16 | Psychopomp Magazine
her hands. It’s impossible to see the infinity of the night sky and not to see its inevitable waltz toward submergence, that is, the end of it. Why would it be surprising that we grope for anything? This is why we cling heartily, why we (and we cringe at the word) hope for their existence. Something needs to be out there, doing anything, as long as it isn’t anything human. That empty infinity has to mean something outside of its end.
A boy, Daniel, the youngest among us, wishes more heartily than anyone that the outside, the alien, would prove itself at last. A few scientists in the colony who crunched numbers for NASA, before they were fired, have figured that the planets and the galaxies and all of infinity is as perfectly lined-up tonight as it will ever be: tonight we have the clearest shot at the general direction from which humans believe most alien communication comes, in this particular corner of that particular galaxy. Look, Daniel, see the starry strip? That’s the Milky Way in cross-section, and see that really bright star near Mercury? To the left of that, right there, yes. When his mother speaks like that, no one can help but listen. She’s close enough to all of us that we recognize her voice, yes, but this is more than that: the way she tells her boy that everything will be fine, that what he wants will happen for him . . . dedication like hers is more addicting than any drug.
He looks hard at that section of the milky slash across the sky and waits to see the telltale pop of color. The others expect a conversation—some light, maybe sound—but the boy hopes that somehow they’ll appear here, walk toward the fire in slow motion, extend a hand and take a cup of milk with coffee. He is not so afraid of that word, hope. He hopes his parents find better jobs so that their bodies don’t hurt as much at night. He hopes that the aliens, and he knows at twelve how childish this sounds, are green. At night in the corner of their RV, the boy lines up five little green men he’s collected from a toy machine at the grocer’s, the tallest in the middle and the two twins, fat ones, at each end. He imagines them walking toward him