Starcosmo

Chapter 1: Starfall

Her name was Jaden, and she was the first to see the stars fall.

Jaden didn't know this, of course: she was all of eleven years old and busy flipping through COSMO and waiting for her nails to dry when it happened. A streak at her peripheral vision, out the window. She ignored it, of course.

A few minutes later, it happened again.

This time she snapped her head around, annoyed that the world had gotten up the gumption to go and do something, something that interrupted her article-skimming and fingernail-drying.

Jaden was a typical eleven-going-on-twelve year old; self-involved, narcissistic, and early to mature. She already considered herself a teen -- what her dad called an adolescent --  sorta. She was just as smart as any twelve- or thirteen-year-old any old way.

Jaden threw her magazine on the bed, smacked her gum and kept her pretty fingernails from touching anything as she flounced over to the window, hands held high like an emergency room surgeon post-scrub. She put her fingers on the windowframe and tapped (but carefully) and looked out.

In the view was the same boring Iowa backyard she'd been staring at for the last eleven boring years.

Nothing ever happened out there; just the chickens and the chicken-scratch that her dad said made them "primary producers", whatever that meant, an old-fashioned windmill for water pumping, and, in the background fields, peeping over the horizon, a hundred heads of the new-fashioned windmills that powered America.

It was dusk, the sky a rosy purple, looking almost soft to the touch. Here and there, stars were beginning to twinkle. The Ordinance had gotten people all across the nation to install redlights for after dark, so as to reduce sky pollution, and so Jaden remembered the night sky getting more and more full of stars as she got older. Her grandfather told her the story of how the exact opposite had happened when he was a boy, so she already had a template for the world totally reversing itself, but it didn't matter: she would still

be surprised by this next reversal.

She saw one.

It was a falling star. Just a silent, gorgeous streak across the twilight blue, as if God himself had put his finger on a twinkling star and smudged it out of existence.

"Cool!" Jaden breathed, despite herself. Of course she'd seen shooting stars beore, but didn't they only happen at night? This was the first one she'd seen at dusk.

Then she saw another.

Her eyes narrowed; this one had lasted an awful long time. So long, it almost didn't look like a shooting star anymore. It almost looked like some kind of beam of light.

Three more, each one on the heels of the last.

Jaden stepped back from the window. Something was not right. Something was giving her a deep case of

the creeps. These stars, or streaks, were way too close.

She watched as two more stars fell, right in front of her -- she could see as they faded that they'd blurred out the Williams' barn, two miles away across the pasture. They were falling in her yard.

Those weren't the shooting stars she knew.

She counted stars, breathless, her fingers tightly gripping the wood window pane: one. . . two. . . three. . .four. . . five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten

"Mom!?"

Jaden ran from the room. On the way out, she kicked over the bottle of nail polish.

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