The Sky Here is Different

When my great aunt died, Mom recruited me to go along to her house in the country to settle her things. This was stupid for a couple of reasons.

One: I’d never met her. I didn’t even know I had a great aunt until she was dead.

Two: No internet. The whole world has had internet since the satellites got launched, way before I was born. What was going on with Great Aunt Sarah that she didn’t? What did she even do? According to Mom, Sarah was an eccentric who didn’t like the internet. That also made no sense. The internet was everything. How can you just . . . not like everything?

Three: My sister didn’t have to go. She got to stay home and work on college applications and resumes. Just because I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life right this second, I was being punished? No, Mom said. But if I leave you here, you’ll just play VR games the whole time.

So, four: Mom had no good reason for dragging me along.

And, five: Mom didn’t exactly seem thrilled to be going either. The whole car ride she complained, talking about how she wished her brother would step up and do something for the family for once and how Aunt Sarah should have had kids of her own so someone else could be taking care of her shit.

Ugh.

I imagined I was a VR detective, off to solve The Strange Case of the Weird, Dead Great Aunt. Who was she? Why did she do what she did? In the middle of Mom’s whining, I got some info. Of course, I was sneaky about it. I was undercover. Apparently, Sarah died in some hospital of cancer, which was wild because we have cures for that. Seemed like Great Aunt Sarah just didn’t go to the doctor. By the time she did go, it was too late and there wasn’t anything much they could do for her. She was odd and reclusive and had trust issues. She was only eighty-seven, but Mom guessed eighty-seven was old enough for Sarah. Don’t people usually live until 120? Mom said, Yeah, if they actually go to the doctor when they’re sick.

The car stopped. I thought maybe we were there, but the GPS beeped and said, No road detected. When we rolled the window screens down, we were fully outside the cities. No other cars, no skyscrapers or even buildings. Everything was dirt. Even the road was dirt, just a different color. It stretched out in front of us, a straight, empty line under the sky. It made me feel hollow.

Great Aunt Sarah lived out in the fucking boonies, according to Mom, so far out that the navigation system didn’t even have the whole way mapped. I didn’t know what we were going to do, walk maybe, but Mom took the car off autopilot and started driving, herself! She wasn’t very good—rusty—but we got there in one piece and didn’t even wreck once.

Great Aunt Sarah’s house was all by itself. Like, it wasn’t in a building and there were no other houses around it. It was super old, and it wasn’t any specific color. Sort of just light brown-gray. There were scraggly dead trees, grass, and the house. On one part of the roof was this huge metal plate Mom said was an ancient solar panel, and it would be a miracle if it was still working.

We got in using a for-real metal key Mom dug out from underneath a clay pot. Woah. I’d seen keys in VR, but I thought they were symbols, not an actual thing. Mom let me hold it and said, Don’t lose it. I liked the way it felt heavy in my palm, all the points and ridges.

People’s houses tell a lot about them. Great Aunt Sarah’s house was maybe the prettiest in-real-life place I’d ever seen. There was a kitchen to the left and a living room to the right. Between them, there was a narrow staircase going up to the second floor. It smelled cozy, like cinnamon and vanilla and something else. Mom pointed to a metal thing, a wood-burning stove, and said,Woodsmoke. Colored glass hung in the windows, sparkling in the setting sun. There were paintings on the walls, too. Not like photos or AI. Real paintings. There was a desk in the living room, all cluttered with brushes and papers and skinny metal boxes. I opened one and saw it was full of colored squares.

I yelled to Mom, who was fussing in the kitchen, I think these might be Great Aunt Sarah’s paintings all over. Mom said, Well, she wasn’t great, was she?

What?! Okay, maybe some of them were weird, but I liked them, and they were really colorful. I could see textures in the paint—brush strokes, I realized. They felt alive. Like they were saying stuff to me without words. Could somebody really just . . . do that? Paint? And then not sell them or put them online or anything? They were secret. Nobody knew about them but Sarah. And now us.

Mom started complaining. There’s just so much shit in here, How are we ever going to box all this up, and, Maybe there’s a junk removal service that will come out. I said, Stop calling Aunt Sarah’s stuff shit. Mom snapped at me about being unhelpful. Ugh. So, I went upstairs to finish exploring. Detectives had to be thorough.

The second floor was one room with a low, sloping roof. On all the walls, there were built-in shelves, and on them were books. So many books! I don’t think I’d ever seen that many in one place before. I wondered if it would count as a library. Teachers always told us how research used to be in libraries, which were real places with books and not just apps on our tablets. They seemed to think it was important we knew.

There was a window at the other end of the room and a chair and a table. On the table, there was a book and a mug, like Sarah was about to come back upstairs, take a sip, and keep reading. If I was her ghost, I would have come home. And if her ghost was anywhere, it was definitely here. That didn’t make me scared. I’d played VR games where I was a paranormal investigator before.

She had been reading a book called Sky Atlas. What did that mean? I memorized the angle of the book on the table so I could put it back exactly the way she had left it, and I brought the book (it was huge and super heavy) onto the floor—I didn’t want to sit in her chair in case her ghost was there.

Some of the pages had drawings made of dots and lines, and after some reading (reading is hard and definitely not the fastest way to input data), I realized what the dots were: stars. And the lines between them made shapes called constellations. I dunno if I was saying that right in my head. I hadn’t ever heard a word that looked like that, I didn’t think, but it sounded pretty. Mysterious.

I turned a page, and there was one big constellation on the left side. Over the constellation, in see-through gray, there was drawn an animal—a bear. Then, I could see how those stars were supposed to be that shape, but it was hard to imagine the bear without the picture.

On the right-hand page, there were a ton of words. It took me a long time to get through them, and there were some I didn’t know, but I figured out what it was: a story about the constellation. It was someone named Ursa Major, who was sometimes a bear but sometimes turned into a cup to help people find their way using the North Star.

I’d never thought about what people would have done before navigation systems. How cool that the stars could show you where to go! When our car’s GPS hadn’t known where to go, if it had been nighttime, we could have navigated by the stars! Like, the world had a built-in map. I wanted to see if I could use it, if I could find the North Star.

The window opened, and there was a little slant of the roof, just big enough to sit on. I climbed out and pulled the book after me. I realized pretty quick that matching anything with the atlas would be impossible. The satellites were in the way.

Back in the cities, the streetlights and skyscrapers and headlights and signs and everything kept the night sky blurry. Like in a halo of light. So I guess I hadn’t really looked at the satellites before. It was way easier to see them out here. They were tiny specks of light, bright, like how metal catches the sun at midday. There were so many of them. They moved constantly. Not all in one direction, but every which way, like mosquitoes. All those hunks of metal, stirring themselves up there in the sky so you couldn’t tell which one was which. That’s what I could see: all satellites, no constellations. No stars. At least, I didn’t think stars moved like that. They couldn’t be maps if they did.

It was so quiet. I had never been anyplace so quiet. But the satellites were loud, busy, like we’d spread the cities into the sky. They made me dizzy with their constant moving.

How did they not all run into each other? What were they even doing up there? Yeah, internet and communications and navigating, but how well did they even work? They hadn’t known the way to Sarah’s place. I knew some of them were for surveillance. I used to think that meant safety. But really, it was like each satellite was an eyeball, and then there were a million eyeballs peering down at me. Who was looking? What were they seeing?

It was like I was alone on a shipwreck in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by killer sharks, just circling and circling and circling. I felt spied on. Misunderstood. And dumb, like there were too many things I never learned. The navigation system didn’t know where I was, and neither did the stars. I just felt really fucking lost.

I hugged the book and wished it could hug me back. Right away, I knew Sarah would have. A huge sadness rushed up in me and I started to cry. It was awful, the world so crowded and so empty all at the same time, and being one person was so small, so lonely. I didn’t know where I was going or what to do.

Eventually, I stopped crying. I felt a little better. I don’t know, maybe Sarah’s ghost comforted me some. I like to think so. I went back downstairs and ate dinner with Mom, who apologized for yelling at me. She was just really stressed. Over the next couple days, we got the house ready and sold it and most of Sarah’s things. I got to pick out some stuff to keep: My fee for coming along.

Back at home in my room, I hung up the colored glass in the window. I put up Sarah’s paintings. I spent hours pouring over them. In one of Sarah’s mostly empty notebooks, I copied constellations from the Star Atlas and sketched in the pictures they made. Sometimes, I made up my own pictures. I didn’t know if I was any good, and I didn’t care. It was just for me. And it was fun, like I was getting to know the stars on the other side of the satellites. I imagined meeting them, like they were people. I introduced myself as Sarah’s great niece, and they knew exactly who that was and greeted me like an old friend. They told me stories. Secrets. And I didn’t tell them to anybody. If they’re secret, then they’re mine.