Lunatics

by Josh Riedel

Sarge pours a prickly pear soda into a chilled, cactus-shaped glass and loads moonwatchers.org on her laptop. Summers in Tucson are hot even in air conditioning, and so it helps to watch livestreams of the moon, to imagine yourself on that cool, silver terrain. Sarge has manned the lunar cams for Moonwatchers fulltime for almost seven years. The website’s leaderboard lists her name near the top for Most Tronkies Caught, second only to a now-inactive user whose point total Sarge is on pace to surpass this year. She sips her soda and navigates to camera 17, which fills her screen with a spectacular view of Clavius crater, a favorite hiding place for invaders. She keeps a lookout until she detects movement, the creatures packing up camp, preparing to journey eastward, into US territory. She watches and waits, and when they cross the invisible border, she hovers her mouse over their virtual bodies and clicks twice. “Gotcha,” she says, and sips her soda until the lunar tanks appear on-screen to herd the trespassers away.

When Clavius is quiet again, Sarge opens the file she downloaded last week from the Moonwatchers discussion forum, a drawing by Evie’s seven-year-old daughter, Leni. Evie posts Leni’s lunar-inspired artwork in the Misc thread every week, and Moonwatchers are always quick to offer their polite praise. Leni’s artwork typically depicts lunar scenes Sarge has observed countless times before: wild moon horses racing up lunar cliffs; flocks of moon pigeons with iridescent beaks, perched on the long, glow-in-the-dark spines which sprout from the trunks of redwood-saguaro hybrids; flowers a hundred feet high blossoming across acres of Russian sod. But last week’s drawing is different; it depicts a creature Sarge has never seen: stout, two-legged, its hide a shimmery purple, with spiral horns like a ram’s. When nobody could identify the creature, Evie, embarrassed, quickly removed the post, but Sarge, a site admin due to her position on the leaderboard, was able to recover and save the file for further investigation.

Sarge is at the kitchen table studying Leni’s drawing in one window and keeping an eye out for Tronkies in another when her son walks in. “We never have anything,” Byll says, staring into the refrigerator. He scopes out the freezer, pushing aside a bag of mixed vegetables to unearth a frozen pizza, vegan margherita.

“Another capture this morning,” Sarge tells him.

Byll yawns. It’s the summer after his freshman year at Arizona State. He’s on an irregular schedule, sleeping through the heat of daytime, waking only when he’s hungry. “Find any missile plans? Earth-destroyer cannons?”

Classic Byll sarcasm. He was in middle school when Sarge joined Moonwatchers, on the suggestion of another military spouse. She tried to pique his interest— catch the bad guys, like in your video games!—but he always shrugged her off. “You know this is about more than just the moon,” Sarge tells him. She has explained time and again that if Americans lose control of the moon, we lose control of Earth, too, but he never listens.

“I hope the program ends before I have to pay taxes,” he adds, preheating the oven. “It’s such a waste to spend so much on the moon when there are families like Randul’s.”

Sarge wants to ask about Randul’s family, but it seems like intel she should already be privy to. She wishes the dorms didn’t reopen this weekend, that she had another few months with her son. Even if he’s always in his room, his presence makes her feel more stable.

Byll searches the cabinets, finds and finishes the last of the Tostitos, then rips off the pizza’s plastic covering and slides the frozen disc into the oven. “I heard in Okinawa you can take a submarine seven miles underwater,” he says. Ever since Husband Sergeant was assigned to Okinawa, last fall, Byll has been obsessed with the place. He would have moved overseas with his father had Sarge not insisted he stay in the States for college. To be closer to their son was her ostensible reason for staying in Arizona, though she and Husband Sergeant both knew they had reached a point where they needed some separation, even if they didn’t state it.

“Seven miles,” Sarge repeats, not sure why Byll finds this impressive. They both know how much farther away the moon is. Still, on her drive that afternoon, Sarge resets her trip odometer to zero. She holds her breath as long as she can and doesn’t even make it a mile before she has to breathe again.

She’s driving north on I-17, towards Trinka, her new—she isn’t sure what to call her. Lover? Rock turns to ponderosa pines as she climbs up the Mogollon rim to high forest country. Past Black Canyon City and Crown King, past Bloody Basin and Willard Springs, until the highway ends, in Flagstaff. Slowing into town, with her window rolled down, she can tell the air has changed, proof that Flagstaff and Tucson are in two different Arizonas.

Inside her condo, Trinka pours Sarge coffee. “Here, rest.” She motions to a deck chair on the balcony and hands Sarge the mug. The mug is ceramic, a chip on the rim. Trinka starts tapping out an email on her phone. “Work stuff,” she says. When the oven beeps, Trinka sets her phone on the counter and slides in a sheet of cinnamon rolls. “At high elevation things don’t take as long to bake,” she explains, “but what most people forget is that you need a higher volume of liquid.”

A higher volume, Sarge repeats to herself. She likes this about Trinka, how she makes everything sound scientific. She stirs butter into her coffee and counts her blessings: a woman—an astronomer!—she thinks she might love; warm, gooey cinnamon rolls pre-dinner; a chill in the air, in summer.

Sarge was last in Flagstaff a few weeks ago, for a Moonwatchers meetup. All the top users, the self-proclaimed “Lunatics,” gathered here, at Trinka’s condo, and caravanned to a campsite in Lockett Meadow, ringed with quaking aspen stands and majestic high peaks. They pitched their tents and fired up Moonwatchers on a projector so they could watch the moon together, on a single screen. Trinka brought her telescope, preferring to watch the moon that way. The Lunatics took turns at the telescope, but it made most of them dizzy, peering through the lens at a physical object a quarter-million miles away. Much easier to study the projected image. They snacked on cheese cubes and fun-sized Milky Ways and stared at the moon, in all its high-def glory, waiting for foreign invaders to step foot or hoof or tentacle onto US territory. They took turns clicking the mouse when they spotted one, clinking their beer bottles together in celebration as the lunar tanks rolled in.

Over cinnamon rolls, Sarge asks about the creature Leni spotted. Trinka confirms she has seen no such creature in her work at the observatory. “That doesn’t mean they’re not there,” Trinka adds. “We don’t know how to see everything.” She licks icing from her fingers and tells a story about her last trip to the moon, when she split off from her fellow scientists to explore the busted ships that litter the lunar landscape. Sarge loves when Trinka talks about her missions to the moon. She likes to think about how far their bodies have separated, only to close that distance again. “Inside the remains of the Hagaromo,” Trinka says, “I saw someone, or something. Just a flash, then it disappeared.”

The next morning, they wake up early to hike Humphrey’s Peak. At the summit, the winds are so strong they have to eat their sack lunch behind a boulder. Trinka points out the Grand Canyon in the distance, which reminds Sarge of Clavius, but she doesn’t say so. She watches Trinka’s throat pulse as she chugs from her water bottle. Sarge’s legs ache and she’s not sure how she’ll scramble back down all that loose rock, but she’s with Trinka, and tonight they’ll cook together and talk about their past lives, before they knew each other, and they’ll go to bed closer, but still with so much distance to cover.

When the weekend’s over, Sarge makes the drive back down to Tucson. Passing through Tempe, she keeps two hands on the wheel, so as to keep the car on its intended trajectory, to not be pulled towards the exit for ASU, for Byll.

She tried not to think too much about Leni’s drawing while in Flagstaff—she wanted to enjoy her time with Trinka—but when she returns home and checks the capture logs, she sees that Evie hasn’t reported a Tronkolite in days, highly unusual for a Moonwatcher with Lunatic-status. Evie’s low capture rate temporarily unlocks surveillance powers for Sarge, an additional permission granted to her a couple years ago, after her thousandth capture bumped her into second place on the leaderboard. From the admin dashboard, she turns on Evie’s webcam. On Sarge’s screen, Evie’s face stares back at her. Sarge flinches before she registers this only works one-way: Evie can’t see her.

Sarge splits her computer screen, so that the top half shows Evie and the bottom half shows the activity on Evie’s computer. She brings her laptop into the kitchen and microwaves frozen enchiladas. Evie alternates between panning the Moonwatchers cameras and solving a crossword puzzle. Sarge eats in front of her screen and, bored, begins to solve the puzzle alongside Evie. Evie is faster than Sarge, but every now and then Sarge answers a clue before Evie. No strange creatures appear, though the celebratory song that plays when the crossword puzzle is complete does startle her.

Before bed, Sarge shuffles through moon postcards and lands on a blackand-white panorama of a wide-open lunar landscape, the lunar highlands in the background. She and Trinka have talked about visiting the moon together, one day. She draws two stick figures on the moon, then flips the postcard over to write: We’ll make snow angels in the lunar dust. Clouds that smell of spent gunpowder surrounding us.

Sarge has trouble sleeping that night, and wonders, as she sometimes does, about Janus, the inactive user at the top of the leaderboard. Most Lunatics agree that the military likely created the account in the early days to seed the Moonwatchers community, to inspire some competition among new users so that one day the site might function as a self-sustaining network of citizen-volunteers, requiring little oversight or funding from the military, as is the case today. Mission accomplished. But that’s only consensus, not truth. Sarge wishes she could know the exact details of this user’s departure. She worries that, if Janus is a real person, that perhaps they lost motivation when they reached the top of the leaderboard, that boredom set in. But isn't allegiance to your country, to your planet, a lifelong pursuit? It's not something that can leave you.

In the morning, Evie’s on the screen again. She’s reading celebrity gossip blogs and slicing bananas into Leni’s oatmeal. Sarge remembers those mornings when she was tasked with making Byll’s breakfast before her own. She pours herself a bowl of cereal and tries to savor this time alone. A notification pops up on Moonwatchers. Yesterday’s capture rate low. It’s because she’s watching Evie, she knows, and closes the notification window. Leni is awake now, eating her oats. Evie kisses her on the top of her head, then it’s back to the gossip blogs, a few checks of the cams.

Home from dropping off Leni at school, Evie keeps a cam open in the corner of her screen and opens a project in Illustrator. Sarge admires Evie’s eye for design. She was the one who designed the patches the Lunatics wear on their jackets: a full moon with a mouse arrow hovering over it. Today she’s working on flyers for a new smoothie shop in the Foothills. She adds condensation droplets to the tall glass and tests out color schemes for the striped straw.

The monitoring goes on all afternoon without any sightings. Evie leaves the house and returns with Leni, back from school. The little girl comes running up to the computer, dark bangs swinging over her eyes. “I want to play,” she says.

Evie sits at the computer and lifts her daughter into her lap.

Leni is flipping through cameras fast. She’s giggling. Hi, she says, waving at Sarge, or rather at the computer screen. Leni has zoomed all the way in, on camera 14. On the moon’s horizon, a pixelated group of the stout purple creatures, just like in Leni’s drawing. Their walk is a dance. Leni moves her arms in a kind of jig, imitating them. She waves again. The beings move closer. They flicker in and out of view, like the connection’s bad. “How are you today?” Leni asks.

The creatures lower their heads.

Later that afternoon, on a video call, Sarge tells Evie she has something she needs to ask her. “It’s important,” she says.

“Shoot,” Evie says, spoon-feeding Leni chia pudding, even though Leni is old enough to feed herself chia pudding.

“Who are the purple creatures Leni talks to?” When Evie doesn't answer immediately, but instead stalls by wiping chia pudding off Leni's chin, Sarge admits she spied on them. She cautions that not reporting the mysterious creatures could put the country's citizens at risk.

Evie laughs. “You’re so caught up in this game,” she says. “Look, I tweaked the code for Leni. I hacked together a simple program that lets her create her own creatures on the moon. Well, on the virtual moon.” She spoons another helping of pudding into Leni’s mouth. “Leni likes to search the moon for her little creatures.”

Evie turns to her daughter. “Don’t you, honey?” Leni laughs and starts to dance like the creatures.

“So that’s it,” Evie concludes. “It’s a silly kid’s game, and it only works on our computer. It’s not like the website is messed up for everyone.”

“I see,” Sarge mutters. “It’s just, you haven’t reported a Tronkie in weeks.”

“We’re just volunteers,” Evie spits back. “Get a grip.”

Evie ends the call before Sarge can say that maybe for some of them Moonwatchers isn’t just a hobby, that it’s meaningful work, the kind of service to your planet that you can be proud of, maybe tell your grandkids about. Her phone rings. She picks it up without looking at the caller, figuring it’s Evie calling back to apologize. “Look, it’s fine,” Sarge says, before realizing it’s her husband on the line.

Husband Sergeant says he met her one afternoon at the Okinawa McDonald’s. She was there with her son, a small boy who liked to dive into the ball pit and pretend he was in another planet’s ocean. She’s also in the military, an engineer of some sort, electrical or maybe software, who cares. All his words started to run together at some point. Her husband, like Sarge, had stayed back in the States. He’s an attorney in Salt Lake City and is more in love with the law than with her. Sarge considers how our country is our laws and our people, and how easy it is to manipulate both, and therefore how easy it is to manipulate our country. Once, standing in line to vote, Sarge let the person behind her borrow her pen and when he went to vote he said on a whim he voted for her candidate, even though he was on the other side, all because of the grace of spirit she had shown. Sarge reminds herself not to think in terms of sides. It gets so much more complicated when you consider the larger universe we’re all a part of.

Sarge doesn’t sleep that night. She waits as long as she can, until the sun shows and the moon has almost faded, before she Facetimes Byll, who is still in bed, groggy, a blanket covering his face up to his eyes. “Mom, it’s so early.” “I have something to tell you. About Dad.” “I think I know,” he says.

“How?”

“I had a feeling.”

Sarge wants to ask Byll about the origins of his feelings, but it’s way too early. The thing is, she’s relieved Husband Sergeant—why does she keep calling him that? Scot, his name is Scot. She’s relieved Scot has found someone new, she tells herself, then sleeps for the rest of the day, until night.

*

The concrete evidence of her waning marriage puts the Moonwatchers debacle into perspective. She manages to talk to Evie. She thanks her for her service, and not long after, Evie begins reporting Tronkies again. Sarge keeps an eye on her, just in case. She’s more focused on the cams now, though she does still do the crossword at night, after she puts Leni to bed. Sarge can hear her in the other room, singing to Leni, the same lullabies she sang to Byll as a boy. She hums along. By the time Leni is asleep, Sarge has dinner made. She minimizes the Moonwatchers cams and does the crossword with Evie. She does a private little dance when the celebration song plays.  

Trinka finds the news of Evie’s game amusing and, on the phone, asks Sarge if she minds if she asks Evie for the software. “I want to create my own little creatures,” she laughs.

“Sure, do whatever,” Sarge tells her, even though she wishes she would not. Or that she would at least wait until they were together again to test it out, whenever that might be.

The distance between them isn’t great, but it’s enough to make the majority of their plans dissolve into apologies. If Trinka lived across town, in Tucson, they could meet whenever they wanted. If in Phoenix, every weekend. But Flagstaff is just far enough away. Subtleties in time and distance make two-hundred-and sixty miles ten times farther than one-hundred-and-sixty. Perhaps it’s best this way, perhaps the distance ensures they cannot observe each other too closely, so that whatever they imagine each other to be can continue to exist, two deceptively smooth-seeming spheres orbiting one another ad infinitum.

*

Sarge finds a photo of the new woman on Scot’s friend’s Facebook account. Privacy settings keep her from seeing the woman’s full profile, so she googles the name, opens the woman’s LinkedIn in an incognito window, and learns where she earned her degrees, plural, and scans all the commendations she’s received. She wonders if she reminds Scot of her or if she’s more of a complement, and then feels shitty for even caring, for defining herself and other people in relation to him. She leaves LinkedIn and navigates to Moonwatchers to clear her head. Clavius is calm and quiet. She breathes in deep and imagines herself there, camped on the crater’s edge. Would the other Lunatics watch her on the cams? Who would she think of when she looked across the cratered terrain towards Earth? She wipes at dirt on her screen, and when the dirt doesn’t move, she zooms in. She doesn’t even wait for the Tronkie to move east across the border before she hovers her mouse over its body and clicks.

*

The next weekend Trinka video-calls Sarge. She shares her screen, opens her browser to Moonwatchers, and loads the livestream for camera 12, to show Sarge the virtual beings she’s birthed. Blue-and-red-striped creatures gallop across the screen. “Moon zebra,” Trinka says.

“And that?” Sarge asks, when the camera zooms in on a spotted cephalopod writhing in a pool of water at the base of a crater.

“A leopard-octopus.”

As Trinka pans across the landscape, Sarge spots unusual activity. It’s one of Leni’s rams, dancing. “Wait, what’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Trinka says, “but I’ve seen them around.”

Sarge opens Moonwatchers on her own laptop, and switches from camera 17 to camera 12, where Trinka’s moon zebras canter across the screen. How did they get on her computer? She pans the camera and there they are, Leni’s rams, climbing the steep face of Mons Pico. “I have to go,” she tells Trinka, and ends the call.

She takes a screenshot of the rams to send to Evie. She doesn’t know where to begin. She starts typing out questions, asking about the logistics of how this could happen, then deletes those because it doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is they’re here, clogging up her screen, shielding the Tronkies. She types out a few sentences chastising Evie for her carelessness, her disregard for this mission, and deletes those too. Instead, she sends the screenshot with a single question: What the fuck?

“When I sent it to Trinka,” Evie replies, “I must’ve forgotten to remove the line of code that makes the program social.” “What does that mean?” Sarge asks.

“Technically, anyone who visits Moonwatchers has the ability to create new virtual creatures and release them on the moon.”

“But how did they get on my screen?”

When Evie doesn't reply immediately, Sarge video-calls.

“I’m looking into it,” Evie says, banging away at her keyboard.

Meanwhile, on the Moonwatchers forum, someone posts the link to a random person’s tweet about the new game, which has gone viral. Traffic to the site shoots up exponentially. So many new virtual creatures are released on the moon that it’s impossible to monitor for Tronkies. “What’s happening?” Sarge shouts at Evie, who’s shaking her head, still banging on her keyboard. Another link in the forum, this one to a video clip on CNN. A Lunar Air Force commander complains of poor access to landing sites. Military footage shows swarms of strange creatures congregated near the moon’s airport. “I thought they were only virtual,” Sarge says, stunned.

It doesn’t make sense, not even to Evie.

In the night sky, the moon is no longer a fixed silver object. It glitters like fish scales as the imagined creatures crawl over its surface, perfect camouflage for the Tronkolites, to say nothing of what these new foreign creatures themselves might do.

*

When Trinka calls, later that week, Sarge doesn’t pick up, because she knows Trinka’s just going to cancel their plans to meet. She’s been working at the observatory so much this week, on a top-secret project, which she insists has nothing to do with the new creatures, but Sarge knows better. No voicemail, just a text: Got called in, sorry.

*

The president takes over the airwaves and explains that the country is considering a nuclear option. “It’s impossible to monitor activity,” she explains. “We reason the most logical course of action is to destroy the host of this chaos.”

The moon has hung there for billions of years and in a matter of hours it will be gone.

Soon after the president’s announcement, Sarge gets a call from an unknown number with a Tempe area code. There’s silence on the other end, then a click. A familiar voice says, “Good evening, ma’am. I’m calling on behalf of the moon.”

She recognizes his voice. “Who is this?”

“I’m a student at Arizona State University, calling on behalf of the Lunar Preservation Committee.”

“Byll?”

A pause, then a sigh. “We use these computers that dial randomly,” he explains, exasperated.

“I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

“A lot’s going on.”

“I know, I know.” Sarge wishes she could go back in time to when he wouldn’t be away, but here, with her. “What is this group you’re volunteering with?”

“It’s nothing,” he says. “We just don’t want to see the moon exploded.”

“But what about the threat from the new species, not to mention the

Tronkies?”

“We have no evidence they’re a threat. We never have.”

“Byll, listen. You know better than anyone I don’t want to see the moon destroyed, but—”

“This is so reactionary,” he interrupts. “We haven’t even tried to communicate with them.”

“Byll, I’m really not in the mood to argue. How are classes?”

He hangs up, and Sarge calls back, but the number he called from connects to someone else, and he won’t pick up his cell.

*

The night of the nuclear explosion Sarge spreads out a blanket on her driveway, to sleep under the moon a final time. In the sky, a starfish on fire, purple and orange. Soon, an aurora appears, a feathery streak of amber set against the glow of a deep red sky. After staring for so long Sarge can see the colors whether her eyes are open or closed.

A buzz in her pocket. The Pacific, Scot texts, is so serene without the tides.

Of course he would use the moon’s demise as a means to reconnect.

Sarge doesn’t text him back but checks Twitter for videos of the placid sea. Scientists say without the tides churning, circulating nutrients, millions of ocean species will die. Sarge wants to drive the six hours to the coast to see for herself, to say her goodbyes to the whales and octopi, but authorities have cautioned citizens to stay inside: small fragments of molten moon have been raining down on Earth. Apparently one took out a bridge on I-10, blocking traffic westbound. From inside her house Sarge can already feel the Earth’s increased wobble, the planet’s now more elliptical orbit around the sun.

Sarge tries calling Byll, but he doesn’t pick up.

She signs on to Moonwatchers, to chat in the forums, but almost everyone who matters has deleted their account in fear they will be reprimanded for unintentionally bringing about the moon’s end, according to their posts in the goodbye thread. Even Janus is gone, which seems to indicate that maybe there was a real person behind the account all along, or else the military engineers themselves were ordered to delete the bot, also wanting to remove all traces of their involvement, to keep the history of this failed experiment from ever being recorded in full. For the first time since she joined Moonwatchers, Sarge sees her name in first place on the leaderboard, which ups her status from admin to super-admin, giving her full control of the site. Moonwatchers now belongs to her, but does it matter? The moon and the cams and even the lunar tanks are now no more than debris spinning through space.

The president is working with a team of multinational corporations on elaborate plans to design a new moon, but that probably won’t launch into orbit for another three years, maybe four. In the meantime, Sarge watches the sky, hoping to identify larger fragments of moon that may coalesce back together into a new moon. It won’t be the same, not as spherical, but surely a cobbled-together moon is better than no moon at all.

*

Not long after the moon is destroyed, Scot shows up in Tucson, trying to make amends. Trinka is there, and Sarge has to lie and tell him she is a Lyft driver who’s lost her phone and keys. Scot feels bad for Trinka and offers her a hundred-dollar bill. Trinka looks at Sarge, then Scot looks at Sarge, both waiting for her to speak. “You guys,” Sarge says, followed by a bunch of words she regrets, or words that describe a scenario she regrets constructing.

Trinka insists that Sarge allow Scot to sleep on the couch, just for the night. “Collisions are the fastest way for celestial bodies to grow,” Trinka whispers, or at least that’s what Sarge thinks she says. Maybe it’s, “Divisions are the surest way for terrestrial bodies to slow,” or maybe, “I missed you and I especially love you.”

That night in bed, with Trinka asleep beside her, Sarge remembers how she likes it best when she and Scot have sex after not seeing each other for a long time, or else when he wakes her at night, only halfway, so that she can be in a hazy dream state. She doesn’t go to him, but she doesn’t curl into Trinka either.

In the morning, when Sarge goes to put on the coffee, she finds Byll in the kitchen, searching through the cabinets. “Dad texted me,” he says. “Don’t you have oatmeal or something?” She shushes him, because Scot is still asleep on the couch, and immediately regrets this instinct to protect her estranged husband.

Sometimes it feels like her brain and her body are a quarter-million miles apart.

The coffee maker gurgles.

Scot stretches on the sofa. “Smells good,” he groans. “Trinka still sleeping?”

Sarge hoped Scot would keep quiet about Trinka, who woke up early this morning to go on a hike. She turns to Byll and quickly tries to decide the best way to explain her to him, or to explain herself to him. “So, you should know I have a friend over,” she begins.

“I know who she is,” Byll says. “She always tags you in her photos on Facebook.”

Before Sarge can respond, Trinka comes through the front door. Over her shoulder, she carries a small purple creature, about the size of a six-month-old human. She pats its back. The creature does a violin-yell, a bright, open-stringed sound. Scot puts his hands over his ears. Sarge and Byll stand there, frozen. “Can you hold him?” Trinka asks Sarge.

“Yes,” Byll says, before Sarge can say anything. He sits down on the couch and opens his arms. “How did you get here?” he asks, cradling the creature. It doesn’t reply, or at least it doesn’t reply in a manner Sarge can understand. “We have to get help,” Byll says.

“We have to report it,” Scot says.

Byll holds the creature closer. Sarge sits down on the couch, next to her son and the creature. It strokes Sarge’s arm gently, a sad look in its watery eyes, as if it knows a secret about her that has yet to surface. Sarge moves her arm away. She has the strange feeling that this creature knows her from another place, a place that almost was, or is, on some other plane of existence. She feels a kind of communion with her selves, scattered across dimensions.

“What’s your name?” Sarge asks. She places her hand on her chest. “My name is Sarge.”

The creature mimics her. My name is Sarge. Sarge tries again. “No. Me, Sarge. You?” No. Me, Sarge. You? Byll tries. “My name is Byll.” My name is Byll. Now Scot. “What are you?” What are you?

“Stop, you’re confusing it.” Stop, you’re confusing it. “What’s it doing?” What’s it doing?

Its face is wrinkled and pocked, like an overripe orange in the desert sun left to shrivel and rot. It moans and stretches. Its bones—bones?—crackle. Mini-fireworks, internal. Sarge takes its hand but it pulls away. It shrivels into a ball, smaller and smaller, until it is gone.

Was it death, Sarge wonders, or some foreign form of departure?

Does it matter how someone leaves, or just that they’re here no longer?

Sarge doesn’t know what to say or what to do after the creature disappears. Nobody does. Byll’s arms are still in a cradle position. Scot’s hands are still on his head. Trinka stares at the empty space where the creature had been. For a few minutes, they were bound together by something unknown to them, and now it is gone. “You should leave,” Sarge says to Scot, but she’s not looking directly at him, and so everyone takes this as an order.

Sarge inspects her house from this vantage on the couch as her guests shuffle out. The plants need water, she should sort through the mail, when was the last time the bug man came to spray the perimeter? When everyone’s gone, she grabs her computer from the coffee table and launches Moonwatchers. The explosion toasted all the cameras, so all that comes up is a sheet of black. Empty space is a fingerprint-smudged computer screen. Still, she searches, and sees a flash at the screen’s edge. Her silhouette, reflected. She positions her mouse and clicks. Clicks again.

She waits, and when nothing happens, she navigates to the admin panel and clicks the button marked Delete next to “moonwatchers.org.” Are you sure? a pop-up asks.

“Yes,” she says out loud, then clicks Yes.

Your site will no longer exist.

“Okay,” she says, impatient, then clicks OK.

When she reloads moonwatchers.org, a generic message reads, Site not found.

It feels good to have created space in the world, to finally feel first-hand how the universe expands.

Josh Riedel is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. A Yaddo fellow and University of Arizona MFA graduate, his short fiction appears in One Story and Sycamore Review. His debut novel Please Report Your Bug Here is forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2022. Visit his website at joshriedel.com