God is an Astronaut by Alyson Foster

once a night, they’ll blaze on without warning, transforming the dark into a garish noonday. If I happen to be sleeping, I wake up with my heart in my mouth, thinking that I’ve slept through my alarm and God only knows what has happened while I’ve been dead to the world.)
     
    So for the moment we’re a hostel for Spaceco employees. Or a war room where they’re holed up to plan their defense. There’s Tristan, who’s taking a break from his wife, but there are others too, people I’m pretty sure I’ve never met before: a silver-haired man who wears his silk ties in half-undone lassos around his neck, some boys in flip-flops who look barely old enough to shave, carrying iPhones and laptops. Someone gave them the keypad code to the side door, and so they wander in and out at all hours of the day and night. I’m pretty sure one or two of them are sleeping here, but it’s hard to confirm who’s working what shift. I walked into the bathroom yesterday morning thinking the man in the shower was Liam, but when I said, “We’re out of toothpaste,” talking to myself, as I have begun to do, no longer expecting an answer, a complete stranger’s voice, sotto voce, said, “Check under the sink.”
     
    So this is what I’ve been doing: washing extra towels and turning this into a game. It’s not as hard as you’d think, Arthur. Jack and Corinne and I compete to see who can build the highest tower with the plastic takeout containers piled up in the kitchen. Jack always wins. (For all his ditziness, he’s got Liam’s uncanny engineering gift, an intuition about how to make things stay together and how to take them apart.) We’ve named Liam’s study the Situation Room . That’s where all the meetings are held. Every single chair in the house has been commandeered and moved there, and it’s a pain to reclaim them, so Jack and Corinne and I have taken to eating our dinners while sitting cross-legged in a circle on the kitchen floor. I make pancakes, and the three of us pass around the half gallon of milk, swigging straight from the jug, pretending we’re cowhands out on the range. We were sprawled across the linoleum when one of the younger guys came in to nuke a burrito in the microwave, and he visibly jumped when he saw us there. No one had told him about the squatters in the house. “I’m sorry,” he said, flushing a little, as though he had walked in on us doing something we shouldn’t, to which Corinne responded, and I quote: “No worries, bro.” She was wearing an old cowboy hat Jack got from the rodeo a few years ago, and is now too cool to wear, and she didn’t even look up from the maple syrup she was attempting to lick off her elbow. My five-year-old has become blasé around strangers.
     
    Most of these men (and they are all men, there’s not a single woman among them) don’t do any more than nod at me when they pass me in the hallway, but a few of them treat me with a strange deference, smiling at me almost apologetically. It makes me far more nervous than anything else, Arthur. It’s like they know something I don’t.
     
    On that note . . .
     
    More later,
    Jess.
    From: Jessica Frobisher
    Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 3:07 am
    To: Arthur Danielson
    Cc:
    Bcc:
    Subject: Re: quick question
     
     
    Sure. “Just curious.” If you want someone to answer that question, Arthur, you’d be better off asking one of the guys crashing on our sofa, one of the men who spent a week of his life at a Marriott in Arizona, where the Spaceco employees locked themselves into a conference room and stormed their brains out coming up with a mission statement and a list of company principles. An inordinate amount of time and effort went into that document—you would have thought they were a constitutional delegation. They took such painstaking care. They agonized. They finessed their phrases down to the Oxford commas, taking them out and then putting them in again.