For One Day They Will Take Her Too
When sunset turns the sky over our sleepover a hundred tempting colours, our friends whisper and giggle and press their faces to the front door, daring each other to turn the handle and find the stars. When the door clicks open it falls to me, the eldest, to pull them back. I clap a hand over each friend’s eyes, drag them backward and shut the door again. I scold them roughly, so roughly I make an embarrassment of the situation. Then there’s yelling, and the parents come through to check on us. Sleepover ruined.
I evade the parents’ withering compassion by bullying my way over to the corner to check on Nessa. She’s pretending to be engrossed in a book about a vampire bunny, but she must be as upset as I am. A shared memory simmers between us, after all. We’re not the only ones in the room who have lost loved ones to the stars, but Mother was closest and most recent; so surely we share this raging body heat, this clench of fist, this how dare you, how dare you make a game of this.
Nessa’s not interested in being my little sister right now. Instead she noses her way deeper into the pages and declares: “You’re no fun,” loud enough for the others to hear. Her way of being part of the group, I guess, even though she never left her corner.
Fine. I can live with being not fun. Nessa lives with it too. Thank goodness: tonight, we all live.
Back at home, we seal the window-boards into place for the night and get into bed. Nessa’s eyes stick unshut. Something about the sleepover has stuck with her. She tells Father, who has slept in an easy chair outside our bedroom door ever since Mother walked into the ocean, “The older kids get to see stars. They have special tools.”
Father shuts his book. “They’re pulling your leg, Ness. The stars aren’t for seeing.”
She grumbles into her blanket: “It’s not fair.”
“They’re just trying to sound tough.” He’s trying to stay calm, so as not to scold her roughly on impulse. “Don’t be too eager to throw yourself in harm’s way, eh?”
Right before Father turns off his light, I watch one blocked-out window as though waiting for it to open.
I know why Nessa wants to look. Like me, she wants to crush each star in her hand and ask why.
I evade the parents’ withering compassion by bullying my way over to the corner to check on Nessa. She’s pretending to be engrossed in a book about a vampire bunny, but she must be as upset as I am. A shared memory simmers between us, after all. We’re not the only ones in the room who have lost loved ones to the stars, but Mother was closest and most recent; so surely we share this raging body heat, this clench of fist, this how dare you, how dare you make a game of this.
Nessa’s not interested in being my little sister right now. Instead she noses her way deeper into the pages and declares: “You’re no fun,” loud enough for the others to hear. Her way of being part of the group, I guess, even though she never left her corner.
Fine. I can live with being not fun. Nessa lives with it too. Thank goodness: tonight, we all live.
What Nessa means by the older kids get to is, we’re learning about the stars at school. We get to look at pictures. As I trace a glossy image with one hand—milky spots on black silk—I have to ask the teacher: didn’t someone have to look at the stars to make this picture? Did they take it and only then walk, slack-jawed, into the nearest body of water, into the nearest murderous cold, off the nearest height?
Our teacher encourages us to theorize. One of us says the photographer might have set out a camera on a timer. Or maybe the photo was taken when our parents were younger, when the stars were apathetic instead of hateful. This eventually causes us to meander down a tangent about how astronomical data can be translated into sound waves. Our teacher plays the sonified image of a black hole: a taste of one of the many tools in our best scientists’ arsenal against the stars, visuals translated into sounds. Insistent overlaid hums, a harmony intent on bone-grinding dissonance, come in and out like a dozen singers screaming at us. Millions of light years away and yet able to sink through my spine and pull.
This is a tool we need to fight the stars, so I listen, but I clench my teeth so hard I give myself a headache.
There is hope, the teacher tells us, once the recording is over. A speech he gives us in some form almost every day: the province has a plan to build night bunkers and underground roads for every town; that the closed-down soccer field and community centre will one day soon be converted into the safe places we need; that we’ll all have a guaranteed safe place to go at night, and people who work night shifts and people who have emergencies when the stars are staring can be safer too. No doors to leave open by accident, no unsealed window-seams for the stars to peek through, no way for their malevolent light to take you by mistake or accident.
(When I am older, I will be amazed that we waited so long and so patiently for these safeties to reach us, far out in semi-rurality, only for nothing to materialize. I will look for people to blame and find no one except my neighbours to scream blame at, and then my friends, and then eventually my own family. Only when I have severed every other connection will I finally look to the stars and recall that the true enemy is the one with the power to reach unimaginably across the universe and kill humans like flies—only then will I set my jaw at the earth beneath my feet and start seeking ways to reach back.
But not yet.)
A classmate snickers and is shushed. In front of me, two boys knock their ankles against one another like they’re speaking some unvoiced language. The windows are open, for now, the sky burnt blue over the pines. Nature seems unafraid. My friends seem unafraid. Nessa wants, too, to do unafraid things. I don’t understand it. It all feels to me like a lie in my body, like there’s an uncrossable gap between me and ease.
The days roll on. Aya, one of the sleepover kids, goes missing.
She is the third person gone missing from our town this year. The first child. Younger people tend to go missing less often than the adults do. Never mind our dares and our complaints; we grew up under stars that hate us, and we’ve been trained not to go out at night, and never to look at the night sky. Even though they watched their friends and families walk into the lake by the dozens, back before they knew the stars had turned, the parents still yearn for the good old days. They run on instincts that don’t fit reality anymore.
Nessa demands to go to the lake, where others have gathered to seek out any human remains. But as usual, there are only dragonflies and water striders. Bleached crayfish corpses litter the slimy rocks. What is there for Nessa to do except rend her hair and stream snot down her upper lip?
“Aya told me she was going to try looking at the stars last night. On a dare,” she whispers into my tear-wet shoulder.
I push my face into her hair and cling to her roughly. “You didn’t think she really would. Hey, now. You didn’t do this.”
“I thought—it was a joke—”
After this, Nessa starts pulling the covers over her head all night, an added layer of protection. Father doesn’t say much beyond you’re safe, you’re safe, but he double-checks all the window-boards and turns his reading light even lower. As though an indoor light might be co-opted by the eyes in the sky and turned against us.
I hold my sister when she lets me. Inside, I scream. I think of Mother on our stoop, tipping her head back with a deep breath and opening her eyes to the sky, her hands loosening in surrender at her sides. I think of her slow metronome footsteps as she made her way down our town’s steep topography to the lake. I think of Father dragging me indoors and slamming the door shut and screaming in powerless terror, caught between following his wife and keeping his children alive. I think of Aya, going through these same movements, except she did it out of curiosity and was punished for it.
I think of Aya’s head disappearing beneath the water. I think of urgent bubbles rising, then stopping. I think of the lake going still, and of water striders and dragonflies coming back in to fill the quiet, the interruption now over.
I hold my sister and amass my rage.
At night I dream of leaving the house carrying a bow and arrow and shooting down the stars one by one. When I look for star-bodies from which to collect trophies, I find only shattered mirrors. The shards multiply each star overhead uncountable times.
My ears fill with angry indescribable dissonance, pitching up, whispering, screaming, until I wake up in my dark bedroom in sudden empty silence.
I check that Nessa is still breathing and Dad is still sleeping in his easy chair outside the bedroom; I lie back down, heart pounding, to do it all over again.
Two months after her disappearance, Aya walks back into town.
Surrounded by parents and children in her mom’s front room, a blanket around her shoulders, Aya explains that she escaped her captor—her own estranged father—by leaving his remote cabin at night. Of course Aya, having been raised into a terror of the sky, knew well to keep her eyes on the ground at night, but her father, desperate to retrieve her and not so careful, made that critical mistake.
She didn’t look up to watch him lurch away, but we all know where he ended up. In a way, Aya says, voice distant, the stars saved her.
The parents rear back. They reach to fuss over their children. No, no, they say, don’t listen too hard, the stars are never good, the stars can never save a person. Think first of the one who died. Our community can’t have the kids thinking the night is safe, we can’t take that risk. Aya tucks her chin into her blanket.
I reach for Nessa since Dad’s not here, but it’s too late. She already has a frightening kind of hope in her eyes.
That night, once Father’s breathing has gone regular, Nessa pushes her face out from under the covers.
“Aya was saying that at night, when it’s just you and the stars in the deep woods, you can hear bugs and animals—not just the cicadas. She said it smells different at night. Better. Green and wet, like after a storm. That she sat outside on her dad’s porch for a whole hour, just listening and smelling, before she went in to wait for morning.”
I should scold her. I should say things to her that would keep her safe the way I know Dad would, lecturing her about all the aunts and uncles she does not have because the stars took them away. Or about the way the dead stand tall at the bottom of the lake, their hair floating around their faces, their heads tipped skyward in silent worship, their mouths open to let the water in. I should scare her.
I should.
But I haven’t heard such unguarded sweetness in her voice in so long. Since before Mother was taken, really—and now Nessa is snuggling into my side, shrimp-shaped, her knee poking at my ribs, telling me all the things Aya learned about nighttime, and wouldn’t it be nice to go out in a blindfold for the pure enjoyment of it.
So I don’t scold her like I should. Instead I keep my anger to myself and put my arms around her. The window-boards are in place. Soon the town’s shared spaces will be torn up to build the night bunkers and the underground roads, and we will be safe from what’s above us. I won’t need to put my hand over Nessa’s eyes or anyone else’s at sleepovers, and …
My mind drifts. Sleep finds me. Then: eyes in the sky, and dissonance as wide as a nebula, whispering, screaming; and dozens of dead mouths open underwater; hope enduring in Nessa that the stars do not bear her ill will until it is too late; and I wake sweating under the blankets, my sleep shirt sticking to my chest, with Nessa breathing alive next to me—
—I relax one clenched fist, my clenched jaw, my terror and my rage.
For my sister’s sake, I have to believe that one day, everything will be fine.
D.A. Straith (they/them) is a nonbinary transmasculine settler living in suburban Treaty 13 territory in Ontario, Canada. Their short fantasy and science fiction stories have been published in Augur, Fusion Fragment and On Spec, and they are a graduate of the inaugural Clarion West Novel Writing Workshop, held in 2025. When they’re not writing, they’re gazing lovingly at their houseplants.
