The telescope was old and battered; he’d bought it at the yard sale across the street. Old Mrs. Schrumpf (her name was all he really knew about her) seemed oddly relieved when he handed over his $4.00 and picked up the disintegrating cardboard box with the pieces rolling around inside. Mr. Schrumpf used to shuffle among the sprawling Victorian fixer-uppers of the ancient neighborhood but it had been some time since the last sighting and the neighbors entertained themselves with all sorts of speculation. The telescope had belonged to him.

     His interest in astronomy was a new addition to the flotsam and jetsam of his solitary life. The sky had been of little interest until one night, about a week before his fiftieth birthday, he happened to look up from his crumbling front porch and noticed the Milky Way rolling and twisting across the spaces between the peaks of the old roofs, seeming to weave its way through the waving black silhouettes of trees whispering on the evening breeze.

     Even he knew this was impossible; the hazy nights of August and light pollution hid all but the most determined stars and planets. Retreating to the sweltering security of his living room he rooted through drawers crammed with ten year old bills and rusting hardware, glass doorknobs meticulously arranged in multiples of three and postcards from long vanished tourist traps out west. He finally located a pair of opera glasses which he promptly trained upon the southern sky.

     The result was disappointing. The low powered glasses brought the phenomenon a little closer than the naked eye but not close enough to reveal any details. And yet, as his eyes grew accustomed to the soft mother-of-pearl radiance and he kneeled to rest his elbows on the porch railing he was sure he detected movement, as if he was looking down upon some great river from high above the clouds.

     This was startling. Stars didn’t behave that way. Recognizing his personal limitations he wasted little time attempting to formulate some half baked hypothesis. Nor did he consult neighbors or textbooks; if it was a new thing it was sure to make the news. If it didn’t make the news then it was either as it should be or a hallucination. It didn’t matter which.

     It was the morning after his discovery that Mrs. Schrumpf had the yard sale. He had hoped to run into the old man; he’d seen him out on the lawn on clear nights in the past, looking wide eyed into the void above, swinging his telescope this way and that. Maybe he knew something interesting. But Mr. Schrumpf was nowhere to be found and his wife was selling his belongings, sighing with relief.

     He spent most of the afternoon assembling the telescope and pointing it here and there in order to familiarize himself with its operation. He looked down the nearly deserted street, through the swaying trees toward the airport or into black, empty second floor windows (there was a young woman who liked to change in front of hers; he avoided that one.) When the mailman brought his disability check he didn’t look up or say hello.

     As evening began to color the western sky the shape (as he had decided to call it) emerged like a growing shadow from the shimmering blues, pinks and yellows. Now the movement of the thing was quite apparent even to the naked eye. Like a river of smoke it curled majestically from east to west, rolling back upon itself, spreading into lustrous pools or constricting into twisting, faster moving channels. For the time being he forgot all about the telescope and watched as the neighborhood sank into black silence, standing against the radiant sky like the phony storefronts of frontier themed tourist attractions. Windows reflected the inferno of the sinking sun and the cool blues of the star splashed east and the shape appeared framed in countless rectangles, shattering the velvet uniformity of the material world.

     Somewhere along the street wind chimes echoed among the still, silent houses and he realized the usual evening noises were missing. There was no cacophony of cars rushing along the interstate a mile to the south, no sirens ripping the air, no rumbling airplanes scratching their way up the wall of the sky. There may have been dogs barking but so far away he couldn’t tell for sure. There were the chimes. There were crickets, louder and more satisfying than any he’d heard before. There was a chorus of birds. And…

     There was the grand tone of the shape itself, heard through his feet and along his back, like a bow being drawn across the strings of some vast celestial bass violin. It was tranquil. It was ecstatic. It was all he had never found in the crystalline order of arranged objects or the reckless abandon of a trip to the alien west.

     The sky grew darker and swarmed with stars. It was time for the telescope.

     A light winked on in the darkness across the street. A door opened. There were footsteps upon a wooden porch.

     With his left eye he peered into the blurred circle of light surrounded by blackness. He turned the knob slowly, carefully, even though his hand had begun to shake. The river tumbled and sparkled before him and as the image grew sharper he found it was not made up of stars at all.

     The river was full of people.

     Faces flowed across the circle of the eyepiece, moving swiftly on the celestial current. He could tell nothing about them; they were neither tormented nor beatific. They simply were.

     He backed away from the telescope, not knowing what to think or how to feel. Night had fallen in earnest, revealing frozen gulfs between the knife points of savage stars. As the earth turned the shape stretched itself downward, a part of it reaching into the world like a tentacle of smoke.

     He never decided what to think or how to feel. Across the street old Mrs. Schrumpf would cry for the rest of the night. But first she would bring the telescope home to sell again.

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     Harry Lang currently resides in south eastern Pennsylvania with his wife, six children and a cat, all of whom are better looking and more talented than he.  He has been published in AlienSkin Magazine and Bewildering Stories.  His literary influences include Fyodor Dostoevsky, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cordwainer Smith and David R. Bunch.  Interests include painting, theology and Asian history.

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