Asteroid City -

The first creature materialized beside it with a soft pop of displaced air. It reached out its three-fingered hand. The smaller one took it. They stood together in the crater, two impossible beings under a sky full of stars that were, for the first time all night, exactly where they were supposed to be.

Then the screaming started. The aftermath was a bureaucratic fever dream. Military jeeps arrived within the hour, followed by men in black suits who had no names and no smiles. The town was quarantined. No one in, no one out. The Stargazer children were confined to the diner, where they drew pictures of the creature on napkins with remarkable calm. Andromeda, Woodrow’s daughter, finally took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. She drew the creature’s face with exacting, anatomical precision.

"So," she said. "What now?"

Then the sky flickered.

She wrote something in her notebook. Then she tore out the page and handed it to him. It was a single sentence: The alien was looking for its child. Asteroid City

Stanley was a celebrated actor in another life—or perhaps in this very life, it was hard to tell. He had a habit of stepping out of the frame of a conversation, as if searching for his mark. He stood now at the rim of the crater, a man in a rumpled seersucker suit, and stared down into the geological punchbowl. The impact, millions of years ago, had fused the sandstone into a glassy, malformed obsidian that reflected the sky in distorted, funhouse fragments.

Thank you.

Woodrow glanced in the rearview mirror. The town shrank behind them. The crater was already just a dent in the earth.