‘Armageddon by Tarantino’ by Graham Robert Scott

Ellie misses the football, not because she’s eight but because she’s staring at the sky.

This is how I know another star’s exploded. 

I rush to block her view of the heavens, and, finger to chin, nudge her gaze back to Earth. 

“You all right?” I ask.

She nods. I watch her chest as her breathing returns to normal. 

Everyone else ignores the star. Mom mise-en-places the dinner line. Cousins toss bean bags and Frisbees. Bruce sits by the radio, even though it’s off, even though there’s no game on, because as far as he’s concerned there should be a game. 

We have Chamberlain Park to ourselves today. No one else is on the grass.

The emptiness everywhere I go feels like a drumbeat, a message. When I showed up for astronomy yesterday, I found row upon row of vacant seats facing an untended lectern. Crowds can be found in obvious places, of course. At the grocery store, the lines go all the way to the milk. 

But here, at the park, it’s just us.

In every hurricane, there’s some idiot family that refuses to evacuate.

Ellie glances at the sky again. 

“Nothing’s hit us,” I say. 

Ellie nods. She’s become so quiet lately that I gauge her mood from the vigour of her head movements. Shallow and hesitant, I think, means not yet. If so, she isn’t wrong. Every few hours a star in our sky explodes, but with all the energy channelled into beams, like water jets from a hose with a thumb over the opening. Been going like that a few days now. No one knows why. 

So far we’re just getting droplets from the side. Nothing straight on, not yet, or we’d be toast.