BY ERIN CALABRIA
Each morning, Mr. Gallagher checked the beacon.
Every night, Mrs. Gallagher pulled the quilt up to Janie’s chin, kissed her forehead, and said again the same thing she’d said every night since the engine failed.
Someone will find us, you’ll see. No star is too far away to feel another’s brightness.
The Gallaghers had been drifting off course for seventy-three days. Only a single panel had blown during the malfunction, but with no way to course correct, it had been enough. Janie knew that, despite its vastness, even the smallest things mattered in space.
The bedroom door slid shut with a soft, pneumatic sigh. Janie listened to her brother Billy wheeze into his pillow and thought about what her mother said, how nobody ever mentioned the distances between galaxies. How those stars grew ever fainter to one another, the expansion of the universe unspooling darkness between them like gum stretched between fingers and teeth.
Janie could still remember the years before the launch, when they used to take the train to visit her grandmother, and she and Billy had each been allowed a gumball at the station. Mr. Gallagher had always tapped the machine filled with confetti-colored globes.
Not many of these left, he would say, turning the key after each coin.
Janie tried to remember the last time, tried to conjure the taste—pineapple or watermelon or strawberry shortcake, a bright, bursting thing with no real purpose. The memory tucked itself around her like a second quilt, and her eyes had all but closed, when the sock drawer beside her began to glow.
Janie sat up with a start. Billy still slept, breathing quieter now, a thin trail of drool sparkling onto the pillow. He was always tired like this now; after their studies, after dinner and dishes, he would make straight for the computer in their room, clicking through an old terraforming sim for hours until his eyes looked like two jellyfish left to bake out in the sun. Janie worried sometimes about what his brain might look like now behind those eyes, but she knew the game was the closest thing he could find these days to solid ground. Hoping her brother was dreaming of some lush, new landscape, Janie crept out of bed and opened the drawer.
Inside, nestled pale and just barely rippling among the rolled up socks, was a sphere of light. Janie was sure it was dying—she could tell by the way its edges frayed like mist burning off a river. She’d seen a river a long time ago, splashing along next to the train that used to carry them away from the city, swirling past the house where her grandmother told ancient stories of the country, of milk and honey left on back doorsteps to quell the mischief fey creatures made in cupboards and butter churns.
This light didn’t look like any kind of creature Janie could think of. Though Mr. Gallagher still said she was too young to use the astrobiological database, Janie knew all about Earth species. Before Billy commandeered their computer, she had sometimes played a time-traveling sim; from the virtual console, you picked a set of coordinates, a date, and then took snapshots of whatever wildlife you found. Near the launch, there wasn’t much to see, but if you went back far enough, you could capture pixelated approximations of snow leopards, ring-tailed lemurs, Tasmanian devils, narwhals. There wasn’t much point to the game, or at least nothing to produce—unlike Billy’s solar systems, rearranged until the hues of storms, seas, and continents combined just a little too intentionally, like a uniform or flag.
And though Janie couldn’t quite put her finger on it, there was something about this light, a barely perceptible hum, some kind of concentrated energy, that just felt…animal.
Alive.
Janie reached under her mattress, where she’d managed to hoard a small stash of powdered cocoa. She tore a package as quietly as she could, inhaling for a moment the fine, chocolatey dust before pouring it into the drawer. The particles sparked as if grazing atmosphere, then vanished.
Of course, Janie breathed.
The light shimmered and pulsed.
*
Each morning, Mr. Gallagher checked the beacon.
Every night, Mrs. Gallagher said, No star…
Janie lined her sock drawer with a towel to keep it dark, and, when no one was looking, began to feed the light. In the ship’s galley, she stuffed imitation porridge and tea and sugar cubes into her pockets. At night, as soon as Billy began to snore in long, even waves, she slipped a portion of whatever she’d pinched into the drawer. Some nights she whispered to the light, reciting all the nature facts she knew.
When a queen bee dies, the workers feed just one larva royal jelly to create a new queen.
A swift can keep flying for ten months before it has to land.
The chemicals in a firefly’s lantern glow in the presence of any living cell.
When that knowledge ran out, Janie offered slivers of her grandmother’s stories.
Once, deep in the woods, there was a house made all out of sweets.
Once there was a girl who spoke to a wolf.
The light devoured everything.
Sometimes Janie wondered about one of her grandmother’s stories in particular, about how, if you ever chanced to enter a magical place—a fey hill, for example, or some other parallel realm—you must not eat or drink anything, lest you be trapped there for years, if not forever. What if, by feeding the light, Janie had somehow tethered it to the Gallaghers’ world?
Then she remembered the second half of the story: how if you left your home behind, the fey would send a changeling in your stead. But she couldn’t think of anything that might replace the light, wherever it had come from.
(And what now, if anything, could replace the Gallaghers back on Earth?)
Meanwhile, a shape began to coalesce at the light’s center—translucent at first, but gradually more defined—like a chrysalis, or embryo. Janie thought she could feel its presence, something like weight or attention.
Photons becoming molecules.
Becoming mind.
*
Each morning, Mr. Gallagher checked the beacon.
Every night, Mrs. Gallagher said, No star…
Beacon.
No star…
Beacon.
No—
Mrs. Gallagher found out when Janie’s chapstick rolled off the nightstand, swiveled, and stopped dead in front of the sock drawer. Her eyes flashed a moment in the light’s undulating gleam, then she shook Billy awake and dragged them both in their pajamas up to the bridge where Mr. Gallagher sat staring at the view screen’s empty square.
All together, they consulted the astrobiological database.
Ignis crescentus, the file droned. Rare. Photonic stowaway. Exponential growth cycle, principally in mass, then size. There followed a litany of lost ships and hypotheses about what the light could become.
A planet.
A star.
Perhaps a black hole.
Back in their bedroom, Janie gave Mrs. Gallagher her quilt to bundle up the light. Then Mr. Gallagher positioned it in one of the escape pods, and together they all watched it hurtle away, a bright lozenge dwindling to a pinprick, then snuffed out in the black.
The rest of that night, Janie couldn’t sleep. She knew by the silence settled like frost over the darkened room that neither could her brother.
How? He finally whispered. How could you?
It…needed help, she said.
And us? Billy’s voice thickened. Who’s going to help us?
Janie got up and curled in next to him. She knew he remembered the days leading up to the launch too, how neither of them could bear to sleep alone. He squeezed her hand the same way.
It’s just—we’re not the only ones out here. Janie said. How are we the only ones who…matter? There used to be— But she didn’t know where to start. There was just too much. Too many creatures that were all just pixels now.
Just light.
*
A week later, the ship’s trajectory shifted, pulled by the light’s increasing gravity into an intercept course. Mr. Gallagher turned off the beacon, unwilling to ensnare any other ships. Mrs. Gallagher kissed the children each goodnight without a word. Janie thought of another one of her grandmother’s stories, the one about sea folk who lured humans into the waves just to watch them drown.
But Janie had never seen the ocean. Space was the closest thing to it she knew, the fathomless, unendingness of it. The light had been lonely—Janie was sure of it. By now, she also knew the things it longed for couldn’t be replaced; they could only be remembered, a lingering phosphorescence engulfed by whatever came next. By now, all of them knew.
At night, Janie pictured the light growing, those scraps of the planet she’d left behind metabolizing into a new world.
She dreamt that, when the convergence came, it would feel like coming home.
Erin Calabria grew up on the edge of a field in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. She is a co-founding editor at Empty House Press, which publishes writing about home, place, and memory. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and was selected as a winner for The Best Small Fictions 2017. You can read more of her work in Milk Candy Review, Longleaf Review, Pithead Chapel, and other places. She tweets @erin_calabria.