fiction

luminosity

by ciera horton mcElroy

You know how the moon is red sometimes? How it’s like a bloody thumbprint in the sky? My father says that’s a sign of End Times. He is very smart, my father. He has a whole basement full of books which I am not allowed to touch, but sometimes I do. He always keeps twenty gallons of spring water—some in the trunk of his car, some in our pantry, some in storage. He says we must be prepared. 

You know how it hasn’t rained in almost eight years? We already beat California’s record at nearly 400 weeks. We live in Georgia. Usually, we get lots of rain, the tree-bending type. Now, we don’t have grass, just stubble. It prickles like my father’s face when he hasn’t shaved, and he hasn’t shaved in a while now. I haven’t seen a lizard in two years. The swing set down the street is coated in sugar-like dust.

Some of the basement books scare me. At night, when my father is on the deck with the telescope, his one nice possession, I tip toe downstairs. I avoid the creaky planks. I pad like a cat through the rows of leather spines. The Kybalion. The Secret Doctrine. The Book of Thoth. There are clues in these books, I know. Some use languages that look fake, like generated keyboard fonts, straight from a video game. The world is dry and cracked and crumbling—these writers predicted it. Los Angeles is on fire. Miami is under water. Mud continues to slide into Appalachian towns. Still, we wait for rain.

My father, he knows things. He used to teach religion at the liberal arts college. Before the drought, when I was small enough to sit on his lap, there would be students in our home. They’d come for potluck dinners and sit in circles for discussion. They sipped tea and fizzy water. This was before my father marched in protests, before the school called him a conspiracist.

Academic idiots, my father says sometimes. They won’t listen to reason.

He publishes a lot of articles on Wordpress now. He doesn’t wash his clothes enough.

I join my father on the deck. It is small and latticed, with a roundabout staircase descending to the garden. Two teak lawn chairs and a glass-top table. That’s all. My father squats before his telescope. Is he looking for Mars? For another dying light? He has lost more weight. I can see that as he hunches, can count each vertebrae. A legal pad is open beside him.

You see that? he tells me. Tonight we have a supernova. We’ve known it was coming for a few years, but just look at it. God, it’s something.

I move to the telescope, squint through the eyepiece.

You know how when you stare at the sun too long and then look away? You know how the light follows you? This is like that. In the viewfinder, I see a smudge of chalky white. It is an exploding star, and I know from my father’s prior lectures that she’s over 30 light-years away. I cannot imagine a distance like that. I cannot imagine destruction like this.

In the basement once, I saw an old King James open on his desk. My father had underlined in the Book of Joel: “the sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.”

A prophet spoke on the TV last week, saying that the supernova and the president were signs of the Messiah’s return. He quoted Revelation.

Now my father massages his neck. His shoulders have become heavy, but he is never tired—or if he is, I’m not aware. He tries to act this way around me. 

You know, he says. A spoonful of supernova weighs more than all of Mount Everest.

I look at him and don’t know if I believe this. I try to imagine a spoon of starlight, all plasma-purple, something so small that carries such weight. 

It’s true, he says, and ruffles my hair. I brighten at his touch.

This is how I know I don’t want the world to end—not yet. Maybe, not ever. There are too many wonderful, beautiful things. Like this: the warmth of nights, the sky ours, the air so achingly still. I look again through the eyepiece and study the supernova’s shade, its bean-shape, because I know that soon, too soon, this beautiful light will collapse and destroy itself.

Ciera Horton McElroy is a graduate of the University of Central Florida MFA program. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, Iron Horse Literary Review, Bridge Eight, and The Crab Orchard Review, among other places. She is represented by Folio Literary Management. Follow her on Twitter: @cierahorton and Instagram: @cieramcelroy, and visit her website: www.cieramcelroy.com.

Ciera donated to the CDC Relief Fund.