Row is an astronomer. By the time he graduates, people have stopped exploring space, the funding is gone and the observatories are closing. He loses his job before it begins.

To keep working with astronomical data, he moves to a small harbor town called Coldwater and takes the only position available: a job he does not fully understand, writing obituaries for dead stars. The post exists because a late piano teacher left her savings so that someone would notice when stars die, and say something.

Meanwhile, news of a coming meteor shower, and rumors that it will end the world, unsettle the entire town. Row knows meteors are only dust. What he tells no one is that, in the patch of sky he watches most closely, a healthy star has been disappearing every night, and he cannot find the cause.

On the night of the shower, the town climbs onto the rooftops together to wait.

An obituary is always late. It is written for readers who mostly will not see it, and it insists that a life was worth a few inches of print. The story gives that form to subjects even further away than the dead: stars, whose light reaches us centuries after the fact, and which no one mourns because no one was looking.

The second starting point was a question: what happens to a person trained to look up when the world decides to stop looking? Row is an astronomer with no sky left to study. When the town hears that the world may be ending, it faces the same question he does: what to say about something before it is gone.

The science stays accurate. The meteors are dust, and the story agrees with Row. But a story that only explains carries no fear, so one element remains unexplained: the stars that vanish from his field, one each night. It is the single point where his knowledge stops, and it allows the reader to share the town’s fear.

The story runs on two clocks. One is vast: stars that take millions of years to die, and light that takes centuries to arrive. The other is a single night in October. The central challenge was making the small clock feel as large as the large one.

Three obituaries

Set into Row’s calm, exact narration are the obituaries themselves, in italics, each headed by a catalog number and an alternative name. They give the story a second rhythm, and each one moves closer to Row.

The town

The small clock is carried by the town. Each resident of Coldwater is given one confession or one gesture, and by the night of the shower, the town itself has become the thing being remembered.

Objects and callbacks

In development

Current work focuses on the ending, which stops on an unfinished sentence held open “the way you leave a door, in case.” The goal is for that broken line to carry the full weight of the night, and to determine how much should follow it: the bell, the dawn, the light arriving eight minutes late.