The first star took its time, somersaulting down to earth slowly, letting its descent be noted by the late night stargazing lovers and loners. And then through the night the others followed, some more hurriedly, others imitating the first’s leisurely downward spiral. When the last star loosened itself from its moorings, the sky lost its last pin and peeled from its divine backdrop. It floated to the ground like a napkin wrested from a hand by the breeze. It draped itself over the city much like a child’s blanket fort slung over chairs and boxes and coffee tables. It proved both remarkably light and pliant, hanging snagged in tree branches and lying lazily across rooftops. It seeped down into chimneys and smokestacks where soot clung to its nighttime surface. It rested on the streets, black night against asphalt.

The paperboys were the first to experience it, wading under its folds as the sun’s oranges and yellows slowly asserted themselves, like the changing of a mood ring. They brushed their ink-coated hands across its surface as they threw the papers onto doorsteps and all agreed it felt glossy like the Sunday edition ads. In the morning, as people went to grab the paper off the steps or rolled over in bed to face the window, they noticed the sky’s new proximity. The early-morning orange hues of the summer sky were saddling their picket fences or melting from their roofs to hang contently over the front porch or against the window panes. The sky was immediate, dominant, but peaceful. It had drifted down too softly to wake anyone, settling like a snowfall across the city.

Policeman Basker, who doubled as Scout Master for local troop 210 and who, by necessity, took to walking his route, said the celestial ceiling felt soft and malleable like marshmallows. Kimberly Linkaster, whose pigtails bobbed as she sat on her father’s shoulders to paw at the blue, low-slung sky, said it felt stretchy like rubber bands and soft like guinea pigs. Others said it felt like loam, balloons, bubble gum, diapers. Most people said, self-assured, that the sky felt exactly as they would have guessed had they ever had the chance to run their fingers over it, but as to a specific texture or feel, no one could agree. Putting down an eraser, the artist Gustav Greve reached out his studio window to massage the sky between his fingertips and decided it felt gummy, like an eraser. But no one saw it as an excuse to break from the routine of daily life. Businessmen in suits worked their way to the office, lifting up the sky and throwing it over their shoulders when it drooped down to ground level. Rene Enzo, the owner and head chef of Enzo’s Fine Mediterranean Dining, propped it up with poles so his customers could still eat outside. It was a mostly cloudless day, but here and there little white pockets hovered—children ran through them, coming out speckled with droplets of water. Elizabeth Benson’s mother said she much preferred the puffs of clouds to broken fire hydrants or lawn-swamping sprinklers.

Leroy Gillman, with his bent back and large, buggy eyes, had spent most of his evenings and spare afternoons hunched over a metal detector combing the park for lost valuables. But the night after the sky appeared on his doorstep, he caught word of the singed holes where the sky had once been held up and the next morning he began searching for the fallen stars. He wasn’t sure exactly what a fallen star would look like, but figured he’d know one when he saw one, unless maybe it had burned out and faded to an unrecognizable charcoal. He gave up after the first week and concluded they had been made of dust or some such thing and had dissolved upon impact. His metal detector came back out and he again began canvassing the park, holding up the sky when needed as if vacuuming under a chair.

The moon and sun had both remained faithful to the sky. The moon had landed on top of Mabel Hollister’s bakery. The first night Mabel had stood outside her bakery, hands on her hips, flour in her hair, until the sun eventually rose and the moon disappeared, just to make sure the moon’s new position was just as harmless as its last. The moon never failed to reappear, casting an opulent glow on the building every twilight, providing it with six or seven hours of spotlighted fame each night. Some evenings it appeared only as a sliver, bending itself across the peak of the roof; other nights it bloomed into its full self, hanging over the edges of the shingled roof like melting snow frozen into place by a cold night. Mabel began claiming the moon as hers in conversation with customers, and before long she was advertising her new one-of-a-kind moon muffins.

The sun still rose, though that wasn’t really the proper term any more. It started at 1st Street, appearing from the edges of the sky, and slowly worked its way across the city, gliding across the sky-blue surface to its daily destination hanging over the park. The sky there was wrinkled and folded from the trees which held it up here and there, and so the sun had a wavering look to it, like heat waves in the desert. Teenage girls flocked to it in their swimwear to bathe and grow dark in its glow. Despite the sun’s fixed location, it still managed to illuminate the city, sending out its rays like messengers which always reported back at the end of the day as the sun disappeared beyond the sky’s edge.

Couples still frequented the same make-out point, a mesa on the outskirts of the city with a pristine view of the city lights, and, before the sky fell, of the stars. They used to come in cars, sitting on the hoods and looking at the lights or kissing and undressing in the backseats. Now the dark night sky replaced the metal casings of the cars and the couples kissed and loved on a blanket under the blanket of the sky. It rested on their bodies, rising and falling with their passions. An outside view of the scene might have shown a landscape of small, living mounds dotting the mesa top, rippling and shape shifting.

The first big summer rain came early in June. Where the sky hung high enough in the air, the somber, rain-heavy clouds formed as usual, but where it touched down to earth, the clouds made rings around the drooping sky, like dark, ethereal halos, the rain pooling beneath them before spreading quickly outward. Lightning struck occasionally and with the distance between the sky and ground vastly shortened, the bolts reached the ground much faster with power to spare and shattered outward into dozens of electric offshoots, reaching out until they crackled and disappeared. The thunder that followed shook the sky, causing it to flap wildly, like a sail caught in a storm’s fury.

It wasn’t long before the people summoned the courage to peek into the holes the dissipated stars had left punched through the sky. Dr. Forest, the local dentist, was the first. He said he had seen snow, falling quietly and gently on a valley. He told his patients it had made him a little chilly, just watching the powder swirl and drift.

Soon, people everywhere were looking into the little holes, like children peeping through the curtains before the show, looking for someone in particular. During her smoke break, Emma Greening would peer into a hole behind the diner where she worked. She would take a drag and then realign her eye with the hole, which was crudely cut, as if in haste. Yellow and black curled at its edges and flaked off with her touch. On a Wednesday she had watched a sad, fat man tie balloon animals in his living room. Plastic sheets covered all the furniture and Emma swore every picture frame hung crooked. It had put her in a foul mood and she refrained from peering into the hole for a week. When she again put her cheek against the smooth, gummy sky she watched a solitary goose flying in a sky that still hung proper. She was late getting back to work.

Roving bands of boys, grass-stained and lit by summer’s fire, sought out the celestial rifts, sometimes standing on each other’s backs, sometimes climbing trees to peer through the keyholes of space and time. They would lay claim to good holes each day and send out messengers throughout the city to let the other boys know. For the low price of twenty-five to fifty cents they could watch battles, explosions, and love scenes, one at a time, pressed tight against the sky where stars had once held it tight in place.

ne such boy, Jeremy Greenwood, once peered into the hole only to discover his cousin Rachel Winters, who had died in a car crash the spring prior to the sky falling. He accused Freddy Herrington, the hole’s daily proprietor, of arranging the other-worldly rendezvous and fisticuffs ensued. When the dust settled, another of the boys stole a peek into the hole and said he saw a man and woman groping in a car. Jeremy tramped home, fat lip stuck out in a pout.

Sally Dunquist, staring through a hole one day, discovered a circus in mid-show and spent the next several hours looking above the elephants, lions, clowns, and flying trapeze artists at a piece of the sky visible through a tear in the tent’s top.

Reginald Peterson, who lived alone with his books and antique maps, discovered his deceased wife through one of the pinholes, dancing the tango bright and beautiful, her dress wringing itself tight against her legs and then releasing in a flurry of twirling red. He pulled up a lawn chair and fell asleep outside to her twists, turns and thrusts, tears running calmly down his cheeks, a faint smile wavering on his lips.

Father Holiday, a pious, charming man with a long face, hosted a town discussion titled “Glimpses of Heaven?” to get to the bottom of what lay beyond the holes. Crammed in the stiflingly hot church basement, the townspeople debated, sweat collecting on their brows and seeping through their clothes. When the meeting was finally adjourned, the Daily Sun, the town’s newspaper, printed up a story detailing the event. They quoted Gertrude Hanseth, her reading glasses perched in her curly grey hair, as saying, “We agreed the holes are indeed glimpses into Heaven,” while Jared Letterman, her second cousin, assured the paper, “We came to the consensus the holes are in fact our desires and wishes.” Father Holiday simply said, “No comment.”

The Fourth of July posed an obvious problem and it was sadly but indisputably agreed by the Town Council that the annual fireworks show was just not feasible. There was simply not enough room to shoot the skyrocketing missiles. But the youth of the city dug into their reserves from years past (kept for just such an emergency), and pops, whizzes, and bangs were still heard throughout the night. Pieces of the sky were smudged with black stains in the morning, as if the sky had been put through the wash with a pen in its pocket. A few industrious citizens tried to scrub it clean, but found that damage to the sky was not so easily undone.

By mid-July, scribbled, spray-painted tags appeared here and there: red, blue, pink, yellow, black, and green smears of paint. The sky, it turned out, didn’t hold paint well, and color bled out across its surface, dripping down the celestial canvas.

The first posting appeared in August. It was small, made of cardboard and asked for knowledge about the whereabouts of a lost cat. But it got the ball rolling and ads began to appear across the city, stuck to the sky by various adhesives (no one had yet managed to put a nail or staple through the blue). The Town Council met to address the new issue and listened to its citizens pose questions about ownership and advertisement rights for the sky. Peter Keller, the high school biology teacher, fought for the preservation of a clear, unmarred sky from the back of the room, but his voice was lost in the tumultuous talk of possession, claims, deeds, titles, and property rights. It was eventually decided that the sky belonged to the person whose land it fell upon and advertisement rights were thus applicable. And so the townspeople went home, drawing and painting lines on the sky to clearly mark what slice they could legally call their own.

Slowly the sky disappeared beneath layers of posters and announcements. Small patches of blue peeked out here and there between excited, neon sale signs and advertisements for vitamins, weight-loss plans, cars, and beer. Flyers and posters were layered so deep in places that the sky sagged beneath their weight, making it look diseased and sickly. Fences were extended upwards where they weren’t already touching the sky to draw even clearer lines of ownership. Soon people seemed to forget that the sky hanging above their heads was anything more than a drooping billboard.

Mary-Jo Bendicksen, a restless sleeper, was the only one to see it happen and she really didn’t see anything at all. Just a roll over in bed, towards the window, a sleepy yawn, eyes clamped shut, and when she opened them the sky was back where it used to be, miles away. She blamed herself. The paperboys walked around that morning with their hands in the air, so used to running them along the sky as they delivered the morning papers. The artist Gustav Greve sat numbly in his studio all day, lamenting the disappearance of his future masterpiece, which he had been fashioning on the soft, malleable belly of the sky. The garbage men had their work cut out for them, sweeping up all the ads that, having lost their backing, now littered the streets.

The townspeople gathered outside that night, anxious to see if the stars had returned as well. They were reassured with bright winks all across the cloudless night sky. The pins had returned just as intact as the sky they held up.

For most of the townspeople, life went on just as before the sky’s falling. For some there was a day or two of lament as if they had lost a favorite piece of jewelry. There were, however, those who took the sky’s return (or abandonment as some called it) particularly hard. They had grown accustomed to its closeness and felt an odd coziness when it hung so close to their heads. Liz Ingram, shy, quiet and friendless, sat under a tree the first day of the sky’s repositioning and, looking up at the sky, cried. Luis Pintor had played with the sky hanging outside his window as if it were a friend. While his parents fought downstairs, he drew and glued various objects and paper cut-outs to its surface, giving it crude faces which he loudly conversed with to drown out his parents’ harsh words. The morning he woke to find the sky back in place, he discovered a heap of buttons, paper clips, coins and paper cut-outs littering his windowsill. He half-heartedly went back to his GI Joes and Legos. Reginald Peterson, who had seen his late wife dancing the tango in all her beauty, was discovered by a neighbor dead in his living room only days after the sky lifted itself back up.

The Town Council convened several days after the initial shock of the sky’s repositioning. It was decided a memorial would be erected in remembrance of the summer the sky fell. The town felt the job should go to the man who had perhaps lost the most, and Gustav was given the job of honoring his disappeared canvas.

The day of the unveiling, twins Johnny and Willy Shaker were climbing a tree overhanging the park’s creek. At its topmost bough, they found a piece of blue, dangling, snagged on a branch. As Willy held it up to the sky, he lost his balance and fell into the creek, losing his grip on the blue. They watched it hurry over the rocks downstream.

Gustav pulled the cover off his memorial in the center of town to reveal a mirror, fixed in place, looking up.

• Previous
• Home
• Next