Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash
Long ago, the moon spun out of its orbit for unknown reasons. Then the stars began to die. No, wait. The stars were dancing, not dying. And the moon left its orbit to get soda and chips. The gods were asleep, and the universe was throwing a house party without their permission. Man was pissed. Without the moon, the ocean flattened like a dog lying on its back. As Earth’s pirouettes sped up, the days tightened. An international hair crisis spread through mathematicians who went bald trying to rewrite calendars. Worse, Orion’s bow straightened, Ursula Major’s paw disappeared, and Virgo’s arm twisted at a broken angle.
The stars did not care. It had been five billion years since anything exciting happened. When they gathered around the sun to toast, their heat devoured the first four planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth. They shriveled up like raisins, reddish-brown, almost black, but before anyone could scream or cry or pray, someone shouted,
“Look! There’s Blake!” A milky tail chased the meteor. Cheers rose for the shooting star. In tradition, everyone tilted their head back and took a shot of emerald nebula, their blunder already dissolving into stardust.
*
In the middle of Asteroid XI’s new song (dubbed the hottest release of the millennium), the music suddenly cut off. Confusion swept everyone under its wing. The crowd began to boo. Someone overturned a table, and nachos flew. Shrieks followed as salsa and drinks stained dresses into black and red abstract art.
“Sorry,” DJ Pollux said. “Technical issues.” More boos. A thousand years later, the speakers stuttered to life and a sound finally broke through. But by then, Asteroid XI was no longer cool. Lil Uzivert was the new “it” artist.
*
Arcturus won twenty consecutive games of meteorite beer pong and broke a Universe Record. He climbed onto the table.
“I just want to thank Tauri and Cephei for believing in me,” he said. “And to all the haters out there—walk into a black hole!” Arcturus flashed two middle fingers, a scorpion tattooed on each. The crowd roared. He raised his arms and fell backward, a wave of hands reaching to catch him. He crowd surfed until he collapsed, swollen and twice his normal size. His friends dumped him in the corner of the solar system where he snored for the rest of the party.
*
At one point, Rigel sneezed and extinguished Saturn’s three thousand rings. No one blinked twice.
*
A scream pierced the air: all the chips were gone. Horror rippled through the crowd like a disease. The moon quickly assembled a search party. They were instructed to leave no planet unrotated. Some would even go as far as the corners of the universe. Luckily, Pollux had an emergency stash of chips in his safe, melting the screams into hysterical tears.
*
Polaris heard from Antares who heard from Canopus who heard from Pleiades that Betelgeuse made out with Vega. Polaris also heard that it was hot. In fact, it was so hot, Betelgeuse burned blue. When Vega’s boyfriend, Sirius, heard the rumor, his flames melted Pluto, but no one cared about Pluto because he was tiny and high-pitched.
“Dude,” Betelgeuse said to Sirius. “Don’t be mad if I have the bigger mass.”
Sirius loomed over him. “I’ll blast you into a black hole, you son of a proton,” he said, before ramming into Betelgeuse. Vega screamed. In the fight, the oddball Uranus was sent rolling on its side in a streak of seasick blue. Neptune dissolved into dust and gas after Sirius hurled at Betelgeuse. Jupiter bruised purple when Betelgeuse’s fist missed Sirius.
*
When the gods woke up, they found man extinct, planets smashed, and a bloodied Betelgeuse and Sirius in the center of it all. The universe shook with their fury. The stars scattered in a fall of light.
The god sentenced the stars to immovable dots, far away from the Earth. They rebirthed the solar system, spun new galaxies from their breaths. They tried to heal the remaining planets, but Uranus never fully recovered. If you look at Jupiter, you can still see his bruise, glaring like a swollen red eye.
Grace Q. Song is a Chinese-American writer from New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Gone Lawn, CHEAP POP, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Passages North, PANK, and elsewhere. A high school senior, she enjoys listening to ABBA and Yoke Lore.