both good fortune and good protection from the sky. Fortune, a sponge seeks because it wishes for one thing only and ever: that it’s offspring be born without a trace of anything that can detect a photon. At some point in their evolution, the sponges evolved a capacity for boredom, and so took to religion. Their scriptures tell that thousands of years ago a great sponge had been born with eyes a-million and this sponge was forever tormented to stare upon the disfigured space and the grotesque objects it witnessed in every direction. So upsetting was the scene that for years the great sponge tried to rid itself of its own existence but never succeeded. Then one day a storm came and everything grew very dark. The storm pelted the great sponge with many rocks and the sponge could not flee or protect itself, faithful to its sponge-form as it was. But when the storm passed it took five sponges four days to convince the great sponge that it was over, for every one of its eyes a-million had been destroyed in the chaos.

The end.