What Sleeps Under the Horizon

When Arti first sees the stars slowly melting out of the sky, she thinks maybe she it's time to go to bed. The second time it happens, she thinks maybe her coworkers were right and she really shouldn’t be trusted in the huge observatory alone. The third time it happens? Well. She figures out that maybe something is going on. 

Tonight marks the fourth night in a row where she’s staring at the sky, perched in the cushy leather seat of a billion-dollar telescope, staring at Ursa Major as the silvery light of the stars start to melt down towards the horizon. Molten mercury tracks sluggishly through the sky, dripping lazily to spill over the horizon. The stars stretch down, down, down, until all that’s left of them is a memory.

Then they bounce back. And the whole process starts again. 

Arti blinks. Hard. Ursa Major continues to melt into oblivion. Well. That could be a problem. 

***

Most of the constellations we know today were named by the Ancient Greeks. Every constellation has its own story. Heroes and monsters immortalized in the night sky. In the storybooks, most people can agree on a consistent story leading to the constellation coming into being. Zeus transforms a hero into stars, Hera turns an affair child into a constellation, etcetera. A reward. A punishment. An acknowledgment. The law holds true for almost every constellation. A leads to B leads to the night sky. 

But not Ursa Major. 

Ursa Major is an exception. Allegedly, she used to be a beautiful huntress turned into a bear. People don’t quite agree on the reason why. A punishment sometimes, a reward others. Sometimes she got to meet her child—Ursa Minor—sometimes he killed her, sometimes he didn’t. The ancient Greeks just couldn’t agree on how Ursa Major had tiptoed up into the sky and what had happened to her before she turned into stars.

Well, Arti has some theories. She’s been researching, pulling books off the shelf at her library on mythology and quantum physics and bear ecology. The librarian has raised her eyebrows at the combination of choices but Arti has forged on, simply smiling benignly as she handed over her library card. At home, she’d spread the books out over her collapsible dining table, put on Stupid Girl by Garbage on repeat, and buried herself in pages thick with scrawling ink. 

So far, what she’d found out was brown bears are the most widespread, Zeus was a whore, and it is entirely possible that Ursa Major existed as something giant and incomprehensible to the Ancient Greeks.

It was as good an explanation as any. 

Otherwise, why would only Ursa Major melt from the sky, as if being pulled back to some physical body, finally stirring after millennia upon millennia of peacefully sleeping? Space. Atoms. The cosmos. All contain countless untold secrets humanity is only just starting to discover. There very well could be something out there that looks like a colossal bear but is made up of something else entirely, allowing it to interact and project energy thousands of lightyears away while it rests somewhere in the still unexplored wilds of Earth. 

Arti thinks it would be a little cocky to rule out a theory based on what humanity knows now. There’s always more to discover. Just look at the Ancient Greeks.

Which only leaves one question remaining. Why now? Why would whatever bear-shaped amalgamation of energy Ursa Major really is wake up now?

Real bears have had inconsistencies in their hibernation schedule recently as a result of changing weather patterns. As the earth heats up and winter comes later and later, hibernation schedules keep moving back and back. It’s entirely possible that whatever Ursa Major really is, is being affected by the changing global temperatures. 

Heat is energy too, after all.

 Maybe that energy is making it—her— wake up. 

***

“Ursa Major is melting,” Arti says, trying to keep her voice as firm as a California redwood, but probably ending up somewhere a little bit closer to a drooping willow. Well. She tried her best. 

“Um?” Elliot, the kindest of her coworkers, blinks up at her, stubby eyelashes fluttering as he wrinkles his nose.

Arti forges on, blurting out her theory with all the tact of a bull in heat, “I mean, it’s not really. Kind of. It’s hard to explain. It’s some weird reflection of a colossal bear-energy thing.”

“Dude, what are you talking about?” Elliot asks, thin lips disappearing as he purses them up at her in disbelief. 

Arti thinks he looks a little like an annoyed fish. All sharp angles, bulging eyes, and puckered lips. Out of all her coworkers, he’s the only one Arti can imagine at least hearing her out. If she can’t convince him, then everyone else is already a lost cause. She can do this. 

“Ursa Major is a reflection of some kind of energy that, like, takes a form similar to that of a bear. I think it might share some ecological similarities too. Or maybe it’s just mimicking. Anyways, it’s been hibernating since Grecian times. It’s waking up now. I’m not one hundred percent sure why, but I have a theory it has something to do with global warming.”

Well. That was a train wreck. 

“Oh yeah? And what type of bear is it then?” Elliot taps a finger against the desk, smiling up at her in a way that makes her skin feel all the bad kinds of electric. 

“I don’t know. I’m an astrologist, not a biologist. And it might not even be a ‘bear’ as we know ‘bears’.” Hasn’t she already said this? Why won’t Elliot just listen?

Elliot clicks his tongue and the sound echoes, bouncing off the papers haphazardly thrown over his desk and around his empty office. “If you don’t even know what type of bear this ‘colossus’ is, then how do you expect us to take you seriously? Really, Arti, if you’re gonna make up a story, you should at least have all the details figured out.”

“I’m not making it up. I have pictures of the stars melting.” Arti rummages in her pocket for her phone, but Elliot grabs her wrist before she can pull it out.

“Just like you weren’t making up that comet last year?” He shakes his head, furrowing his eyebrows in a way Arti supposes is supposed to look commiserating but just makes her heart sink. “And how you had pictures of that?”

Shame burns red-hot through Arti’s cheeks. She really had seen a comet and she really had thought she had taken a picture of it. She had been so sure but when everyone gathered to look at it, the night sky had been as still as a forest in winter and the picture had simply disappeared. As though it had never existed in the first place.

 No one had ever really let her live that one down.

“I didn’t make that up either,” she mumbles, and, even to her own ears, her voice is shaky.

“Oh, Arti. It’s okay. We all make mistakes sometimes. Especially after spending all night staring at the same sky. It’s okay.” Elliot pats her shoulder, short fingers cold even through the fabric of Arti’s lavender sweater.

Burning coals settle into Arti’s lungs, curling flames licking up the kindling of her ribs. Smoke clogs her throat, a scream fighting to pour out of her mouth in a deluge of flame and smoke and everything she’s been pushing down since the comet debacle last year. She swallows it, as she always does, and it sticks in her throat, sticky as molasses and impossible to breathe properly through.

“I have to go,” she gasps, and, for a second, she’s surprised when ash doesn’t bubble out with the words.

“You should really take a vacation, Arti,” he calls after her, sticky as syrup and pitying as someone zooming past a deer on the highway.

***

A vacation actually turns out to be a wonderful idea, even if every time Arti thinks the word it burns its way into her ears, sounding suspiciously of Elliot’s patronizing voice and smelling of burning wood. She sends a quick text to her group chat of friends, first telling them she’s going to be a little unreachable for a while and then sending them the picture of melting stars. They tell her to have fun and that her artwork is beautiful. Arti’s ribs burn.

She puts in notice at her work. Tells them she may be back someday, but she won’t make them wait for her. They laugh as they wave her off, exchanging knowing glances as she gathers her stuff from her desk in a beat-up shoe box. Smoke stays locked safely behind her lips. 

That very same night, she packs her telescope carefully into a duffel bag, padded with crumpled sweaters and torn up jeans. She scrawls calculations into her notebook, watching Ursa Major wink at her—deceptively intact without a telescope— from the horizon. 

She books a train ticket to the horizon. 

Or, well, as close to it as she can get. By her calculations, at least. 

By the second day after her spontaneous vacation plan starts taking shape, Arti stands on the train platform, scarf looped over the lower half of her face and duffel burning into her shoulder. The train rolls into the station with a lazy whistle, wheels clicking as it slows to a stop. Commuters rush out as the doors open, conversation rising around her and bouncing off the vaulted roof of the station. 

Is this how Amelia Earhart felt before departing for her flight around the world?. Too big for her skin? stardust and boiling energy crashing together in her veins? Arti feels—real. 

She burns the feeling in the fire nestled between her ribs and steps through the doors.

***

For a while, the news runs stories on her. Her ex-coworkers read them while tutting and shaking their heads, only discussing it long enough to make a couple of crude jokes before they forget about her once again. Her friends read the stories and put them through the shredder. They figure they’ll hear from her soon enough. They’re not the type of people who keep in contact all the time, anyway. 

For a while, the world forgets about Arti.

***

It's hard to continue forgetting her when the observatory, along with a good portion of North America, is rocked by a 4.3 magnitude earthquake at 7:01 am one nondescript mid-march morning. Harder still when a rumbling growl radiates out from Arti's horizon, exactly where she'd marked on a map at the observatory the day before she quit.