The Stars are Going Out by Clay Waters


It was funny at first, that’s what you remember. Nothing scary, not right then. No new creatures, no old monsters, nothing raining from the sky above, nothing crumbling out of the ground beneath. Only your foursome of a family on a Sunday morning before church, plunging cups of coffee out of the French press, yelling at the younger one to stop bothering the older one.

Your husband said the numbers on the bathroom scale were out of whack, reading 288, at least 100 pounds too heavy. Finally he held on to the bathroom counter and stood on it, but it still remained stuck on 288 (“you’re not a pound over 280,” the last joke you ever made).

“It’s a curse,” he replied, laughing but also apprehensive. He’d always been the more sensitive one.

And when you were driving your children to church that morning, the speedometer stayed fixed on 27 miles per hour, no matter how many brake checks you performed. You found it funny, then puzzling, then finally disturbing, recognizing the parallel.

You took your after-church walk, your last, removing your jacket against the unseasonable warmth, taking your toddler by the hand, entering upon impulse a small store having a “grand” opening that included a ridiculous amount of balloons.

The excessive chime rang loud in the little space, compelling you to stay with the proprietor and her crippled smile. Her thin, showy fingers compelled your attention to the array of delicate trinkets. After a few halting minutes of stilted talk and phony praise you picked something out to get away gracefully and she logged the sale on an old-fashioned cash register whose rusted drawer refused to open to dispense change for your $50 bill. You finally just let her keep it, not without regret.

As the chime rang again to herald your departure you waved goodbye, an unusual thing for the kind of person you were to do.

Did you sense a changing?

***

Your two-block return home was interrupted when the school across the street vented screaming students. You stifled your own scream while following your toddler’s pointing finger up to a sky that had gone mint green. You went to your phone, which had been overtaken by runes too disturbing to be even the most decadent emojis. The phrase “blink out” was all you registered before the phones themselves vanished out of a billion sweating hands.

Somehow it surprised you that the trees were next to go. When people began to vanish, in person and from panicked online gatherings, some of your neighbors started jumping in the street, as if deepening their impression on the disappearing earth would forestall their flickering out. You saw them vanish, clothes and all.

Oversized animals appeared before flashing instantly out of existence, like crumpled up possibilities. The stars flatlined, squeezed into white lines on a dark screen. The moon flickered up oversized, an image in a corrupted file. The universe went on dark mode, with an unworldly light projected from the back.

The strangeness overwhelmed, too fast for suicidal impulses to take hold, your fellow humans mostly skipping straight into drugged resignation, although out the window a mangled head on a body walked slow down the middle of the street. The world’s color was seeping out. Gray latticework displayed behind your closed eyes. Everything you knew was drapery. You remained calm even when your oldest child disappeared opening a can of soup, thinking Why did the soup stay and he depart?

“Closet,” you said, carrying the toddler, and your quiet, doomed husband followed into what you could pretend was deeper shelter. You tucked the inert, odorless slabs of clothing, around you, as if socks and belts could form ring of protection. “Remember how you made numbers and letters with these, Andy?” You told the boy, wanting to make the last words he heard wonderful. “You’re such a smart boy.”

You hugged them to you, but you were missing something. The older one, of course, but also the little trinket you had purchased so dearly. Why was its absence so saddening?

Unusually, tragically, your husband did not disappear, but faded gradually. You could see the wall behind him (the wallpaper had vanished) and he looked still and sad and you never spoke again. Then you could see through all of him and realized it was just you and the child, quaking in the dark. Then the closet and house disappeared and your eyes were stuck in place, staring at the sky. One night, ages ago, sitting on your parents’ porch, he had said the full moon looked so fresh and close it could have been hung on wires. If only a sodium light would crash through the world’s shopworn stage curtains and land on the both of you!

The toddler had not cried after his older brother had puffed away. Perhaps he thought that’s how people went. A blessing. But when his father slowly dissipated in front of him it had sat watching, open-mouthed. You want to put a blanket over his head to hide the blankness from him, but you cannot move, and there are no more blankets.

There is a flutter in your skull, a blinking of strange eyes watching from within. Somehow it shook out something: Part of a poem popped into your head. Are you the last one to remember it? How did it go?

If you could speak you would have told the toddler “Don’t be afraid if I go first” after you felt that telltale sting in the air. The hopeful thought came, crazy but no crazier than the others, that the boy was small enough to be part of you, which he had been not so long ago. You hugged him hard as if to make the two of you irreducible: One or zero, here or gone.

It’s been dark all day, but it feels like night now. Something is pressing upon you, as if compensating for the loss of gravity. There’s a quality to the darkness that comes out under such forced inspection, thick and softly leathered. Closing time. Though your mouth can’t move, your head fills with what you long to say to your numbed, scared child:

“Hey Andy, what do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese!”

“What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear.”

“Don’t go, I have a funny oneWhat do you call it when two giraffes run into each other?”

Gone.

With no one left to tell it to, the poem comes back, the back half, anyway:

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

The two-headed calf didn’t realize anything was wrong with him. Are you the doomed calf, the knowing mother, or just one of a myriad dumb stars? Were you really so unrepeatable?

Leaving is taking too long; the quiet becoming agony.

The fragility of your faith disappointed. You were satisfied that you had a firm enough foothold, sufficiently vigorous to get you to heaven, sufficiently skeptical so you could still respect yourself. It vanished like everything else. Perhaps the happenings were too weird to slot into the parchment-lined lanes of a proper prayer: Simulation, not Revelation.

You presume that if this is a corrupted simulation, then something will keep going after you and everything you know are gone.

Does this comfort you?

A frazzle storm hits your brain. We connected.

Greeting! We hope this finds you. We intend to communicate. We may not correctly explain ourselves. We are trying to relax. Statistically speaking, you should relax. Should you be thankful?

We can not explain your situation. You have demonstrated tenacity. We think it could be random. You are correct in your confusion. We will expose you to our situation. We can not promise any particular thing. You can use your eyes and see everything but not our way. Your pattern will be frozen. We have your object. You can not remember it. Perhaps it is important?

Will you come willingly?

 


 


Clay lived in Florida until the age of four and recently returned to find it hasn’t changed a bit. Three of his six memories from that first stop involve the alphabet, which in retrospect was a bit of a tell.

Published 2/14/25