Fiction | Short Story

The Astronomers

One day, Brian would dissolve into the atmosphere and not come back. One day, this room, our home, our love, would no longer be able to contain him.

Brian shattered into a field of light while he was supposed to be teaching Matilda how to ride her bike. The training wheels had just come off, and she was wobbling unsteadily down the alley behind our home. I could see it all clearly through the kitchen window: Brian’s good hand on the small of Matilda’s back, guiding her forward. The glow bleeding through his fingertips, then exploding out, taking his body with it.

Matilda pedaled forward, oblivious. Her father reduced to a haze of gold behind her, countless individual points of light drifting as a cloud. It illuminated her from behind, cast her shadow forward in the alley so that her front tire continuously ran over its black echo. I cut off the faucet where I was readying a pot for boil and made for the back door.

Brian was reassembling when I stepped into the alley. The pinpricks of light were coalescing into the shape of a body, indistinct like the chalk outline of a crime. For now, this was how the condition worked. Every time Brian fell apart, some inner gravity would (mostly) put him back together. Ahead, Matilda had caught a rhythm, zigzagging to stay upright.

“I think I’m doing it!” She called over her shoulder. She looked back and saw only me and the light, suddenly recognizing the vast distance she had covered on her own. Her balance, already delicate, wavered. Her triumph mitigated by the new understanding that no one would catch her if she fell.

Before I could shout a word of encouragement, Matilda was swerving wildly, trying to stop herself. The metal frame of her bike lurched sideways. Matilda stuck a hand out awkwardly to brace for the crash. A sharp snap resonated even louder than the sound of metal on gravel. Then, a wail of blinding pain.

I raced toward her, stomach lurching. Behind me, Brian was almost entirely back together, cells stitching into skin. He would need a minute to recover, to get dressed and see if he came back whole. He knew the drill, but it was still always a trauma. I would have liked to be there for him.

But Matilda was crying, rolling in the asphalt grit, holding her left arm. I reached her side and crouched, asked her where it hurt. She couldn’t make the words. Then I saw the white of bone jabbing through the skin of her forearm, and I didn’t need them.

I dimly heard the sound of Brian getting dressed. I should have had a stronger stomach, given all that we had already faced. But seeing the break in our daughter, her body snapped and exposed, sent numbness surging down my face. The world blurred.

I did not have time for a sickness of my own. I did not have the luxury.

I squinted and controlled my breathing, swallowed bile, and opened my eyes. I called back to Brian to get me a towel. While I waited, I kept talking to Matilda, telling her that it would all be okay. That, no matter how bad the break, we could put her back together.

Brian returned with the towel. He placed his good hand on my shoulder, corporeal and solid. Reassurance, if only temporary. I began to tend to the wound.

*

It used to be that my husband would only disintegrate rarely and in quick flashes. I never even saw it happen until after three years of dating. We were tangled on his futon at the time, Brian’s body pressed down from above, the rusted skeleton of the futon up from below. The frame rattled, almost as if it might give way. I clawed tight at Brian’s back and took comfort in the fact that, if our support collapsed, at least we’d fall together.

Then, a smell like melting plastic. Blinding light. The weight that had pinned me down—gone. Breath surged into my lungs, my heart leapt in a patter of panic, and just like that, the light condensed and Brian was back on top of me.

Even though it was all over in a matter of seconds, I could not get over the shock.

“There’s this thing with my family,” Brian explained, after giving up on his efforts to coax me back into position. “Where sometimes we burst apart.”

In the coming months, I read all the literature. I came to an understanding of what I was about to marry. I knew that it would only get worse, that it was just a matter of time. As the dissolutions became more frequent, as the glow of his body spread farther, stayed suspended a beat longer, I understood that these were bad signs. I would watch Brian come back together slow, like fireflies clustering into a human body, and try to summon my solemnity. I told myself this was the beginning of an end. I told myself that I was witnessing a tragedy.

But, at heart, every time my husband fell apart, I could not help but see it as dazzling.

*

Route 434 was a parade of brake lights. Brian stayed with Matilda in the back, tried to keep her distracted from her pain.

“You can tell the kids at school that you fell off a dragon,” he said, leaning against her booster seat. “Or a magic carpet. They’ll all be very impressed.”

“Nuh-uh,” she snuffled. “No one’ll believe me.”

“Okay, let’s pick something realistic, then. How about you were saving Mom and me from bad guys? You punched one of them so hard it broke your arm, and that scared the rest of them away.”

“Hey guys, let’s try not to go too violent with our cover story,” I called back.

“Can that really happen?” Matilda said, ignoring me.

“Oh, absolutely,” Brian said. “It happens all the time. That’s why we only punch people when they really deserve it, ’cause we don’t want to break our arms.”

I smiled in spite of myself, appreciating the attempt at a compromise. A green light, and we lurched forward, Matilda whimpering in pain from a shift in the suspension.

“And if anyone asks, you say ‘you should see the other guy,’” Brian continued. I watched them through the rearview mirror, Brian speaking softer now, gesturing through a mock conversation. For the first time, I noticed that the pinky finger of his right hand was gone.

It starts with the extremities and works its way down, the decay. This was normal, the doctors had assured us when Brian’s left hand had come back missing a thumb back in January. There was no cause for alarm, beyond the usual. We still had plenty of time.

I kept that in mind, as a comfort, while Brian’s left hand frayed into a stump this spring, while I helped pin the sleeves of his shirts closed around the wrist. I did my best not to look at the calendar. I have done my best to appreciate what we still have, without regard for what we will lose next.

I told myself that I was witnessing a tragedy. But, at heart, every time my husband fell apart, I could not help but see it as dazzling.

The Urgent Care Center loomed on the right, past a half-vacant strip mall. I lurched us over a rain gutter to pull into the parking lot, wincing on Matilda’s behalf with the jostle.

“You can just drop us off,” Brian said as we approached the entrance. “I can carry her in.”

I met his eyes in the rearview mirror and saw them staring grey and serious. He had to know this wasn’t an option. Not when his flashes were so unpredictable, when he could drop her in an instant.

Brian shifted his right hand behind the car seat, hiding the missing finger, and I recognized that he needed this. An opportunity to pretend that nothing had changed, that he was in control. A chance to prove that he could still contribute in a moment of crisis. I weighed the risks.

“Sure.” I said. “Just be quick.”

I idled while Brian fumbled with the latch of Matilda’s car seat. He scooped her out, careful not to dislodge the gauze I’d taped over her arm. With our daughter cradled against his chest, Brian kicked the door shut.

Brian walked toward the lobby with his chin tucked against Matilda’s head. Automatic doors yawned open in a rush of air conditioning. Together, they stepped from the concrete sidewalk to the gleaming tile. The doors closed, sealed them off behind a wall of tinted glass.

It wasn’t until I heard the force of my exhale that I realized I had been holding my breath.

*

On some level, I always knew what I was signing up for. Still, the reality did not really register until after the funeral for Brian’s father.

At the service, the casket gaped empty. LED lights had been threaded through the satin lining and burned dim through the fabric. They haloed the pillow where the head would rest, gauzed it white with glow. We sat in straight-backed wooden pews and listened to the priest explain how this was not a loss, “just a change from the body we can understand to one that we can’t.”

The wake was at a Polish restaurant in the South Hills. Brian wordlessly pushed pierogies around on his plate before getting up to use the bathroom. I was checking to see if I had a mint to counteract the onions, when I felt a hand on my shoulder—soft and light, like a sparrow landing on a wire. I turned and found Brian’s mother standing behind me.

“We have a hard bargain,” she said, watching her son disappear down a narrow hallway. “You and I.”

“I’m sorry.” I did not know what else to say.

“I was lucky.” Brian’s mother said the words like she was convincing a skeptical stranger. “We had many good years before the bad. I saw what happened to his brothers. I know it does not always work that way.”

“Wait, what do you mean?”

Brian had never mentioned his uncles. In truth, unless pressed, he never talked about his family at all.

“But still, you’re never quite prepared, are you?” Brian’s mother sighed, not hearing my question. “No matter how much time you get, no matter how much warning. Those final years. You cannot imagine how hard it will be until it happens.”

She gripped my shoulder tighter, fingernails digging half-moons into my skin.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, at a loss. “This all must be awful for you.”

Brian reappeared from the hallway, dabbing at his face with the sleeve of his jacket.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Brian’s mother leaned forward, her funeral veil whispering black against my cheek. “You don’t understand. The end, that’s the easy part. It’s the rest—watching it happen. That’s what will tear you apart.”

She stepped back before I could respond, opening her arms to greet her son.

*

Matilda rated her pain at a seven on a scale of one to ten. She pointed to the frowning orange face, stopping short of the crying red one. I wondered how she could know, at seven years old with her bones snapped jagged, that this would not be the outer limit of her hurt.

The attendant supplied us with a child-sized chair and wheeled Matilda back for an X-ray. Brian and I followed, hand in hand. I touched the gap where his pinky used to be, felt the unnatural smoothness of the skin that now covered the knuckle. We did not talk about it.

“What we’re really looking for is to see the severity of the break.” The attendant told us over the rattle of the wheelchair. “We need a clear scope of the damage before we prep for surgery.”

“Surgery?” Brian squeezed my hand.

“Nothing too invasive.” The attendant lowered his voice to avoid Matilda’s hearing. “We’ll just be sterilizing the wound and fixing the bone into place so it can heal. Screws, rods, plates, depending on what we’re dealing with. Regardless, we’ll want to put her under before we operate.”

“You’re sure that’s all necessary?” I asked.

“I know it sounds like a lot, but as soon as the bone breaks skin, there’s a whole host of issues that we have to account for. It’s all routine procedures, though. She’ll be in good hands.”

I tried to do the math as Matilda was situated for her X-ray, but there were too many variables. We had bought the best insurance we could afford between Brian’s disability checks and my freelance editing work, but even the best was patchwork. This hospital was covered, but I did not know how the rest worked. I did not know what an operation would cost. I did not know if we needed in-network surgeons. I did not know the co-pay for an X-ray.

“The end, that’s the easy part. It’s the rest—watching it happen. That’s what will tear you apart.”

Brian and I watched the technician bombard our daughter with invisible light to make her insides glow. Of course we would pay anything. Of course cost was not a question. We would find a way—we always had.

It was not so much a question of what we could afford as it was a question of what we would have left. One day our reservoir would run dry. What we would do then, when we scraped the true unyielding bottom of everything—that still loomed uncertain. I did not have a long-term plan. I did not have a solution except to scrape from one day to the next, stringing together enough in sequence until it hopefully became a life.

“She’s gonna be fine.” Brian said, not taking his eyes off our daughter. “She’s gonna come out of all this okay, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, with enough conviction to answer the big and small of his question. I have had enough training in baseless faith where it has long since become a reflex. “We’re all gonna be just fine.”

*

The clock on Brian’s life did not start in earnest until after Matilda was born. I have since learned that it happens differently for everyone, the disintegration. The condition can lie dormant for decades, or it can roar into debilitating force all at once. Some can live with it to the age of eighty without enduring more than the rare inconvenience. Others can unravel in a burst before they escape their teens.

Through my pregnancy, the flashes were rare enough to still be a footnote. Instead, my fears knotted around the life growing inside of me. Mine and not mine, a new, breakable part of me with a will of its own. I could feel every step of our daughter’s fragile becoming. From the beginning, I wanted her to have the world. From the beginning, I was terrified of what the world would do to her.

Brian was a pillar of care through the whole process. He held my hair back through my morning sickness. He maintained an arsenal of hot compresses and ice packs. He made midnight candy runs and told me over and over again about how our child would conquer the universe. How she would climb mountains without a guide, wrestle alligators with one hand tied behind her back. How she would see the world and grow old and visit us in our cozy Florida retirement home with an entourage of sticky-handed grandchildren.

When Matilda finally came screaming into this world, she seemed every bit as indestructible as Brian had foretold. Her lungs were magnificent engines. The months to come were sleepless, delirious, and somehow, also bliss.

For six months, it all held together. Our child was unpredictable and demanding and an ever-evolving revelation. We fumbled our way forward as a family, exhausted and in a constant state of marvel. Then on a heavy summer night, Matilda’s cries crackled through the baby monitor. Brian rolled off the mattress in a groan of sagging springs. I yawned, blinked the sleep from my eyes. Brian returned with Matilda gurgling in his arms.

“She’s not wet.” He whispered, squatting on the edge of our bed. “I think she was just lonely—”

And that’s when his skin flashed immaterial. Matilda bounced, laughing, onto our mattress as her father dissolved and reassembled in a blinding game of peek-a-boo. Brian came back sweating, breathing heavy. I had to dive to keep Matilda from rolling over the edge of the bed.

At the time, we did not realize this was the start of something new. We assumed it was the usual one-off, the rare firework that I had long since learned to accommodate. But then it happened again during breakfast the next morning, and while he was changing her diaper later that week. We visited the doctor together. I stood in the room with Brian as he was told the news, my hand crinkling the paper on the examination table. We were given the timeline. We were told what to expect. Brian would no longer be allowed to drive a car. He would not be able to hold his daughter unsupervised.

I drove us home with the radio off, telling Brian stories about how we would be okay.

*

After we watched our daughter drift to sleep, the mask affixed to her face like an alien parasite, Brian and I slumped onto a bench outside the operating theater. The break was as clean as they could have hoped. The plastic of the X-ray printout wobbled audibly as the doctor pointed at the fracture, tried to explain why the angle of the broken bone was not as bad as it could have been.

“Wish they could have saved some of that gas for me,” Brian said, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. “It’s been a day.”

“Maybe they can give us whatever Matilda doesn’t use. Like a doggie bag.”

We stared ahead at a white wall, so bright and clean we could almost see our reflections. Quiet for a moment.

“Wanna talk about it?” I broke the silence, turning to face Brian directly. Bruises of fatigue around his eyes, sandpaper stubble on his cheeks. It occurred to me that he might not have been joking about the gas.

“About what?”

“You know.” I extended a pinky.

“Oh, that.” Brian exhaled like he was scraping out his lungs. “Yeah. Not thrilled with that development, to be honest.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No.”

A beat.

“I don’t know if you saw, before, ya know. But Matilda was doing it. Before the crash. She was really riding on her own. The practice paid off.”

Brian shifted up a little in his seat.

“It’s funny. I’m usually out of it when,” he opened and closed his hand in a mimed explosion. “Supernova. But I swear, this time I can remember seeing everything. Like, I don’t know if I’m making it up, if it’s just a trick of the brain. But I feel like I could see her going. On her own.”

The doors at the end of the hall swung open. A man in pale green surgeon’s scrubs walked past, tugging down at the elastic of his gloves.

“Pretty amazing.” I rested my head against his shoulder. “This kid of ours.”

“Yeah.” Brian wrapped an arm around me, leaned back. “You might be onto something there. Might be worth watching, to see how she turns out.”

*

For years, we wrestled with what to tell her. Brian was adamant that Matilda know as little as possible. He saw it as a burden too great to put on her shoulders, the knowledge that her father was gradually falling apart. Me, I thought the truth, told gently, was the only way out. We argued, but in the end, Brian got the final say. It was his body, his story to tell.

I obliged as best I could. When I caught signs of a coming attack—a distant smell of burning ozone, a curious light behind his eyes—I would take her out of the room. I shielded her from having to face the reality unfiltered. I would redirect her attention elsewhere, let her play with my cellphone as a distraction. If she noticed the glow behind my back, if she asked where her dad was, I would stall until Brian inevitably came back.

This worked for about four years. Our precautions paid off, and Brian was careful to make sure I was in the room during their every interaction. He was still coming back intact at this time, and Matilda never asked a question I could not answer.

Then, a lapse. I had just taken Matilda in for a checkup. The air conditioner was on the fritz, I was behind on three different deadlines, and a semi-permanent tension headache had taken up residence at the bridge of my forehead. Matilda had been given a clean bill of health with minimal trauma. Brian was watching TV in the living room when we clattered through the front door. I set Matilda down and told her to show her father her band-aid. She ran across the kitchen tile, padded onto the living room carpet. Brian opened his arms to catch her.

And then he burst apart.

The specks of light scattered through the dim living room. A million tiny suns suspended in the air, radiating their own muted heat. Matilda watched the bits of her father drift all around her, her mouth agape.

For so long, I had dreaded Matilda facing this truth unfiltered, but in the moment, I felt a surreal calm. I walked into the living room just as Brian’s light began to re-converge, each individual point of life slowly drifting back into place.

“Mom?” Matilda grabbed at one of the lights, but it slipped through her stubby fist. “What’s wrong with Dad?”

Brian was here and not here. His body was outlined crisp, but it still blurred in the center. I crouched at Matilda’s side. I pointed at her father, at not her father.

“You see.” One day, Brian would dissolve into the atmosphere and not come back. One day, this room, our home, our love, would no longer be able to contain him. Matilda’s cheek was soft against my own. Her eyes followed the trail of my finger as her father’s body glowed—imperfect, but for now, still here. “You see, we’re made of stars.”

*

Matilda was still unsteady on her feet after the anesthesia wore off. The hospital offered to let us use a wheelchair to bring her back out to the car, but I chose to carry her. The rigid plaster of her cast scraped against my back as she slumped over my shoulder.

Brian followed us out into the parking lot with the bag of antibiotics in hand. The day had whittled away while we were inside the hospital. Sodium street lights flickered yellow. With my daughter pressed close, I grasped through the shrapnel of coins and receipts at the bottom of my purse in search of my keys.

A summer moon scythed against the sky. I could not tell if it was waxing or waning. An airplane blinked incremental progress against the black. The stars were not yet out. Or, I should say, we could not yet see them.

I found the keys and chirped our sedan unlocked. Brian stepped ahead and opened the rear door, helped me ease Matilda into her booster seat. She yawned as the belt fastened shut. A dim smell of burning ozone. Unnatural glints sparking in the centers of my husband’s eyes.

With Matilda secure, with the night young and murky, I prepared for the flash. I readied myself to squint through the blinding, to map the constellations of his dissolution. Once again, I would watch our family come undone. Once again, I would wait for the moment of grace that, however briefly, would pull us back together.