Word Count: 1293
You open your eyes. Your fingers are burrowed in soft white sand and your hands support the weight of your leaning body behind you. The seat of your pants is saturated with the warmth of each wave that crawls up the slow gradient of the beach. Your eyes are transfixed on the unnatural specks of brilliant light above you—brighter than the constellations that interrupt the eternal black of the night sky, dimmer than the bioluminescent dinoflagellate that glazes the ocean water slapping around your ankles.
You hear someone call for you.
It is a distant sound, dissipating as it passes through a fuzzy wall of distraction erected around you by your curiosity at the steadily amplifying specks. You hear your name but everything else is an unintelligible mumble that fades into the rhythmic susurration of the waves.
A clammy hand grasps your shoulder, and you emerge from your stupor. You turn to see one of the local boys, his youthful starlit face twisted in atypical anxiety and jaw moving wildly as he yells words that don’t register to you.
You shake your head, a comical attempt to expel the fuzz that fogs your brain. It works. His words are crystal clear now, and you remember who he is. A distant cousin. Or nephew or child of a family friend—the specifics of the relationship has been superseded by other information you have deemed more important. The boy has been your shadow since your return to the village; a role that he had assigned to himself, and one that you have come to appreciate in the past weeks.
“Uncle,” he cries out in the native language, “the stars are falling again!”
You remember his name. Nafi.
You return your gaze to the sky, and the specks blink with newfound lucidity—no longer the distant pinpricks of a few seconds ago. They are spheres of light with orange-red tails; incandescent, ethereal tadpoles falling towards you. A shudder permeates your bones as the destructive aura of the meteorites becomes clear. It replaces your awe with fear.
And as quick as it had come, relief washes away the fear. You remember the reason for your presence here, in this secluded coastal village—your ancestral hometown. It is a land barely caressed by the exploitation the rest of your island country flaunts; a land overripe with your familial history—childhood memories obscured by years of minimal contact and neglect.
To them, you are the son who returned.
In truth, your return is not the assumed quest of heritage reclamation, for which you were welcomed with open arms. No. You were lured here by scientific curiosity, by reports of the falling stars that frequented this village. You were enticed by the possibility of claiming a connection, however flimsy, to the extraterrestrial happenings the village bore witness to.
So now, you race the plummeting sky, sprint towards a hut veiled by beachfront coconut trees, to retrieve your instruments. Nafi barely understands the instructions you deliver in your elementary grasp of the native tongue, yet he complies with unwarranted devotion, extrapolating the particulars from your frantic gesturing.
Great splashes in the distance punctuate a tense silence, the sound of meteorites peppering the ocean. A loud thud from much closer proximity momentarily halts you in your tracks. Corollary tremors echo in the beach sand at your feet.
The commotion draws you to its epicentre with a magnetic attraction. Lugging a multitude of cameras, sensors and instruments—and the boy at your heels—you run towards the hissing and the sulphur that cuts through the breeze. Nafi’s footsteps distract you. You consider stopping, sending the boy away from imminent danger.
But you don’t.
Time is a luxury you refuse to squander, especially now that immortality is within your reach. Your initial concern for safety is trumped by burning excitement, primal greed; a mission to break new ground in planetary science. So, you ignore mortality—yours and the boy’s—to spit in the face of unknown peril. All so you could claim your aliquot of fame as a pioneer in meteoritics. The safety of the boy, of the village, of yourself, is an afterthought.
You feel vindication as you encounter the source of the clamour, a flaming sphere partially buried in the chalky beach, well away from the waves. Streaks of black slag unfurl and stain the sand around the sphere’s circumference. The top of which stands level with your eyes, but the enveloping flames reach far higher.
The seemingly endless revelations that could emerge from this encounter occur to you; the studies, the analyses, the grants, the eponyms, the acclaim. Your ecstatic outburst of joy at this thought fills the night with guttural whoops.
The boy mirrors your celebration. You take it as a sign of his shared enthusiasm, not the adulation of a child mimicking his poorly-chosen idol that it is. False pride swells within you; not only have you successfully hunted down a meteorite but also imparted your sense of curiosity to the boy. It blinds you, again, from the danger you have placed him in.
Your jubilations are abruptly curtailed by a grating, drawn-out crack. A vertical fissure forms on the unusually smooth metallic surface of the sphere. The billowing inferno whips about violently as the crack splits the sphere into two distinct shells that fall apart. From within comes an inhuman glow that darkens the fiery radiance around it. It disconcerts you instantly, deadens your somatic senses and doubles your vision.
You watch, frozen in time, as a wild tendril of fire reaches for the stunned boy and engulfs him in the space of a heartbeat. His ashy imprint dissolves in the air, whipped away by the scalding wind as it whistles a chilling dirge.
You want to scream.
You don’t. You’re stilled by the sight of my emergence from within the shells.
I see confusion in the folds of your face. Your slack jaw betrays your alarm. Your eyes reek of despair. I intuit your story within moments of our contact. I know you, intimately. I know of every event, every choice that has led you to this moment.
You were not meant to see me. I was not meant to crash land on this beach. The boy was not meant to die.
I can’t reciprocate the angst that contorts your features, or the pungent remorse that radiates from you. It is beyond the empathic capabilities of my kind. But I understand the path of complex emotions you now suffer through, a path dominated by regret. It seems that within the past few moments, your thirst for scientific knowledge has been supplanted by regret, perhaps the guilt of not having sent the boy to safety when you had the chance. Or for not committing to your memory his importance in your life. Or for your neglect of the boy—and the village—until circumstances dictated a reconnection. I see the lines that the regret, remorse, angst, guilt carves on your face; and between them, I see you yearning for a chance to set things right.
So, I give you this opportunity to rewrite your recent past. And the boy’s.
This is not a gift from me. It is my penance for underestimating the fragility of your kind.
I will send you back to a point of temporal divergence, one that is compatible with your Earth’s linear perception of time. There, you can choose not to allocate your worth to the pursuit of specks in the sky, and instead, place it closer to the ground. You can choose to give the boy a different ending. I trust you will choose correctly this time around.
Now. Close your eyes.