Asteroid: City

The Junior Stargazer and Space Cadet convention was, by all accounts, a modest affair. Fifteen children, their parents, and a handful of military observers had gathered in the shadow of the crater for the annual "Scholarship & Celestial Discovery Rally." The children, all between nine and twelve, wore miniature pressed uniforms and cardboard helmets painted with silver radiator paint. They took turns presenting dioramas of lunar colonies and reciting the chemical compositions of Jovian moons. The highlight was to be the crowning of the Junior Stargazer of the Year, a title for which the frontrunner was a severe-looking boy named Woodrow, who had built a working spectrograph from a toilet-paper roll and a shattered prism.

He thought about it. The apartment in New York where his wife’s dresses still hung in the closet. The stage door of the Cort Theatre, where his name was still on a faded playbill. The back seat of his son-in-law’s station wagon, with three children who had just watched their father speak to a creature from another world and were already treating it as just another Tuesday. Asteroid City

Woodrow glanced in the rearview mirror. The town shrank behind them. The crater was already just a dent in the earth. The Junior Stargazer and Space Cadet convention was,

A woman beside him laughed. She was a magnetic, weary-looking creature with ink-stained fingers and a notebook perpetually open. Her name was Midge, and she was the mother of one of the other Stargazers, a quiet boy named Clifford who had built a replica of the Sputnik core out of chicken wire and baked beans tins. The highlight was to be the crowning of

Stanley read it. His face changed. Something behind his eyes—a door left ajar. "How do you know?"

Before Woodrow could answer, the creature’s slitted eyes widened. It looked up. Everyone looked up. The sky had begun to peel. Not metaphorically. Literally. A corner of the blue overhead curled back like wallpaper, revealing a void of absolute, silent black. Through that tear, figures could be seen—enormous, blurred shapes moving in a world of muted grays and sepia. They looked like stagehands. They looked like gods. They looked like men in coveralls pushing a scaffold.

The ceremony began at 4:17 PM. The children stood at attention in the bleachers. The town’s mayor, a man who also ran the single gas station and the diner, read a proclamation about "the indomitable spirit of celestial inquiry." Woodrow was called to the podium. He adjusted his spectrograph. He began to speak about the composition of the asteroid that had created the crater—high in iridium, low in nickel, an outlier from the core of a broken planet.