His eyes haven’t moved once from the star. He’s laid up like a corpse, dropping empty beer cans carelessly in the pool. They float but don’t make ripples. LED lights warm the bottoms of our feet. The colors change smoothly like cutting through jello. “They’re beaming me up.”
I’m in one of those plastic donuts that crush your knees to your chest so I have to push off the wall to reach the cooler. I grab myself an IPA. “You know where you’re going?” He doesn’t answer, so I assume not. I grab his raft to keep it from drifting off. When I put my head next to his we’re sharing the same sky. “...looks like Centaurus A.”
“Is that a good one?”
“Nah, man. Their sun’s a black hole.” I crack the can open and offer him a sip he doesn’t take. His clothes have mostly dried but there’s a puddle in the center of the raft trying to seep into the back of his t-shirt. “Shit’s gonna destroy itself. You seen any aliens yet?” He doesn’t respond so I splash him to make him move. “Well? C’mon man, what do they want with you?”
For a while he stays silent. His eyes get wide and wet and he makes a sort of choking sound. I take my hand off the raft and squeeze his shoulder. “They wanted to show me...” Snot trickles down his face. I see the constellations reflected back through him. Words are finite, useless things in space. The breadth of his silence tells me everything I needed to know. I climb off my donut and float on my back for a while, the chlorine in my ears muddying his sobs as my brother mourns a world lightyears away.
Olivia Woodcox was born and raised in Indiana with a perpetual fear of alligators (who are not native to Indiana, which Olivia considers to be a win). When she's not writing, she works in a children's library scrambling to keep plastic objects out of kids' mouths.
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