When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

My brother gripped the back of my neck and stared into my eyes. His gaze was glassy, but then he blinked and it hardened. There was no softness left for me in him. Something inside me broke. He was right. No one was going to help us. We were on our own now.

Ever since the accident, there’d been an anger in me that never burned quite strong enough to escape. It was stuck in my gut, embers that never died, even as layers of sadness and fear and whatever else got piled over it. I was angry at the world, for what it had done to us. Angry it would never care. Angry that it would go on like it always had and never acknowledge what had changed.

Wanting things was like needing people. It backfired every time.

Sometimes the anger was too much. Sometimes I thought that if you peeled back my skin, that would be all that was there: a burning red hate for this world and what it did to people callously, every second, every day.

I’d learned from the accident that people, even the ones you love, are temporary.

“No one knows all the answers to the universe’s questions, but I admire anyone who keeps looking up at the stars and asking them questions.” They both believed in the seamless machine. That a zillion pieces fit together to make something miraculous. A beautifully ordered universe, where if you talked to the stars, they listened. Where things happened for a reason, be it the design of Holy God or Good and Miraculous Science. Something out there had a handle on this flimsy universe.

Now I understood it had never worked to begin with. Things happened. Random, horrible things no itty-bitty human could protect another itty-bitty human from. The machine was a black hole, a cold, lightless thing. It did not have nerves or blood-filled veins. It was not made for itty-bitty, ooey-gooey humans, and it did not care what became of us. It was a disinterested force, a mass’s gravity pulling us toward its center, the point where all things ended. The only thing you could do was to try not to stare at it as it pulled you closer.

I thought I felt him then. Not there, in the room, but somewhere. Sometime. Three feet and five years away, maybe, or in a place that only looked dark and silent from the outside, but inside was brimming with light and sound. There were things we couldn’t understand. Places where the laws of physics broke down.

As he nears the event horizon, he moves slower and slower, and then he stops. Hovering, frozen. There he is, in my sight, forever. And even while that’s true, he’s also somewhere else. He’s crossing an invisible threshold, and there, then, he sees it. The answers. The past. The future. The light. Everything, all at once. He laughs. I know he laughs.