The Lesser Light of Dying Stars

Jinwoo Chong
| Fiction

 

The massive initiatives undertaken by governments to sequester the novas were being cut their funding. Saul had read an essay by a Dr. Merrick of the Great Basin facility: what was to stop the phenomena from emerging again, in even greater numbers? It seemed a question nobody cared to answer, thankful for the darkness in their neighborhoods and cities, and the stars in their places on the black ribbon of the sky. Saul gripped a flyer in his hand, something he’d found this morning and had been saving to share with David for the past few hours. He thought desperately of lifting his son’s mood, knowing it would only be for a moment and reaching, anyway, for it. David had turned seventeen the month before, with a cake left in front of his bedroom door and a scarce handful of calls that Saul held just under the door on speaker. David had so many friends. Most of them, Saul reasoned, still had their own fear to contend with.
“I found something here,” he began, “Those visors, that would let me see you. They cost a fortune but maybe if… if you’d like—”
“Dad.”
The sun had begun to dip low over the trees, spilling gold flames through the dark branches. Down the hall, Saul heard his wife get up from their bed and run the sink.
“It’s dark.” David’s voice had dropped to a whisper. Saul moved closer, the wedge of light under the door was lengthening as the sky blackened. “All over, in here. I can’t see. I haven’t for—couple days.”
He said no more. Saul pressed his ear to the door, closing his eyes. Carefully, he stepped away. “I’ll be back,” he said, “I’ll be right back, David.”
He turned down the hall, screwing his fists savagely into his eyes, breathing once, twice, then again until the feeling it would never stop had stopped. Quietly, he entered their bedroom. Priya was gazing over the sink at her face in the mirror. He thought for a moment about her silence all these months, expecting anger. It would not come. Their eyes met—the last time they had, he couldn’t remember.
“Let’s eat in the hallway tonight,” he said at last. “I think we’d all like that.”
Priya looked a few seconds longer at him. She dried her hands. She had thinned considerably; they both had. When at last she said it, her voice rung like tolling bells, demanding he listen, and he remarked to himself that it was one of the reasons he had not yet forgotten, why he loved her.
“I don’t remember his face. Either of them.”
Saul tightened his mouth against his teeth. He tried to imagine the way David’s hair fell in ocean’s crests about his head, arms exploding violently from stocky shoulders, stockier than either him or Jack. His rocky hands, he didn’t know when they had become so rough—
“If I could just see him.”
It was neither question nor answer. Saul reached his hands up, rubbed his face dry. This was what it felt like to breathe clearly, to know. He came to her in the bathroom, bringing her hands to his face. They stood there for minutes. Then they turned around, back to the hall lit with a sliver of blinding light under David’s door. Priya sensed, reaching it, the slightest tremor in the floorboards, working its way up her knees and unsound spine to the tips of her fingers. She held her husband’s hand tight in hers, she reached the other out to take hold of the doorknob, warm to the touch. “David?” She turned it, opened the door. They walked inside.

Jinwoo Chong is an MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in CRAFT, Tahoma Literary Review, The Forge, and others. He serves as Fiction Editor at Columbia Journal.

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