My ex-boyfriend’s name is Tripp Pham, but I recently learned that for the past year or so a group of people have been referring to him as Mr. Wonderfull. As in Full of Wonder. When an almost-friend at work showed me the website on her phone in the bathroom, I leaned forward, squinting, though it was obviously him. “That’s Tripp,” I confirmed, perversely proud. Then I scrolled down. There were photos of Mr. Wonderfull standing in front of palm trees with strangers—mainly attractive young women—their heads tilted together like happily conjoined twins. There were weekend retreats: Metaphysically Cure Yourself through Chakra Work and Transformational Energy Vortexes. There were testimonials: “It’s amazing!!! You free yourself from aging by dynamically reinterpreting your body and by consciously grasping the subtle link between the soul and biology.” There were inspirational precepts: “It is the nature of babies to reside in WONDER and BLISS!!! Remember to practice Baby Talk and Baby Presence!”

     The TV is on. Channel 12. Evening news. Des Moines. A contestant at the county fair crams hot dogs into his sunburned face. His Adam’s Apple moves like a mouse trapped beneath a blanket. Then a reporter interviews a teenage boy with chemical-green hair. He mumbles that his python, Julius Squeezer, is still missing. “He’s about eighteen-feet,” the boy says, stretching his skeletal arms out wide. “Grew up in the wild, so you might keep an eye on your dogs and kids.” When I first saw coverage of this story, I recognized the John Deere sign from the store two blocks up the street. Somebody tossed a rock through it that left a ragged hole where the deer’s heart should be. That night, I watched videos of pythons on YouTube. One showed a female devouring an adult antelope. Head first. “Always head first,” the snake expert said. “Easier to swallow the limbs that way.” The most popular clip had over 120 million views. It was footage of a Burmese constricting and then swallowing an alligator that was eight feet long. I’d always thought pythons suffocate their prey to death before eating, but this gator’s hind legs were still paddling uselessly, as if searching for mudbank, when the snake began to stretch the wide hoop of its mouth around them. 

     I probably fell for my ex because he reminded me of Thich Nhat Hanh. Shaved head, boyishly slight frame. The dorky ears, the gap between his front teeth, the habit of frequent blinking, as if warding off flies. And the stillness, the apparent goodness. Everywhere we went, he picked up people’s litter without curse or complaint. Once, when a cockroach skittered across the kitchen counter, I grabbed a saucepan, but he barely reacted, just bent down to its level and studied the creature with a kind of childlike curiosity. Yes, with wonder, I suppose. He told me that he liked Thich Nhat Hanh, too. After I moved into his apartment, we even talked about getting married in Plum Village. The wedding party, all smiling and bald as the moon, dressed in plum-colored robes. Maybe a little girl—like the one he said we’d have one day—holding a bowl of water with a floating white lotus. And me in a traditional Vietnamese wedding dress, the áo dài—silk-ribbon red, with long sleeves of lace.

     I cleaned the entire apartment today. Now it smells like bleach and pine. I left them in every room. On bookshelves, in kitchen cupboards, tucked in corners where the baseboards don’t quite meet. Roach tablets. White as aspirin. I bought a 4 oz. pack last week. On the front of the bright yellow box, a single cockroach is standing on a large white tablet above the words “Mata Cucaracha.” I don’t think cockroaches are capable of facial expressions, or if it’s even correct to think of them as having faces, but this one on the front of the box is visibly eager. He seems to be very pleased with himself, and with his find.

     It’s hot. Muggy. Highs statewide in the low 90’s all week. But I switched off the AC a few hours ago. I pick at a chipped nail, get up and go to the kitchen, grab a glass, fill it with cold tap water, turn off the TV, return to the sofa. There’s a photograph on the wall, the only one in the entire apartment. After staring at it for a while, I stand up, lift it off the screw, rotate the little metal hooks on the back of the frame till the picture slips out. It’s an old Vietnamese man and woman. They’re wearing cone-shaped bamboo hats and standing in a forest by a tree with roots jutting out of the ground like a giant skeleton’s hand lifting the trunk into the sky. They look alike. Maybe they’re brother and sister. Or maybe they’re one of those lucky couples that lives together so long they start to resemble each other. Tripp told me they’re his parents. I look at the bottom of the photograph, the border no longer hidden by the frame: Getty Images, Inc. Two weeks ago, Tripp came home late one night, the tangy odor of hard liquor on his breath. “You’ve never told me anything about your family,” I said, folding my legs up on the couch, arms crossed at my chest, a little surprised by the injury in my voice. “Tell me something about your parents.” He stood there for a moment, then pointed to this photo. He started talking about the terrors of the Khmer Rouge and how his parents hadn’t been so lucky. Soon he joined me on the couch and cried a little before we made love. After Katie, my almost-friend at work, showed me that website, I Googled “Khmer Rouge.” The Communist Party. In Cambodia. 

     It’s strange to see the door to the bedroom closed. I remember closing it, but still. I’ve been living here for five months now, and I don’t think we ever closed that door. For a few moments it feels like maybe I’m in the wrong apartment. I almost knock or say, “Hello?” When I open the door, I see what I expect to see. A python stretched out on the floor, its midsection massively swollen, the bulge almost comically large, like that of a cartoon snake. At the far wall, the door to the bathroom stands open. A powder blue shower curtain and a metal rod lie in a heap on the floor, along with a busted towel rack and green bottles of shampoo—still and silent as grenades. My ex liked to take a shower every day after work. He always took these long, hot showers. Thirty minutes. Sometimes close to an hour. There isn’t a circulation fan in the bathroom, but he refused to open the window, so everything—the toilet seat, my flat iron, even the mirror in the bedroom—got all foggy and damp. “But it reminds me of being a little boy in Vietnam,” he told me, his eyes suddenly wet with nostalgia. 

     Five maybe six times this week, I put on my purple slippers and snuck in and opened the window as he was taking a shower. “What are you doing!” he said once, but I didn’t answer—just walked out as if I hadn’t heard him. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure myself. Today, I opened the bedroom window, too. A little while later, sitting at the kitchen table, I heard the shower rod clank against the tub. I lassoed a wet tea bag with its little white string and squeezed. Sipped my tea. Then I stood and set my cup in the sink. I walked to the bedroom door, looked in. I shut the door firmly but gently, as though not to disturb, then went out the front door, waved to a neighbor, walked around to the back of the apartment where I wrestled the warped bedroom window shut. Then I stepped laterally over a series of black mole hills to the bathroom window, a movement that reminded me of tennis drills in high school. The python’s tail was dangling out a few feet, writhing like a blind worm at the tip of a spear of grass. When I reached to toss the tail inside, it coiled rapidly around my wrist, exerting a firm, precisely calibrated pressure, like the inflatable cuff on one of those blood-pressure gauges. A few seconds later, the tail relaxed its grip and disappeared inside. As I stretched up to shut the window, I could see that the snake’s jaws had already worked their way down to Tripp’s hips, the front third of its body like an overstuffed Christmas stocking. There was an eerie sound, a reedy, rhythmic whistling noise, faint as the breath of a seashell, coming from a fleshy tube—wet, pink—sticking out one side of the snake’s mouth. Its windpipe, I later discovered. “Pythons are able to temporarily externalize this organ,” the website said, “to do what they need to do to survive.” As I stood there in my slippers, watching, I realized that the last thing I would ever see of Tripp Pham were the pale, perfectly smooth bottoms of his tiny feet, which, I knew, had never touched the soil of a village in Vietnam.

   And now—late evening of the same day—standing in the open doorway, I look at the python once more, close the bedroom door, double-check to make sure the AC is off. Then I flip the porchlight switch, remove my clothes and stretch out naked and sweaty on the sofa.

     That morning, I call in sick. “Herpes-zoster virus,” I say. “Shingles. It might be a few days.” I close all the blinds in the living room and kitchen. It seems I’m always walking by houses shut up like that, all the curtains or blinds closed. It makes me wonder what’s going on inside. 

     At the kitchen sink, I run cold water over a hand towel. Wash my face, arms, legs. Then I sit at the table, open my laptop. I learn that this python, with its red eyes and its geometric pattern of yellow and white skin, is an albino. I learn that it takes a python six days to completely digest its meal, and that during digestion, a python’s heart grows by forty percent.

     I need to pee. 

     When I push the door open, it’s in the far corner, coiled in a rectangle of sunlight. I step into the room, crawl across the bed, reach to twirl the rod to half-shut the blinds, then walk along the near wall to the bathroom. Closing the door, I sit on the toilet. Turn to stare out the window. The window frames a cloudless blue sky. Once, standing in a dimly lit room with a clear blue tank the size of a swimming pool, I saw a tiger shark—idling, perfectly still. I walked up close to the glass. The near eye was a cold black planet against the shark’s moon-colored skin. It seemed to be staring at nothing and everything—at me, and at the totality of space around me. I leaned forward, turning my face to one side. I opened my left eye as wide as it would go, pressing it right up close so that the lens could feel the coolness of the glass. My eye—directly opposite that magnificent black eye. The shark didn’t blink. I didn’t blink. As a schoolgirl, I’d always won those contests. But this was different. This wasn’t about winning or losing. It was more beautiful than that.

     I stand, flush. Bend down, pick up a dark green bottle of herbal shampoo—his, not mine. I flip the cap, squeeze the bottle, take in the scent. Then I look in the mirror. A raised mole on my neck that my senile grandfather, who thought it was dirt, tried to scrub off. Bare shoulders like fins: thin, pale, not quite even. Black eyes. People tell me that I have black eyes. But I don’t agree. I don’t see it that way. Or maybe I just can’t see what it is they’re seeing. 

     I will turn thirty-three at the end of the month.

     He was the first man—the only man—I’ve ever really been with. Unless you count the adjunct professor—of anthropology, I think—who told me to undress slowly and lie back on the bed before he began to rub me with his pinky. He just stood there, at the foot of the bed, fully dressed, looking down at me, rubbing. His gleaming white teeth like elephant tusks. Right as I was about to climax, he stopped—told me he was married, that he didn’t want to be unfaithful. “Could we just do this?” he asked. No, begged. “Could we just meet and do this?” 

     The toilet makes a leaky hissing noise. I jiggle the handle. Then I reach under the sink, grab a pair of orange gloves, kneel and scrub the rusty toilet ring at the base of the bowl. It fades a bit. Maybe. Kneeling there on the floor, using both index fingers and thumbs, I begin to rub my nipples through the thin cotton of my T-shirt. Two summers ago, as they were driving home from choir practice, my parents died in a tornado that touched down in Pella, the little farm town where I grew up. It ripped the four-paneled blade from the giant windmill in the center of town and dropped it in a cornfield forty miles away. Around that time, I developed the habit of rubbing my nipples to relieve stress, or to arouse myself. I usually did it with a shirt on. After a while, I noticed that the nipple area on some of my shirts was fading, leaving two pale spots, a blurry-edged pair of ghostly eyes. I eventually realized this effect was from the peroxide in my facial cream. Apparently, I wasn’t thoroughly washing it from my fingers.

     Lying naked on the sofa, I watch a documentary about storms and snakes. The basic idea is that we bring these non-native snakes into pet stores, mainly in Florida. People buy them as pets, then end up dumping them in a ditch or a field. Or sometimes a hurricane will come and destroy the stores. Then the hurricanes come and destroy the stores, allowing the snakes to escape and breed. We try to control the populations, but we aren’t doing a good job. There isn’t enough money. There aren’t enough cages. There are too many snakes. The snakes seem to be winning. “Once they’re here,” the old guy with a Florida Gators cap says, “we just have to learn to live with them.”

     The next morning, when I open the bedroom door, the snake is still in his corner. Probably waiting for the sun to come through the window. He’s so still that he doesn’t look real. And what if he isn’t? What then? 

     I walk along the wall to the bathroom, close the door, put up the shower rod, hang the curtain, take a cold shower. Then I dry off, wrap my hair in a towel, lie on my stomach on the bed. I study the snake’s bulge. My ex-boyfriend didn’t like tight spaces. He didn’t like hugs. He refused to use bathrooms on a plane. He couldn’t even wear tight clothes. “Too constricting,” he said.

     The day after Katie showed me that website, we stood at a long row of sinks during break, talking to each other’s reflection in the bathroom mirror. As I reapplied my lipstick, she told me about a woman in her building who fell down the trash chute. “Her boyfriend left her. Moved to Seattle with some other girl. Out of the blue. When she found out, she got drunk, then tried to go up on the roof to jump, but the door was locked. So she threw herself down the trash chute instead.” Katie turned. Looked at me. Tilted her head slightly, with concern, like Mom used to do. Then she looked back at my image in the mirror and said that her Holistic Wellness Coach once told her, “If they survive the initial blow, people can usually recover from cancer, hurricanes, any kind of natural tragedy. But betrayal, especially by a loved one, is another matter.” Katie snapped her purse shut, then looked directly at me. “Eighteen floors,” she said. “The paramedics had to come and pull her out of the compactor in the basement. The woman survived, but barely.”

     Near dusk, the lump looks a little smaller. It’ll be gone in a few days. Lying back against a pile of pillows, I hear the rapid, muted rumble of footsteps—the little girl who lives upstairs. This is what always happens before she heads out to play in the open space behind the complex. When the noise stops, I wait a couple minutes, then peek out through the blinds. She is wearing a yellow dress with bright red sneakers, standing with her back to a concrete wall, eyes closed, facing the dying sun so that her shadow stretches long and high behind her. She stands on one leg, raises her arms in a graceful circle above her head, like a ballerina. Then, abruptly, as though suddenly possessed, she turns to face the concrete wall and begins to dance—wildly, unpredictably—her magnified shadow mirroring her every movement. And it’s almost like she’s trying to trick it, to outwit it. Trying to unhinge her shadow from her body—like a man, a foolish man, wriggling to free himself from his fate. After a while, the girl collapses onto the pavement in a kind of exhausted puddle. 

     The last day I went to work, I’m walking down the sidewalk and recognize a woman I’ve seen before, though only from a distance. She is always pushing a baby stroller. I notice that she stands off to one side, misaligned, pushing the stroller with just one of the handles—and there is a jerkiness, a clumsiness to her movements, like those of a marionette. As we get closer, I can see and hear one of the plastic wheels dragging sideways, scraping the concrete, and I can hear this woman mumbling something, talking to her baby, it seems, trying to engage or to console it. When we are about to pass each other, the woman’s pinched gaze and clenched jaw are directed up and away. She is addressing some absence, a blank space in the air. “Fucking bastard,” she says, leaning over to spit on a bush. “You goddamned motherfucking bastard.” I hesitate, but then glance at the baby in the stroller. The baby isn’t moving. And it seems too small, this baby. Unnaturally still. Then, as the woman’s shoulder brushes roughly against my own, I look down once more and see that it isn’t a baby. It’s a doll. A plastic doll with one pale blue eye and stiff carrot-colored hair. And then, as my feet carry me unsteadily forward toward the busy intersection, I overhear myself whisper, “You motherfucking bastard.”

     Last week, after learning about that website, I admitted to Katie that I’d noticed a pattern—that he only gave spare change to the cute homeless girls. I left work early, came back to the apartment, searched his desk. Eventually, I found it. A list of passwords. For the next two hours, I read his email correspondence with Nelischka, a Kazakhstani woman who’d attended two of the retreats. She’d loved the Circle of Authentic Sharing practice, where everybody had been encouraged to shirk convention, to express their feelings without restraint or inhibition. And she’d been “fricking AMAZED!!!” by his object lesson one morning during breakfast when he’d captured everyone’s attention by simply holding up a hardboiled egg, still encased in its protective shell. After a brief period of silence, he delivered an impromptu homily about the importance of being radically open to the breaking of our own hearts—how we should not resist this breaking, how resisting this inevitable breaking leads to bitterness and resentment, to a shrinking and hardness of the heart. As the emails between Mr. Wonderfull and Nelischka grew more frequent, there was talk of a trip to Plum Village. And there was Baby Talk, nauseating back-and-forth Baby Talk.

     Now I flip open my ex’s computer, log in to his website. I type: “All retreats canceled till further notice. Mr. Wonderfull is undergoing a profound transformation.”

     Two days pass. 

     A long, gray morning. Afternoon, the same. Towards dusk, I sit on the edge of the bed. My bare feet don’t quite touch the floor. It’s hot. All I’m wearing is one of his T-shirts. It still has his scent. The scent reminds me of tiger stalls at the zoo—that sharp scent of sawdust. After a while, I get down on my hands and knees and begin to crawl towards the corner where the snake lies, motionless. The stenciled pattern of yellow and white scales like wallpaper. The eyes, red, one slightly clouded, a black vertical slit at its center like the pit of a fruit emerging, breaking through. The forked tongue tests the air. 

     I reach out, stroke the tail. Cool, familiar. Males have large spurs, bone-like vestiges of hind legs, which they use to stimulate females during sex. Tongue between my teeth, I trace the tip of my nail along the curved edge of one spur. The other.

     By now the bulge is barely visible, like the belly of a mother in her first trimester. I slide one hand up so that I can feel the slight swelling. Then I place my other hand on my smooth, flat belly. I cried last week, for three consecutive nights. But not now. Now my eyes are dry.

     I awake in the room on my side, facing the window. The morning sun is burning the edges of the half-open blinds. It is the feeling of shipwreck, of being dislodged, hauled by a great net to the surface light.

     I can hear my own heartbeat. Feel two heartbeats. I rotate my head. The bulge is gone. And then I see it, on the wall, the shadow, the strange shadow on the wall, like that of a single being. 

Robert Brian Mulder lives in Portland, Oregon. His stories have been published in The Sun, Cimarron Review, and Moon City Review. He was longlisted for the 2021 LitMag Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction, was a finalist for the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Fish Publishing International Short Story Prize. He also received an honorable mention for the 2017 Glimmer Train Press Very Short Fiction Contest, and was a finalist for the 2003 Boston Review Short Story Contest. His flash fiction and poems have appeared in Pennsylvania English, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Evening Street Review, Sky Island Journal, Sandy River Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine.

At the tilted pole of a distant planet on the date of the summer solstice, the eyes of a young astronomer reflect the faint glow of a radio-sized machine which measures the countdown to sunrise. This far north, it will be the only daybreak of the year. Four minutes of morning.

Wilted logbooks lie beside her in the snow, open to her notes and weighted with shards of sea glass. She glances briefly at them, at the penciled calculations of parsecs and parallax, and despairs at the neatness of her penmanship. No one demands her data or commands her to be swifter. The dispatches she receives from the southern posts—from the teams of scientists scurrying to report on new medicines, new weapons, new morals—arrive dimensionless to her computer screens with rarely a spot of handwriting. Their world hurries to repair itself. To repopulate, replace. No one craves the mathematics of the sky’s unblustered canopy.

And so she is alone at the pole. She had wanted to be. She uses time to write slowly, to linger in the trails of her numbers, her words. Meridian. Aphelion. Obliquity. 

Years ago, when the astronomer stood no taller than the heads of dune grass, she had lived above the cliffs of an island on the wider side of the world. The sands there jostled underfoot, black and porous and rough—lapilli stones, her father had called them. Volcanic remnants of an earth on fire. 

Once, after dinner, the astronomer and her brother had slipped out the back gate of their mother’s garden and into the shade of the woods, a damp and quivering jungle which sprung from a river and led to the coast. They sometimes brought their records there, and listened to music by the sea. This time, they carried a net, stalking the thin crustaceans which scurried up the bark of antler-torn trees, watching for the larger beasts which hid, impossibly, out of sight. They stained their shoes with moss. They mimicked the caws of feather-crowned birds, pocketed the sun-bleached skull of a shrew. Bare-shouldered, red-kneed, they made their way to the beach, where night appeared with the blue ringed planet and its two twin moons. Where they realized, in the dark, that they had forgotten their lanterns on the kitchen table. 

They wandered, lost, for what felt like hours. The sky had merged with the sea.

As they rested in the sand with their backs to the tide, the astronomer lifted a piece of the lapilli stone just above the line of the bordering cliffs, cradling a low-hanging star in the groove of the stone’s imperfect shape. She did not know the constellations, then. She did not know that the star she cradled was among those clusters which showed the way north, and whose names appeared in all the annals of the old explorers. She did not know that the stars of her island were also the stars of the pole, and that they led to the everlasting night at the cattycorner of the world.

Her chosen star winked in the darkness until, from around the edges of the stone, the blackness of space began to pale. A spot of brilliance gathered behind the grass on the cliff, growing into a haze which swallowed the star and began almost to solidify. The astronomer recognized the effect as she had recognized the glare of lighthouses through mist and rain. A beacon. 

Her brother shook her shoulder, told her to stand and wave her arms. And when the astronomer brushed off her knees and looked again toward the bluffs, it was the beam of her parents’ lanterns which emerged fully formed at the ridge. It came with a hum like music—one long, high-pitched note, one low—until the sound of her name grew rich on the wind. She squinted into the glow of the mantles cresting on her cheeks, her nose, and even, as she cried back, in the palate of her mouth. A taste like honeysuckle, soft and fleeting.

From behind her, she thought, the gasp of a porpoise broke the surface of the sea before silencing once more, and diving away. 

These are the rules, her parents said afterward: If you get lost again, stay put. Don’t move. Wait for us to find you.

Many years later, the astronomer stood again on the beach of the lapilli sand, in the stench of brine and sea-rotted scales. In the shadow of the cliffs. No one at home. Only the survivors, their bodies still clean, unblemished by illness, wandered the coast. They stood in the surf as if searching for a single particle of scattered ash, one lonesome fleck of memory, to pass over their bare feet, to cling to their skin. Wait for us to find you.

She couldn’t bring herself to stay. By then, the astronomer had learned that lapilli stones don’t always come from the earth. Some of them, indistinguishable by sight, arrive from the opposite direction. From the plummet of meteors crashing from space. 

In the sky above where she crouches in her coat, and astride the long horizon between the low icy crags in the distance, thousands of stars flicker in the guise of their former selves. Their effervescence arrives too young, hiding tendrilous nebulas or expired white cores behind the slow tide of light-years. They seem to the astronomer, on her loneliest days, like airborne embers from a blanketed fire. Or snow on the lashes of unblinking eyes. They are so orderly. They do not move as planets move. They look as if they might last forever. But the astronomer, watching the numbers of another year’s countdown, knows the ulterior truth of physics: that everything beyond the earth rushes imperceptibly away from it, and the earth from everything else, all the universe speeding away toward its unknown boundaries. Even the moons and the blue ringed planet which hang always in view, tethered by gravity, slacken their ties with each year’s revolution, party guests escaping a conversation which has run its course and now drifts lazily onward, aimless.

One day in the far future, when the light of all the stars and the orbs of all the planets retreat too far, a person could stand on the pole of this planet, look up, and see nothing. Nothing at all. As if the earth were the only object in existence. 

The green radar screen beside the countdown displays the fine lines of a digital globe divided into quadrants, a small blinking pulse marking the zone in the top right corner, the place where the astronomer kneels in the snow. And though the cosmos has no direction, and she may just as easily consider herself south or east or west, at night—or rather, during the sleeping hours of the pole’s constant darkness—in her bed, she has felt the pull of the cardinal north from her toes to the tip of her head, which on her pillow lies in the direction of the polar constellations. In those instances she feels mineral, electric. As if she has been born of iron poured from the core at the center of the world, and retains its elements in her bones. Even now, the observatory station some long strides behind her glows with the lights she keeps always burning.

The countdown clock in the little machine is almost out of time. About thirty minutes remain until all units read zero.

The astronomer contracts the antenna, gathers her notebooks and the machine into her arms, and turns back to her home where the eye of a telescope at the cusp of the still, domed rooftop reflects all but one of the eastern stars.

Inside, the downstairs studio weeps with electricity. It comes from more than two dozen lamps of two dozen shapes on the countertops, the desks, the upside-down boxes, and from tall torchieres blooming in poppy splays, all golden and ruby and budding-white. It comes from mismatched sconces—frosted glass and cast-iron lanterns—screwed into the walls between tall, narrow windows like those in stone cathedrals or castle ramparts. It comes from dozens of cords plugged into the walls, and from paper-shuttered bulbs and a lone chandelier hanging low on long wires from the ceiling. The astronomer’s supervisors, when they arrive with the quarterly shipment of supplies, always suggest that she raise these higher, but she ignores their wishes. She likes the feeling of revolution when she moves around the crowded stations, from the computers to the mapping tables to the drafting desks, and to the charts which curl up the walls in waves. She has traced upon these, some nights, the passages of old satellites known only by their earthly records, for they receive no new signals, and send none out in return.

The astronomer removes her boots by the salt-crusted floor mat, hangs her coat and gloves and hat on a peg. A sprinkling of snow descends from their fabric at the slightest of her movement, at her breath when she sets the machine down on the floor. She does not want the seconds ticking down beside her while the spin of her planet prepares itself. She likes to be surprised by the potential moment, the larger moment, the prolonged instant at the upstairs window when the countdown to sunrise must almost be ending, could end at any second. 

Dressed in her socks and sweater, the astronomer looks at nothing in particular. It is her hand, instead, which moves to a trio of switches on the wall beside her. She presses all three at once, slowly, and the hanging bulbs, the sconces, and the low chandelier fizzle out without a sound. The remaining lamps glow like minuscule galaxies about the room, culling dust motes from scents of cedar and pine.

In their spectrum, the veins beneath the astronomer’s skin flow green like jungle rivers viewed from a rocket’s height, and she has been known to sit, wrists up, under a curtain of lamplight, and recall in them the colors of her mother’s old garden at the line of zero latitude. 

But for now, she moves on. Her notebooks she places into a tray on the closest table, beneath a lamp textured in the golden scales of the many-finned fish which swam in the waters of her old home. Atop an old music player, a stack of records languish like sand-dollars pulled from a pool, catching moonbeams in their ridges. A generator in a neglected corner struggles to maintain a trill, growing quieter and quieter, and then only whispering once the astronomer pulls the cord under the shade of the lamp. When the scales turn to silver, then slate. 

She wishes sometimes that a doormouse could survive the long winter, that it might scurry out in the darkness and tap on the floorboards when she finishes her day’s work. Instead, the only rattling comes from a dram of tincture and a bottle of anti-virus pills stamped with a government seal which sit beneath a lamp in the shape of a pond-side willow, with light in each leaf. She barely looks at the thick hardcover book peeking out from the darkened outskirts—Chemical Warfare, Vol. 2—nor at the mess beside it, at the vials of Vitamin C and D spilling across a petri dish. The astronomer pushes a tab beneath a knee-bent root, and the filaments expire. 

She passes, next, a half-opened shoebox overflowing with old envelopes, each labeled “No-Entry Zones: N Hemisphere,” under the light of a lamp as crystalline as an icicle. The message repeats itself on a large map leaning against the wall behind it, where thick, inky “X”s cross out huge swaths of land and sea, leaving only small patches unmarked. A thinly drawn circle encompasses a small patch of tundra where the observatory stands. A twist of a knob, and the icicle melts into shadow.

The astronomer powers down the sear of the computer screens, the petal glow of the torchieres. With each extinguishing her skin grows paler, more alien. She presses her shoulders back when she feels herself growing heavier, when her neck begins to bow. But still she moves delicately through the studio. She knows her pupils are expanding in the dark. They will gather what remains. 

Every lamp she touches—the broad one in the flat curve of an umbrella, the soft ones puffed like mushrooms, the slender necks of silver and gold—fades into its drained surroundings. The moonlight from the windows cuts into the work tables, leans against the handmade map of the solar system as broad as the southern wall. The astronomer weaves past it to the back of the room, but the silver ink of circumnavigations flashes once against her face, as does the cobalt blue of the drawing of the ringed planet, of the sketches of the moons, of the gas giants too soft for landing. Her supervisors have yet to notice the inaccuracies of the map, failing to comment on the few extra constellations, the handful of pulsing quasars, and even the spare green planet the astronomer has painted into the orbits of the galaxy. Little things all her own. A different world. 

One last layer of light comes from a wooden staircase ascending the back wall. These steps lead up to the second-story apartment, to the base of the observation dome where the great telescope stares into the sky. Somewhere, thinks the astronomer, someone must be looking back at it. Unknowingly, and unknown, much too far away. 

She grips the railing as she climbs, rising along the wall where several framed photographs and government documents hang in uneven rows, lit by a trail of holiday lights like mourning lanterns floating upstream. In one photo, her mother and father wear outdated clothing and bright white smiles in front of their small wooden house, surrounded by spindle trees and dew drop flowers. The family home. In another, the astronomer and her brother hover behind a birthday cake, grinning wide enough to force their eyes shut. In a third, a fourth, and a fifth, the foam of a breaking sea on sand suspends its shells with an amber clutch, warm and opalescent. She catches her reflection in the glass covering a diploma in astrophysics, which hangs beside a moisture-cracked sheet of paper—“Relocation Request Approved”—nailed to the wall with its torn envelope, with an address she no longer knows by heart.

The top step creaks as the weight of the astronomer leaves it, and the light of the trail extinguishes, glass by glass by glass. 

Wait.

The upstairs apartment is a low field of fireflies amid a hard beam of metal. These are the dim phasing lights of the machinery along the floor, this the solemn glint of the telescope as it reaches, faceless, into the dome. A small chair on wheels sits empty by the mount, attended by scatterings of papers and pencils like fallen roof tiles, while varnished sheets of space-black astrophotos almost disappear behind their pins on the wall. The room lies in darkness, and the gabled window which looks out onto the tundra gleams like an eclipse in reverse, reflecting the snow. 

The hour nears. 

The astronomer passes her narrow brass bed to reach the view, passes the overturned crates beside her lopsided pillows where a single lamp with a simple shade sits black and dormant. Her chest thrums. Her fingertips throb with pinpricks. She crawls upon the window seat and looks out, silent.

This is the long instant. The moment of a year. 

It peeks. 

It peaks.

Outside, the tundra is a ballroom floor. White marble and wax. Even the blue ringed planet pales with its moons behind a thin gauzy curtain which creeps from the horizon like haze from a hearth at the core of the earth. The bulk of the crags harden into coaly imprints, their shadows streaked and extending back and back in slow crescendo while the ocean of snow blooms violet in the swath, the softest of its divots reassembling their shapes. Week-old footprints, here. Tracks from the sled, there.

In true spring, as a child, the astronomer had plucked flowers just this tone and pressed them in the leaves of a long-lost diary. The fields of home had sprung in height and multitudes of texture. She had felt the scratch of the palms, the brush of an airborne seed on the wind, large as a moth in the short, warm nights. How many footprints there would have been had the snow touched down on the island. There would be her father’s, always larger, always one step ahead. Her mother’s, creeping by the sides of ponds for snails with bodies soft as custard. Her brother’s, disappearing at the base of a tree, as if he had spirited inside, his posture in its boughs nymphish with sweat and happiness. The sky to her then was the blue fire of distant stars, and the greatest one of them always above, its light only minutes old, always new. A million light-years an open book before her eyes.

But now, the turn of a page. Here is the first clear crest of the spectrum above the curve of the earth. Feathery down on the back of an infant swan. And here, blooming into the palette of clouds, a match of the sky strikes the slate of the horizon line and flares, flares red like a holiday sparkler once given to the astronomer by her brother so carefully, so beautifully dangerous on a warm summer night. The snow, too, bleaches after so long in the blue of the moons and the many-ringed planet, pure white as a star on the brink of its death. But the astronomer is here, and the sun is breaching, and she still has time, for the world is turning, and her blood in her veins is the heat of momentum, is traveling breakneck through space to catch up to this moment at the top of the earth.

Four minutes. The arching of the light, the fire red on the cold, hard snow. Lips parting for a taste of honeysuckle.

A last goodbye. 

A slow descent. 

The waning of spectrums back into violet, into the ghost of a damselfly’s discarded skin still clinging to its reed.  

The tilted planet had seen many things lost. The astronomer thinks often about one type of loss in particular, one that would have happened in the days before machines, before the great eye of telescopes and the advent of electric light and the knowledge of atoms.  She can imagine a child who must have existed hundreds of years ago, maybe on a small country hill many miles from a city, who has just heard her favorite song for the first and last time in her life. Not because she is dying, or because she will go deaf, but because she has come to see a traveling orchestra which will not pass her way again, not for a very long time, when the repertoire has changed, and she has decided just now that this ending of a song—maybe a long, high-pitched note, one low—is the most wonderful, most perfect experience in the world. She is blessed for only a handful of minutes. Only that. They are all the minutes she will know of this music. Of all the minutes in her life. There is no way to capture it, not even if she assembled every musician she knows, for she does not know how to teach them the tune. She will spend a lifetime in hums, trying to recall the moment of such brief time. But the song is forever elsewhere. Four minutes of mourning.

The astronomer presses her palms to her eyes as the stars reappear in the light of the moons. The ringed planet endures. The tundra softens. Her hands come away damp and sparkling. 

After a few breaths more of immobility, the astronomer turns from her gable, setting her feet on the hardwood floor. The eye of the telescope peers up and away past the ceiling of the room, the panels of the dome extending downward from its center like gravity’s pull on a dripping firework. It siphons images of faraway galaxies, witnesses a million suns. It is fixed and transfixed. The astronomer approaches it, brushes it gently with her fingertips as one does to the shoulder of a suffering friend who would rather be alone. 

She feels twenty pounds heavier, battered as an asteroid, but she moves. She moves toward the bed by the stairs. On the nightstand, the plain white slope of the single lamp covets the blue of the tundra outside, and the astronomer lifts her arm as through the crush of ocean tides, and finds the beaded cord beneath its shade. It is almost too heavy, an anchor on the sea floor, but she pulls. Clicks. And the veins of her hand are green in the golden sheen. And the white sheets are cumulous, and the brass is burnt like obsidian, and the wood on the tabletop is sienna and umber, the colors of her hair. The waves of each lock flow like dune sand, like jungle rivers, when she lays her head down on the pillow. Facing the east gable window. The moons and the blue ringed planet. Her snow-laden tracks. The night-long glow of the lamp. 

The astronomer closes her eyes as the yearly countdown starts again in the downstairs corner by the salt-crusted boots. The old pull from the center of the earth reaches for her again, and she holds it against the blankets, against the cold. It brings a snowfall down on the pole with the return of darkness, and gathers the still-cycling satellites to their daily orbit. It suspends every star in unreachable hoverings. Today, it does. 

Through the telescope’s eye, a flash in the atmosphere registers on the quiet machines, is recorded by the computers without disturbing the astronomer’s hand. Their numbers describe a meteor, burning and gone. An elegy in signs.

Low is the drone of the generator. Colorless, the night. Slow and steady is the departure of the universe from its moorings, the combing of stardust into the archives of the dead. 

The astronomer has underlined as much in the footnotes of her books: a star can burn for ten billion years. But nothing, in the end, defeats its own life. The galaxies will stretch away. The world will one day be alone. And yet. There, in the astronomer’s pocket. She reaches for it as sleep descends. A fragment of collision. Glacial coolness. A piece of her island’s old lapilli stone. She gives heat to its surface from the palm of her hand, fire present for fire past. She mimics the clutch of the mesosphere through which this chip of the universe had managed to slip. A little salvage of a wreck. 

Somewhere overhead, the telescope’s meteor turns to soot. But should one particle of its ending land on the tundra at the top of the world, it would see on the black horizon a semblance of its former self. In the distance, the lamp of a gable window persists in the night, and the fireflies of machinery spatter like comet trails, and that returner of the universe would fade in comfort, in brilliance, in wonder at these infinitesimal suns. These small northern lights.

Christina Leo is a journalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After earning her MFA from the University of Notre Dame as a Sparks fellow, she returned south to the world of magazine publishing, where she pines for snow but rejoices in not having to shovel a driveway. Her previous fiction has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and appears in Salamander as the winner of its 2019 Fiction Prize.