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In high school, Briane went out for the track team dreaming of being a pole-vaulter. He was assigned to shotput and discus, where he failed to excel. He also blogs at "Thinking The Lions," thinkingthelions.com.
At first people thought it beautiful, all these new stars appearing every night. I did. I especially liked that in cities you could see the stars for the first time. So nights when I would leave the office late, I could see them on my way through downtown Chicago, blazing down between the tall, dark obelisks of buildings I drove under as much as I drove over the farmland in the second half of my drive .
But after a couple of months, when there were still more each night, when the night sky above the farm house we lived in--and were supposedly fixing up--seemed to blaze like white fire, and Wendy, when I accidentally woke her up one night at 12:15 a.m. having just arrived home, said It seems like it's hot at night, doesn't it?: after that, it didn't seem just pretty, anymore.
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You could see stars during the day, some of them. People said we were falling towards the galactic center. Scientists claimed it was nothing, that there'd been a period of intense star formation 13,000,000,000 years ago and we were only now seeing the result, but they didn't seem to believe it. Cults committed mass suicide and people like us postponed having kids.
It'll probably be any day now, we tell each other every night. We sit on the porch wearing sunscreen to ward off starburn, as people are calling it, saying, We'll probably realize why it's happening, pretty soon. And eventually I say I have to get up at five to drive to the office, so we go to bed, pulling shades against the wall of light that never goes away.
The End
This story was first published on Thursday, December 18th, 2014
Author Comments
Rarely is anything all good or all bad. People complain about not seeing the stars when they are in the city, and remark on how beautiful the sky is in the country where seemingly every star is visible. One day, I was listening to the Coldplay song "A Sky Full Of Stars" and I thought to myself "What if the sky was" (you guessed it) "TOO full of stars?"
- Briane Pagel
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