The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker Page A

rug.
    “Do you believe in past lives?” she said.
    “I don’t think so.”
    She’d draped a crimson scarf over the only lamp, and the room was dim and stuffy. She’d pulled the vertical blinds shut, but stripes of sunlight glowed through the cracks.
    “I’m pretty sure I’ve lived past lives,” she said. “I have this feeling that in every one of them, I die young.”
    Lately, I’d begun running out of things to say to other kids. I’d stopped knowing how to respond.
    “Hey,” she said. “Want a tattoo? I learned how on the Internet.” She pointed to a sewing needle and a tiny jar of black ink laid out beside the candle on the floor like primitive surgical equipment. “You just run a needle through the flame, then scratch your skin in the shape you want and pour ink into the cut.”
    Gabby’s house was the same model as ours but reversed. Her bedroom was the same bedroom as mine, the dimensions exactly equal. For twelve years, we’d slept between walls erected by the same construction crews and looked out on the same fading cul-de-sac through identically sized windows. Grown under similar conditions, we had become very different, two specimens of girlhood, now diverging.
    “I’m going to do an outline of the sun and moon on my wrist,” she said. “I’ll do one on you, too, if you want.”
    The album came to its end. Silence filled the room.
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “I should probably go home.”
    Maybe it had begun to happen before the slowing, but it was only afterward that I realized it: My friendships were disintegrating. Everything was coming apart. It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. As with any other harsh journey, not everything survived.
    That night, while the sun continued to shine, my father came home with a telescope.
    “It’s for you,” he said as he unpacked it in my bedroom, tissue paper crinkling. “I want you to learn a little more about science.”
    The telescope came in a shiny mahogany box, inside of which lay a silver tube and a trio of titanium legs that glittered in the sunlight. The telescope looked expensive. He set it up in my bedroom and pointed it at the still-bright sky. My mother watched him from the doorway, arms crossed. She was often annoyed with my father these days, and it seemed that even this offering—in the encrypted language that traveled between them—was in some way an affront to her.
    “There’s Mars,” said my father, squinting one eye while he aimed the other through the telescope. He motioned for me to look. “You’ll be able to see it even better when it gets dark.”
    Mars had shown up in the news lately, after draft plans for something called the Pioneer Project had surfaced on the Internet. Privately funded by a group of secretive billionaires, it was a plan for a human settlement on Mars, complete with temperature-controlled biospheres and a self-cleaning water supply. The Pioneer Project was an evacuation plan from earth. If necessary, a cluster of humans could supposedly survive up there on Mars, the whole settlement like a time capsule, like a living, breathing souvenir of life as we once knew it on Earth.
    Through the telescope, Mars didn’t look like much to me, a fat red dot, hazy at the edges.
    “Some of the stars you’ll see out there don’t exist anymore,” said my father, gently turning the knobs of the telescope with his thumb. The gears squeaked softly. “Some of the stars you’ll see have been dead for thousands of years already.”
    “Are you two going to be up here all night?” asked my mother.
    My father wiped the lens with a black strip of felt that had come in the box.
    “What you’ll see with this telescope are not the stars as they are today, but how they were thousands of years ago,” he went on. “That’s how far away they are; even light takes centuries to reach us.”
    “If we’re ever going to have dinner,” said my mother from behind us, “we should