Outer Stars Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (bio) That evening when he does not come home, Clara makes dinner for their daughter and carries on with their routines as if nothing is wrong. Outside, the city has not yet gone quiet. People are still returning from their day of work. The street below their fifth-story window is still bustling with the traffic of passing cars and bicycles. If there is anything markedly different about the scene—unfamiliar or unsettling—she's not sure what it might be, except maybe his absence. She feels it like a breath held—the waiting, a small pause in her body's rhythms, a pressure at the center of her chest that she knows will release the moment he walks through the door. "R U OK?" she texts him. "XO," he writes. The whole night passes. "Why isn't Dad home?" Moira asks over breakfast the next morning. The news is on the television, a woman in a red dress reporting before a digital background image of a sunny blue sky. Out the window, the real sky is the color of cooked and cooling egg whites, soft and opaque. The reporter echoes what has been said and said over the last twenty-four hours, words like particulate and aerosols that might once have simply been terms but which are now panic invoking. They predict rain, which will clear it. Stay tuned for the full forecast. Clara turns it off. Moira is six. She looks like Clara, tawny hair and gray-brown eyes. Sometimes looking at her daughter is for Clara like seeing herself in a warped mirror. It's not the resemblance so much as a shadow of doubt or distrust—a feeling she's known all her life, and which her daughter, with all the love and attention she's been given as the only child of parents who desperately wanted her, certainly has no reason to feel. It's a feeling Clara would like to have spared her girl. Crack in a glass, snag in a cloth, knot of anxiety under the surface of every day. Little voice in her center whispering [End Page 161] nothing lasts. Can you inherit uncertainty? It pains Clara to think she's passed it on, like a bad gene, this propensity for finding the dark hole of any moment. She sets a bowl of cereal in front of Moira, the swim of bluish milk floating a sparkle of cinnamon and sugar crystals, and watches the girl stir before eating. With the first bite the concern on the child's face dissipates like clouds thinning. Moira tips the cereal bowl, drinks the sweet milk, and smiles, temporarily sated. She is elfin in the way of all not-yetadolescent children—long limbed and bigheaded. Cute and fragile and still in need of mother-love. Clara kisses her forehead, clears away the bowl. Moira gallops across the room, clambers up onto the couch, and cranes over to look out the window. "When Dad gets home, we're going to build a model of the ship from Outer Stars," Moira says. "Really?" Clara answers from the kitchen, just feet away. This apartment is small, efficient, but always enough for them. "Sounds like you two have a plan." Clara says it like it will be only hours. Like a sure thing. "We do have a plan," the child says. "We'll play Outer Stars, then we'll repticate it." Moira grins, lifts her eyebrows—a new gesture, another mirror of one of Clara's own. "Replicate it?" Clara asks, hoping Moira will correct herself. "We're building it exactly. Exactly." Outer Stars is a video game her husband and Moira play together on the weekends while Clara reads a book in the other room or goes out alone to walk where she will not be spoken to or needed. In the game, you—the player, but also the protagonist—have been sent into space following an undefined apocalyptic event that has made Earth uninhabitable. Space is your new landscape, in all its endless darkness, and your challenge is to make that darkness home. The darkness is not, however, vacant, nor even actually dark...
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Oct 1, 2022
Dengquan Li + 4
Open Access