4 ideas
In "The Distance of the Moon," the Moon once orbited so close to Earth that Qfwfq and his companions rowed out at night and climbed onto it by ladder to gather moon-milk. As the Moon drifts away, Qfwfq's beloved, Mrs. Vhd Vhd, stays up there by choice, having fallen for the deaf cousin who loves only the Moon. The tidal recession of the Moon, a real astronomical process, becomes the physical form of a permanent romantic separation.
Each story takes one literal scientific fact or hypothesis, such as all matter concentrated in a single point or a galaxy taking 200 million years to rotate. It then asks what ordinary human feeling that condition would produce: gossip, jealousy, nostalgia, or embarrassment. Held fixed, the premise constrains the plot, and the domestic emotion makes an inhuman scale graspable.
In "All at One Point," before the Big Bang, every being lived packed into a single dimensionless point, bickering like tenants in a crowded building. When Mrs. Ph(i)Nko says she would make noodles for everyone if only she had room, that impulse toward generosity is what sets off the expansion of space. The origin of the universe is recast as an act of hospitality.
An ageless narrator who existed as a particle, a mollusk, and a dinosaur makes deep time feel like remembered biography rather than abstract chronology. Qfwfq speaks of eons in the offhand tone of "back when we were young," which collapses the distance between cosmic history and personal memory. The effect implies that every present form carries the whole history of matter as its own past.