Young Writers Society

I was seven years old when the stars went out.

Momma had yanked the blankets from my bed, my baby sister May Ann perched on her hip. “Put on your good church shoes, baby” she told me, her voice shaking but strong as I could ever remember, “Jesus is comin’ again.”

I’d hardly got the silky pink ribbons tied over my bare feet when Momma had me by the wrist and was dragging me behind her out onto the street in front of our looming apartment building. Every neighbor we had in that decrepit old place had already gathered around Momma’s old Chevy and were staring up at the sky.

They murmured to one another, anxiety buzzing around them like static. As Momma pulled us toward them I followed their worried gazes upward. Above us, hundreds of stars blinked out of the night sky. Not all at once; they flickered like the dying light in the hall outside our apartment before disappearing in one final flash of light. Like a hundred fireflies that couldn’t quite keep their lights on.

“The world’sa ending,” old lady Hanley stated, as if it were simply another sale at the grocery. “It’sa ending and we’re all goin’ with it.”

Momma’s grip tightened on my wrist, her nails digging into my skin. May Ann started to cry. I ground a clod of dirt with the toe of my white little shoe as my nightgown fluttered against my knees. I didn’t understand then, standing beside my mother looking up at a sky that wasn’t even familiar to begin with, that this would be one of the last times I’d see the night look whole.

I dragged a deep breath into my lungs, an invisible weight bearing down on my shoulders. I was seven years old and the world I’d been born to would never be the same again.

Of course, it turned out the world wasn’t ending, and Jesus was as far away as he every was, but the stars didn’t stop disappearing. And even with panic spreading across the country, the world, in the weeks that followed I couldn’t have really fathomed what it meant.

In fact, no one seemed to know what it meant. Researchers jumped on the anomaly almost as soon as the stars started going out, but when weeks passed and the night sky was still filled with light, most people calmed down. Momma stopped reading us the Bible every night and praying for our salvation. The news people started covering car crashes and the economy again. The kids at school moved on to new gossip. But the stars kept going out.

It wasn’t as fast as that night the world first took notice, but anyone could tell each night there were fewer stars lighting the sky than the night before. It was years, it seemed, before the world started caring again.

There were advocates, of course, and protestors and astronomers that never forgot about the stars. New research came into the news every few months claiming a new solution to a different source of the problem that would stop the stars from disappearing. May Ann and I would lay on the old shag rug in the living room and watch the protests on the television. Teenagers in black canvas bags pin-pricked with white would parade in front of the White House demanding to change to problems that only might have actually existed, and if they did they probably had little impact on the activity of bodies millions and millions of miles into space.

At twelve I scoffed at them. At seven May Ann would bury her face in the stained yellow shag and cry. Thanks to some smug little punk in her elementary school, she was convinced there were dragons or monsters or something flying around out there eating the stars.

“Don’t be dumb, May Ann,” I’d tell her. “Nothing’s eating the stars.”

She’d shoot up onto her knees, her little hands balled into fists in her lap and tears in her eyes. “Uh huh!” she’d cry. “Bobby Hayes said so. Monsters’re eatin’ the stars and they’re gonna eat us too!”

I’d push myself up by my hands to meet her height and settle my strongest stare on her. “Bobby Hayes is an idiot and if somethin’ was out there eatin’ anything they’d eat stinking Bobby Hayes first and spit him right back out.”

May Ann would break into a fit of giggles and I’d smile and we’d settle back down into watching the television. I didn’t tell her how pointless it was to worry so much; people could talk and talk but that still wouldn’t change the fact that someday the stars would be gone and we’d be left all alone. As far as I was concerned when the stars were gone, so were we.

No one ever seemed to come to any real conclusion about the stars, even for all the time everyone spent on the news talking about it. Eventually, I think the scientists gave up trying to get any real answers and just started to churn out more and more ludicrous theories and speculations aimed to placate an ever-anxious populous.

To be perfectly honest, after seven years of talk about the stars it started to lose its effect.

At fourteen, it felt like all anyone had talked about for as long as I could remember, and nothing ever came of it. It almost became an obsession, like a new television show or a new kind of shoe. Fear became fad. People started gathering; on rooftops during summer blackouts and in parks after midnight to watch the light flicker in the sky.

I had my first date that summer I was fourteen. Momma made me wash my hair and she spent an hour with the curling iron fitting it in the image of the daughter she thought I should be. I wore a new dress bought especially for church, though we didn’t go so much anymore. When Tony Dawson picked me up he had a picnic basket slung awkwardly under his arm, something his own momma must have fixed for him because I was always quite positive Tony Dawson wasn’t the kind of boy to touch a picnic basket with a ten foot pole if his momma didn’t make him.

Still, it was sweet in that embarrassing sort of way that made me snap the door shut behind me before Momma could try to talk to him or take our picture or something else embarrassing that single mommas with horrendously mannered daughters liked to do.

He took me to a park not a mile from my apartment where the lights had all been disabled in favor of the nightly spectacle in the sky. It was a good one, that night, I’ll admit. Stars fluttered and flashed away with a steadiness that almost seemed uncommon anymore. It was rare to get a good star night lately, though it never stopped people from going out and watching like Tony had brought me to do that night.

“Here,” Tony’d said, his mouth full as he handed me a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in cellophane as he dumped the basket on the ground and dug into his own dinner. He stood a respectable distance away from me, his gaze stuck to the sky as I watched him with curiosity. Why any boy would take me to see the stars, I didn’t know. I was hardly the prettiest girl in our class, and the stars were hardly new or different anymore.

“Why do you think it happens?” he’d asked at last, tearing his gaze away long enough to look at me hard and steady. He had peanut butter stuck to his mouth.

“Why do I think what happens?” I’d said back, though I’m sure I knew perfectly well what he meant.

“The stars,” he’d said. “The scientists say all sort of things. Like pollution and global warming and the ‘natural decay of celestial bodies’,” he made sarcastic air quotes with his sandwich still in one of his hands. “I dunno,” he kept on. “It just doesn’t seem like they actually care about finding out, ya know?”

“What does it matter?” I’d asked. “Why do you care about the damn stars? What’s it matter if they’re goin’ out.” I took another bite of my sandwich, almost angry about his so typical fixation on the sky. It was all anyone ever thought about.

“Well the sun’s a star, isn’t it?” he’d kept on. “If they keep goin’ out the sun will too, and what’ll happen to us then? Don’t you care you’re gonna die?”

I’d shrugged and crossed my arms over my chest. “We’re all gonna die anyway.” I don’t think I knew then that I’d hear Tony’s fourteen year old voice echoing those very words “Don’t you are you’re gonna die?” in my head for years after that night. I didn’t know if the sun would survive the epidemic sweeping the night sky, but by then endless repetition and teenage hormones had stopped me from caring.

Tony’d rolled his eyes and stuffed the last of his sandwich in his face. “You’re nuts.”

“Why’d you take me out here anyway?” I’d shot back. “You coulda insulted me in the yard at school like any regular boy if that’s what you wanted—”

“That’s not what I wanted,” he’d cut me off, looking genuinely upset I’d judged him.

I’d planted my hands on my hips. “Well what’d you want then?”

“I wanted to kiss you while there were still stars here!” he’d shouted at me before grabbing my face in his freshly scrubbed hands and planting his lips against mine. He tasted like peanut butter and wheat bread and I kissed him back.

Read Part 2 here