Above the Vaulted Sky
by Kurtis Hessel
The desert wind whipped the fire, now flattening the flames against the ground like a rocket’s exhaust, now folding them, now shredding them into flares that floated in midair. Fugitive sparks blew across the hardpack and rose, as if to join the night’s busy traffic. Bright pinpoints zoomed overhead, swerved, blinked, rushed along bisecting pathways. Long trains of satellites chugged through the dark. The sky teemed like a kicked-over anthill. Or like the armies of heaven routed and in disarray. Somewhere beyond there were stars, everybody said.
Saul slouched into a camp chair and scowled into the flames, feeling the heat from the fire on his face when the wind set the coals murmuring. His brother Absalom sat beside him, leaning westward towards their youngest brother, Julian, who stood a coltish silhouette at the edge of the fire’s glow, staring into the darkness. Julian was looking towards the pile of stones covering a grave. From the darkness beyond, coyotes splintered the night’s peace. And farther out, mountains bounded the McDermitt Caldera, a jagged black horizon jointed to the heavens’ restless dome.
“Come back and sit, Julian. Dad will be OK.” Absalom spoke with tenderness, but Saul could hear grief in his brother’s voice.
Saul snorted. “OK as a dead body can be.”
Absalom shook his head. “Damn it, Saul.” He stood and crossed to Julian, rested a hand on his shoulder, and stared across the black desert with him. All around, shadows tangled in the bristling masses sprouting from the earth. With each gust of wind, brush whispered like feeble voices rasping for water.
Absalom spoke softly to Julian, but loud enough that Saul could hear from across the fire. “At least he isn’t suffering anymore. Why don’t you come away from here?”
Julian never turned his gaze from the pile. “What if they dig him up?”
“The rocks are heavy, bud.”
“They could work together. They’re smarter than they seem, Abbie.”
Absalom put himself between the darkness and the boy and got down on one knee to look into his eyes. “We piled them high. We’re stronger together than they are.” His eyes flashed upward and met Saul’s over Julian’s shoulder. What was he insinuating with that look? Saul stared back defiance.
Absalom looked again at his younger brother and squeezed his arm. “You’ve been working hard.”
“I guess so.”
“C’mon.” Absalom stood and guided Julian to the fireside. “Let’s do what we came to do. I have a meeting later.”
Saul restrained himself from scoffing. There was always a meeting. In the middle of the night. In the early morning, before the sun. Never an explanation. Saul spoke with calculated bitterness. “Just enough time to put him in the ground.”
Absalom stared and then shook his head. He grabbed the third chair from where it rested on the other side of Saul and moved it next to his own. “Here you go, bud.”
He sat. So did Julian. All three watched the wind fret the fire.
Absalom spoke. “Saul, you should start. You’re the oldest.”
Saul grumbled. He rose out of his slouch and lifted one hand in a mocking declamation. “Here lies Ezekiel Winters—romantic idiot, hardcase father, selfish sonofabitch.” He fell back into his slouch.
“Jesus, Saul!”
Saul glared. “Don’t blaspheme.”
Absalom stood. “I knew this would happen.” He took out a flashlight and held out a hand to Julian, who was staring back into the darkness from his seat. “Come on, Julian.”
Saul stood and put his hands on Absalom’s chest. “Don’t go, Absalom.”
“I told you to call me Abbie. I hate that fucking name.”
He tried to push past, but Saul grabbed his shoulders and held him.
“Let me go, Saul.”
“Wait. Just wait.”
“You wanted this. You called me from Reno in a panic.”
Saul flinched at the mention of Reno. He wondered what his brother suspected about the trip. He mustered detachment into his voice. “Just wait.”
Saul was bigger, tough from ranch labor, Father’s plow horse. His look was stern as rusted iron, but his eyes wandered Absalom’s face with uncertainty. Absalom would lose the fight, but his lean frame was tense, and he seemed ready to throw the first punch. They had fought before.
“I wanted this too. I agreed because I thought we needed it.” Absalom gestured to Julian, who was still staring away.
Saul sighed with relief. “We do. Sit.”
On the other side of Absalom, Julian jerked and stood and pointed above the horizon. “What’s that?”
Absalom turned towards his younger brother. “What, bud?”
“A light in the sky! It just exploded. Or broke up. It got brighter, and then there were smaller lights.”
Saul rolled his eyes. “He’s imagining it. Just sit.”
Absalom sat. “Do this right.” He turned to his younger brother. “Julian, sit.”
Saul sighed. “Yeah. Sure.” He stared into the fire and wondered what Absalom wanted him to say. How were you supposed to eulogize a father like theirs?
Saul cleared his throat. “I didn’t like our father. He was mean and demanding. He tried to grow us up righteous. And I guess that’s as it should be. And he taught me…”
“Whoah! Another one!” Julian was up again and pointing.
“Shut up, you little idiot!” Saul twisted in his chair and glared at Julian. “At least he taught some of us respect.”
Absalom put his hand on Saul’s arm. “We’re all the family we have now.”
Saul jerked away. “He’s only half our family.”
The concerned disappointment in Absalom’s eyes made Saul falter. Their mother had sometimes looked that way. Before father chased her off. Saul stammered, “Well, what about you and your meetings? Does family keep secrets?”
The wind gusted and flames billowed, and Absalom flinched against the grit blowing into his face.
“Say your piece, Saul, and then I’ll say mine, and Julian his, and then we’ll get out of here and leave Father behind.”
Saul stared quietly into the fire, chastened. “He taught me…”
He thought about his father’s homilies about hard work and God’s love. Then he thought about his father screaming him out of bed, forcing him to memorize Bible verses, locking him in the closet to think about his sins; he recalled the sting from Father’s palm. He thought about giving up every teenage summer to frame houses for the “family business” that Father had sold out from under him once Sindee came along, Father’s new wife, younger than the oldest son.
But why say all that again?
“He taught me the world doesn’t care what I want, and I have to get whatever I need for myself. Amen.”
“Look! It’s not stopping.” Julian was pointing above the southwest horizon.
“Shut up, you little…”
A flash in the southwest sky caught Saul’s eye, and around that flash tiny points curved or zipped or looped like a cloud of gnats and then disappeared. But before the mesh of pinpricks had completely dissolved, another smaller flash exploded in the same place, ejecting its own pixels into the black. Saul stared, silent now. He didn’t know what to think at first. And then there was another flash nearby. And another. And he remembered something he’d heard two bigwigs in Reno talking about. Another flash. White to bright blue. And another. White to white-orange and red. Flare after flare across the southwest sky. Something had started.
“What’s happening?” Absalom’s jaw hung open, and for once Saul felt the satisfaction of understanding at least a little better than his know-it-all brother.
“The satellites.” Saul spoke without turning his face away. “They’re exploding.”
“But why?” Absalom was rapt.
The explosions were happening throughout the southwest sky now. Every second. Every half second. Across most of the sky thousands of pinpricks still sped by. But the explosions grew more frequent, and lower in the sky streaks of glowing dust trailing fire had begun to cascade.
Saul’s voice was reverent. “And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.”
Julian had rushed to the firelight’s edge. His whole body seemed to vibrate, as if some energy from the explosions had settled into his flesh. He was jumping up and down. He was an eleven-year-old beneath a falling sky.
“Aliens are shooting the satellites down!”
“This isn’t one of your sci-fi comics, Julian.” Restrained panic had replaced the haughty confidence in Absalom’s voice. Saul smirked. For once he wasn’t the only one bothered by the boy.
“The colonists, Abbie! The ship that left for Mars. It got there!”
Saul laughed. “Those fools are dead in space.” He addressed Absalom. “This is all Sindee. She encouraged Father’s cowboy nonsense and filled this one’s head with Star Wars.”
It was as if Julian couldn’t hear him. “I bet when they got there, they found an underground Martian city. I would try to steal the Martian weapons because ours aren’t as good, even if we’re braver. But I bet they were captured and the aliens tortured them; they’re meaner than we are—and they found out where Earth is, and now they’ve come to take us over. We have to defend our planet!”
Absalom’s tone was worried. “Did you hear anything in Reno, Saul?”
Julian piped up before Absalom could finish. “Yeah, Saul! Did you see any recruiting stations? I want to be a soldier!”
“Bud, hush! There are no Martians.”
The entire southern sky was pulsing now. Verses out of Revelation harrowed Saul’s thoughts, but he also felt superior, and he feigned stoic acceptance.
“What would I have learned in Reno, Absalom?”
Absalom threw his hands up. “There’s newspapers. Or underground… you know… publications. Or the libraries. They’d have the whole open internet. If I had spent two days in Reno, I’d have learned something, God damn it!”
Saul blinked. “Don’t blaspheme. You’ve got a library with the internet in Elon.”
The night felt colder, and Saul saw that the fire had gotten low. He gestured. Absalom chuffed and stomped to the wood pile and balanced a log on the fire. “Lithium Nevada isn’t giving us open access. Elon’s a company town.”
Saul was smirking. “Go to Winnemucca. Just because you went to college doesn’t mean you have to be a snob.”
Absalom stared, another log clutched in one hand. “Don’t throw that in my face. I didn’t get to finish.”
He let the log drop roughly onto the fire, which collapsed in a swarm of sparks. He trudged to his seat and slumped into it. “It’s not like I wanted to work at the mine to keep his ranch running.”
They sat together in silence. Saul saw in Absalom’s discouragement a reflection of his own trials. He guessed his brother knew it too. But still there stretched stony and wind-scoured miles between them, the vast darkness of Father’s country isolating each son from the other. Even Julian’s exuberance was tempered, and he crossed and sat in his chair. He spoke in a soft voice. “What did you see in Reno, Saul? Were there robots?”
“No, Julian. I didn’t see any robots. The rich people must keep them to themselves.”
Julian frowned. “Flying cars?”
“No, Julian. They had some taxis without drivers, but people would rush on and off like they were afraid. I saw a lady catch her jacket in a door, and the car dragged her five feet before the people inside figured out how to stop it. And once she got free, everyone just walked around her like nothing had happened. There were drones flying everywhere. Like the one Father gave you, but bigger.”
Absalom cut in, staring above the horizon. “Can we keep the land? Even just to sell it?”
Saul spoke to the distance. “I’m working on it.”
The sky’s whole dome strobed above them now. The skirmishes in the south had expanded into an insurrection across the heavens.
Absalom craned his neck to watch the sky. “What if it’s the Diggers?”
Saul sighed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and the rocks of the mountains.”
Julian looked puzzled. “What’s that mean, Abbie?”
“Revelation, Julian.”
Julian only looked confused.
“Rich people use those satellites to control us. Without them, we would be free.”
Saul cocked an eyebrow. “You think the New Diggers are blowing up satellites? Do they have spaceships? Did they get them from the Martians?”
Absalom glared at Saul. “They could have infiltrated a few companies, hacked the satellites’ guidance systems, made them crash into one another.”
Saul laughed. “I expect smarter from you, College. You’re no different than the boy. Spacemen and revolutionaries. Comic books.”
“Aren’t we all equal in God’s love? Don’t we all have the Holy Spirit in us? The land should belong to everyone as a common treasury.”
Saul glared. “This land belonged to Father. He sold our lives, yours and mine, to get it. I’m trying to make sure it stays in his rightful line. Or did you want me to disown our sinful property?”
Out beyond the light, coyotes began to yip to each other, and Julian was peering into the darkness again.
Absalom’s indignation collapsed. He seemed to be struggling with something, opened his mouth to speak, closed it, stared into the fire.
After a moment he spoke quietly, “There are some guys at the mine, Numu guys; they said this place is sacred. Their people lived on the land by learning from the animals, moving with the seasons, not exhausting it. But there were treaties and theft, and they lost it. There was silver, then copper, then lithium to mine.”
Saul snorted. “So I should give up our land, then?”
“The company will only let us keep it until they want it.”
Absalom took out his phone and looked at it, then held the screen up, trying to find a signal. “Things are going to change.”
Saul rolled his eyes. The lack of signal on the phone unnerved him, but he wouldn’t show it. “I’ll keep what’s mine.”
Caterwauling erupted to the west.
“Do you hear that?” Julian turned to them wide-eyed. “I heard rocks tumbling. They’re digging him up!”
He bolted into the dark, yelling and waving his arms.
“Little fucking idiot,” roared Saul. He flipped on a flashlight and tore after his youngest brother.
He caught up to him at the gravesite, where Julian was frantically testing the rocks and walking in circles around the stones they’d piled up. Pitiful. Someone so senseless would always be a burden on everyone around him. Saul grabbed Julian’s arm and held him still. He thought about his father lying in a crate beneath the stones because they couldn’t afford a fancy coffin. He slapped Julian’s face, and the boy began to cry. He felt the sting in his own palm. Behind him, Absalom was yelling something about how he needed to calm down, but Saul could barely hear him.
He shined the light into Julian’s face and then over the grave. Strange shadows collected between the stones, as though a blackness were seeping from underneath. The flashlight beam began to quiver and then to shake. “Do you see?” He was yelling, but he didn’t understand why. “Still there! Under the rocks!”
Julian’s sobs had turned into screams. Saul was holding him roughly against the pile. “Do you feel how heavy they are?” Shadows seemed to seep up and wind around Julian like tendrils of smoke. Saul’s heart was pounding and his mind frantic, and he feared the tears that threatened to trickle from his eyes, and damn it, they wouldn’t, and his rage pressed the anguish back down inside and convulsed his hands, so his fingers clenched more tightly around Julian. His rage held the boy. And the boy screamed louder.
“I should pile a few on you! Then you’ll know.” Saul wondered what Julian saw when he looked at him. And whether his pupils were as black as the darkness between the stones.
Suddenly Saul was stumbling sideways, bowled over by Absalom’s rushing force. He hadn’t heard the running footsteps. He fell onto the pile and felt the flesh tear on his palms and forearms. He rolled and banged his head on a rock and had to blink away a darkness in his vision. Everything above was swimming, wobbling, exploding, and he couldn’t tell what was behind his eyes and what was in the distant vault above. Somewhere nearby, Absalom was picking Julian up. Somewhere nearby, Absalom was shushing him. Absalom was saying let’s go now. We have to go now, Julian. Absalom was leading Julian away.
And Saul felt a pain in his shoulder that he knew would linger, and a wetness trickled down his temple, and he put up a hand to smear it away, but when he looked there was only blackness across his palm and blackness all around, except for the sky exploding above. And he patted the ground for his flashlight and found it and flicked its switch and shook it, but it would not turn on.
He sat up and his head swam, and in the distance, he saw Absalom with his arms around Julian, comforting the sobbing boy, both enveloped under a radiant dome. Sunk in darkness himself, he watched them embrace in the fire’s light.
Saul fought to his feet and the dome of light jostled in the crowding gloom with each step of his shuffling gait. Absalom was kissing Julian’s forehead. Absalom was motioning for him to wait. Absalom was digging through his backpack.
“Absalom!” Saul thought his own voice sounded like a demon speaking out of the night. “I know you carry that gun, Absalom. I took it out when you asked me to get your bag, and I locked it in your truck.”
Absalom kept digging. Saul could hear his voice saying, “they’ve got to be here,” and the frantic note in it made Saul feel ashamed, and that shame made him angry. Julian shivered and whined.
Saul drew the truck keys from his pocket and held them up, and they faintly jingled with each step.
Now he was standing at the firelight’s dim perimeter. He had blood smeared in his hair on one side of his head, and a rough-looking gash on his right forearm. Absalom looked up at the sound of the jingling. He stood and pushed Julian behind him.
There were tears in Saul’s eyes, but his lips curled with anger. “Are you going to walk out of here, Absalom? It’s miles.”
“Good idea.” Absalom lifted his bag. “Come on, Julian.” He took his brother’s hand. “The road’s this way.”
Saul’s eyes widened. Everything seemed to still—the wind died, the fire fell back into its bed, and Saul couldn’t feel its heat. He shuddered. He needed his brother not to leave. “Wait!”
They stood on opposite sides with the campfire between them. Absalom paused.
“Absalom, I’m sorry. Please come back.” Saul fell to his knees in the dirt.
Absalom looked at Saul, then turned to look at Julian. A bruise was forming on the boy’s cheek where Saul had slapped him. His eyes were red and wide as a rabbit’s.
Absalom turned back to Saul. “I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”
Saul’s shoulders slumped forward, his eyes searched the dust. “I’m sorry, Julian. Please come here.”
Julian hung back and Absalom rested a hand on his shoulder.
“It was wrong to hit you, Julian. I won’t do it again. Father got to me. I can’t put enough rocks on top of him to keep him out of my head.” And in saying it, Saul believed it was true, and he was afraid.
Julian sniffled. “Why did you hit me, Saul?”
Saul didn’t know how to answer. He thrust his face forward. “I want you to hit me, Julian. I deserve it. Close your fist. Hit my face.”
Julian met Saul’s gaze and held it, his eyes surprisingly confident though tender. Saul felt the urge to look away, a frantic voice whispering that the boy could see into him. But his pride would not allow it.
Julian stepped to within an arm’s length of Saul.
“I don’t want to hit you, Saul. I love you.” And he put his arms around his oldest brother. Hesitantly, Saul hugged Julian and closed his eyes against the desert and the darkness and the exploding lights in the sky.
And he wanted to fall into the embrace, but Father still lay under the pile of stones, part of the land now. Father stretching out bleak mile after mile of cracking dirt and dry scrub, thrust upward as craggy buttes, black monoliths against the teeming night sky. And there was the construction company that could have been his. Was supposed to have been his. And Father’s voice through the closed door: “the only Sin I’ll have in my life.” And Sindee’s: “I’ve been so sinful, Zeke; I hope you’ll teach me another lesson tonight.” And the strange feeling of coveting Father’s wife, who would have had him call her mother. And here was this soft child, her actual son, who thought that Martians would come to disrupt the will of fathers and that a lifetime of pain could be salved with a hug. And there was the letter from that lawyer that came after Father died, and that Saul didn’t tell them about, the one that said Father had changed the will.
Absalom spoke in a hush. “The life Father built around you and me wasn’t really his, Saul. And then Sindee gave him permission to do what he wanted. He was selfish, and we don’t have to forgive him. But it helped me to see that she gave him back a dream.”
Saul let go of Julian, but found his youngest brother gazing into his eyes, kind, genuine, and innocent. He turned his face away and got to his feet. “He owed us. We were the oldest.”
“People are more complicated than you think. You know, Sindee really cared for him. She wasn’t just some gold digger. In the hospital, before she lost consciousness, she talked about his curious soul. She said she was sorry he had been so severe. She said no one had shown him how to love. And she asked about you, Saul. I remember she was wincing from the pain, but she worried that she hadn’t loved you enough.”
Saul’s jaw clenched, his face like exposed sedimentary stone.
Absalom shrugged. “I have to go now. It was good of you to apologize to Julian.” He put his hand on Julian’s back to guide him away.
“What’s this meeting you’re rushing off to?”
Absalom sighed. “I’d prefer not to talk about it, Saul.”
“Those big tankers come in at the beginning of the month, the ones with the warning labels. Is it acid in them? For the processing?”
Absalom’s face remained inert. “I don’t know about the processing side.”
“Weren’t you working on a chemistry degree?”
“I don’t know anything, Saul.”
Saul sighed. “Alright, but let’s sit together a while longer. I messed up. I want to find some peace with you. The world might be ending.”
He walked to where his chair had landed, righted it, set it in front of the fire and sat. After a moment, Julian came and sat by him. Absalom stood apart from them at the firelight’s edge. Then he crossed to the fire, added a piece of wood, and sat between his brothers.
All around, showers of sparks and cascades of smoke drifted from above into the lower atmosphere like rainfall below stormy heavens. The night sky seemed less crowded, though tiny explosions still flared in every part of it. And yet, some still small points shone through, light from distant stars older than Lithium America, and older than America; older than the McDermott Caldera, and older even than the Earth. There was more stillness in the busy sky than they had ever seen.
“It’s beautiful.” Absalom’s voice was reverent. “I didn’t know it could be this way.”
Julian spoke, his voice tentative. “I wasn’t afraid the coyotes would eat him.”
Saul rubbed his head. “What?”
Julian spoke more loudly. “I kept imagining if they moved the rocks he would get back up, and I didn’t want that.”
Absalom’s tone was hushed. “You know that can’t happen, bud.”
Julian nodded, but his voice gathered strength. “He didn’t spoil me. He was mean. He didn’t like when I read comic books or played imagination games. I could tell he tried to be nice around mom, but he was ashamed of me. When she wasn’t around, he called me an idiot.”
He turned to look at Saul. “Like you do, Saul.”
Saul felt a feeling that he couldn’t name, and it made him want to be angry. He looked at Absalom, who was staring back at him with trepidation. He said nothing and listened instead.
Julian looked out into the darkness. “It got worse after she died. He never hit me, but it was still bad. He said I didn’t know about the value of work. He said I was lazy. You would be out fixing a fence or digging or working with the stock, and he would tell me I needed to learn from you, or I’d never amount to anything.”
Saul’s stomach lurched.
“He came into my room one night after mom died. I realized he was drunk. He said I was his child of joy. He said I was supposed to be his greatest triumph. He started to cry. He begged me to grow up and not be useless. He kept asking me what he had done wrong.”
Julian’s voice got quiet again. “I’m not supposed to feel happy he died.”
Saul sat quietly. He was thinking about the will, was thinking about traveling to the probate court at Winnemucca and the sonofabitch in the silly tie who told him there was nothing he could do because his father had changed the will and that was that. And he was thinking of how he had told Absalom that the company was trying to steal the land, but really Father had just given it all to Julian, his child of joy. And the land was worthless; his idiot father had bought a scrap of dirt without any mineral value. Why would any company steal worthless land? He had asked whether there was an older version of the will. His father wasn’t well at the end. Didn’t that matter? “Look buddy,” Mr. Silly Tie had said, “You ain’t rich enough to buy me off.”
So he had gone to Reno, not to do research or to find better lawyers, but because he got a meeting with someone he thought might be rich enough. And in Reno there had been cars without drivers and people walking around in flashy clothes and a sky full of drones and stores full of gizmos to buy. But there were no robots. No recruiting stations. And he saw a report on a TV in a bar about how that space company had lost contact with those Mars colonists but kept it quiet for almost a year, had lost complete contact, like the ship had drifted off course or been struck by a meteor or had a mutiny or who knows what, but anyway the company’s stock had dipped, though they were promising another attempt before the year’s end. And the rubes were signing up. And the company’s stock was blasting off.
And waiting in the lobby at the Lithium Nevada offices for his meeting, he had overheard two rich-looking guys wearing spotless cowboy hats and suits talking about how nobody knew what was going to happen. Corporate negotiations about sky rights had broken down again. And volatile nations were talking about shooting satellites down. And other nations were threatening retaliation. And nobody knew the difference between company interests and the law. And one of the guys looked at the other and said, “But they’re not going to end the world, right? This is all going to work out.” And they had laughed and gone out.
Saul had laid it all out in his meeting: Sindee’s long illness draining the family coffers, a short period of mostly unsuccessful ranching after her passing, and Father’s decline and death. Pitiful as his lament was, the man across the table stared with detached evenness at Saul, right through him really, and more than once Saul wondered whether the man was actually a robot. “I’m sure that all sounds very sad, Mr. Winters,” the machine-man had said without a shred of sympathy. “I think we can help you with that will, but what will you do for Lithium Nevada?”
Saul stood and spoke abruptly to his brothers. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Let’s go.”
And then they heard from the direction of the road a car door slam and footsteps grinding in the dirt, and Saul felt a spike of horror like he had never felt before and looked with stricken eyes at Absalom.
Julian hailed the figure materializing out of the darkness. “Hi, Sherriff Rusk!”
The sheriff’s voice sounded congenial, but there was an anxious undercurrent to it. “The Winters brothers! Just who I’ve been looking for. Lucky, I saw your campfire from the road.”
Absalom was on his feet, his body moving with the automatic action of instinct. Saul heard the sheriff call out, “Abbie, don’t!”
Then the sheriff was sprinting past Saul, and Saul was rooted in place. He didn’t want his brother locked up, knew it in the moment and with anguish. He had been wrong. But there was no stopping the law. Not now. It whirred away like a machine always circling above and outside, and it was pointless to resist it. The law, like fathers, persisted.
The sheriff tackled Absalom and pinned him just outside the circle of firelight.
Julian was screaming. “Abbie! What’s happening? Saul, stop him! Sherriff, stop!”
The sheriff was holding Absalom’s arms and yanking him to his feet and jerking his wrists behind his back to handcuff him.
“Absalom Winters, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit sabotage and unlawful assembly with radicals.”
Deep inside Saul a wordless howl reverberated, an inscrutable cry full of grief and loneliness and self-loathing. He recognized in it his father’s voice, keening beside Sindee, and he remembered how his father’s cry had been muffled because Ezekiel had ordered them all out of the room so he could be alone with her corpse, so they had listened to him grieving through the walls. It echoed through the cavern inside him and shivered all the way to his throat, but he would not let it escape his lips. He held it, as Father had taught him to do.
Absalom’s eyes turned up to the sky, where they fixed on one of those still small points. He became calm, and a dangerous quiet of waiting infused his body.
The sheriff yammered. “I don’t know why you had to make this difficult for me. The staties sent over the warrant before everything went tits up, and I can’t get any explanation or even get anybody on the horn, but I can do my job. What are you doing fucking with the mine, son? That’s people’s jobs. That’s somebody else’s money. Lots of money.” It was as if he wanted Absalom’s permission to arrest him.
As they walked past Saul, Absalom stopped and turned and looked wordlessly at the sheriff, who, overwhelmed by his intense gaze, stopped hustling him forward. Then Absalom peered into his brother’s eyes. “The old world is going up like a parchment in a flame, Saul, and it is drifting back down as embers and ash.”
Saul felt his brother looking deep into him. And the corners of Absalom’s mouth turned up. “Don’t pile the soot over yourself. I forgive you, Brother. Now, stand up.”
Saul felt tears brimming that he did not fear. A shiver ran down his spine, and he felt a warming in his chest, as the grace born in his brother’s love filled him up, and he felt blessed as he had never felt before.
Absalom’s voice was soft, a command of love. “Stand up, now.”
Then the sheriff led him away. And Saul heard a car door slam and watched headlights dwindle into the distance.
Julian was whimpering, but Saul held his hand down, palm open at his side, and Julian quieted. The fire guttered and gulped in the breeze. The night had grown nearly silent. No coyotes. No talk. Only the distant wail of wind flaying its back on the sharp corners of stony passageways.
To the west, a fireball streaked out of the sky and collided in a bright flash and a terrible crunch with the ground two hundred feet away. Julian jerked and sped towards the points of fire burning in the near distance, and Saul ran after him, calling out, “wait, Julian!”
Julian was shouting from up ahead. “It looks like a piece of a spaceship!”
A flaming charred hunk of twisted metal, still glowing with the heat from reentry, had crashed into the pile of stones over their father’s grave, scattering some of them around. Here and there, smaller flames licked at the wreckage strewn from the impact.
Saul looked at the metal hulk burning amid the piled stones. Then he looked at his brother. He got down on one knee and met his gaze. “I guess he won’t be getting up now, Julian.”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t have hit you. I won’t do it again.”
“OK.”
They stayed that way, Julian standing and Saul kneeling, and watched the flames die. The sky had grown almost completely still, only now and then did a single faint point zoom by, while a quiet celestial company stared solemnly down on them.
“Abbie’s going to get free, Saul. He’ll kick out the grate in the sheriff’s car and make him swerve, and the sheriff will get knocked out in the crash, but Abbie will get the handcuff keys and get free. And he’ll go into hiding in the hills so they can’t find him. He’ll get food and water wherever he can. Eventually, he’ll come out of hiding and find us. He’ll be covered in dust and muck and have a long scraggly beard. But we’ll recognize him right away, and when he sees us, he will hug us and tell us how much he missed us. He’ll help us fix this, whatever has happened. I know it’s not really Martians. I don’t know what it is. But Abbie will know how to fix it. He’s smart. He’s going to be a leader one day.”
Saul could feel the heat off the metal, even from this far away. He opened his arms to his brother, and Julian smiled and nestled into him. Saul closed his eyes. Low and close to Father’s grave he still felt the weight, some dark gravity drawing him towards it.
Then he felt the boy’s delicate frame in his embrace. This time, his mind didn’t wander from the contact. Their father lay buried under the burning heavens, and Saul felt newly stable, with one knee to the open earth, and strong. Julian’s breathing slowed and deepened. Saul found his own was slowing too. The desert breeze was faint now, but each breath carried the subtle scent of sagebrush to remind him that he held the world inside himself. And that the world held him. Held them both. Held them all. The silence was comforting. He opened his eyes.
“When he gets out, Julian, I believe Abbie will come and find us.”
Saul stood.
He rested a hand on Julian’s shoulder. Together, they watched the unencumbered stars burn brighter and listened to their sweet stillness.
Kurtis Hessel lives in Boulder and teaches writing at the University of Colorado. His scholarly work on British Romanticism and the history of science has appeared in journals including Studies in Romanticism and Configurations, among others. He especially enjoys teaching science and nature writing, which dovetails with his passion for hiking and backpacking in the mountains and canyonlands of the American West. This is his first fiction publication. Learn more at www.kurtishessel.com.
Author’s Note: “The seed for this story was planted when I watched a chain of Starlink satellites creep across the sky during a backpacking trip in the Utah backcountry. I had recently learned about space junk and the Kessler syndrome from a student essay in a science writing class. Standing in the isolated stillness of the wild, confronted by how fragile our outer darkness now seemed, I wondered what would happen if someone who had grown accustomed to a sky clogged with satellites watched—without understanding—as those lights suddenly began to explode. Saul, Absalom, and Julian, with their Rashomon-style explanations, grew out of that speculation.
“For Aunt Jenna, who taught me to love storytelling.”
“Above the Vaulted Sky” by Kurtis Hessel. Copyright © 2026 by Kurtis Hessel. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The desert wind whipped the fire, now flattening the flames against the ground like a rocket’s exhaust, now folding them, now shredding them into flares that floated in midair. Fugitive sparks blew across the hardpack and rose, as if to join the night’s busy traffic. Bright pinpoints zoomed overhead, swerved, blinked, rushed along bisecting pathways. Long trains of satellites chugged through the dark. The sky teemed like a kicked-over anthill. Or like the armies of heaven routed and in disarray. Somewhere beyond there were stars, everybody said.
Saul slouched into a camp chair and scowled into the flames, feeling the heat from the fire on his face when the wind set the coals murmuring. His brother Absalom sat beside him, leaning westward towards their youngest brother, Julian, who stood a coltish silhouette at the edge of the fire’s glow, staring into the darkness. Julian was looking towards the pile of stones covering a grave. From the darkness beyond, coyotes splintered the night’s peace. And farther out, mountains bounded the McDermitt Caldera, a jagged black horizon jointed to the heavens’ restless dome.
“Come back and sit, Julian. Dad will be OK.” Absalom spoke with tenderness, but Saul could hear grief in his brother’s voice.
Saul snorted. “OK as a dead body can be.”
Absalom shook his head. “Damn it, Saul.” He stood and crossed to Julian, rested a hand on his shoulder, and stared across the black desert with him. All around, shadows tangled in the bristling masses sprouting from the earth. With each gust of wind, brush whispered like feeble voices rasping for water.
Absalom spoke softly to Julian, but loud enough that Saul could hear from across the fire. “At least he isn’t suffering anymore. Why don’t you come away from here?”
Julian never turned his gaze from the pile. “What if they dig him up?”
“The rocks are heavy, bud.”
“They could work together. They’re smarter than they seem, Abbie.”
Absalom put himself between the darkness and the boy and got down on one knee to look into his eyes. “We piled them high. We’re stronger together than they are.” His eyes flashed upward and met Saul’s over Julian’s shoulder. What was he insinuating with that look? Saul stared back defiance.
Absalom looked again at his younger brother and squeezed his arm. “You’ve been working hard.”
“I guess so.”
“C’mon.” Absalom stood and guided Julian to the fireside. “Let’s do what we came to do. I have a meeting later.”
Saul restrained himself from scoffing. There was always a meeting. In the middle of the night. In the early morning, before the sun. Never an explanation. Saul spoke with calculated bitterness. “Just enough time to put him in the ground.”
Absalom stared and then shook his head. He grabbed the third chair from where it rested on the other side of Saul and moved it next to his own. “Here you go, bud.”
He sat. So did Julian. All three watched the wind fret the fire.
Absalom spoke. “Saul, you should start. You’re the oldest.”
Saul grumbled. He rose out of his slouch and lifted one hand in a mocking declamation. “Here lies Ezekiel Winters—romantic idiot, hardcase father, selfish sonofabitch.” He fell back into his slouch.
“Jesus, Saul!”
Saul glared. “Don’t blaspheme.”
Absalom stood. “I knew this would happen.” He took out a flashlight and held out a hand to Julian, who was staring back into the darkness from his seat. “Come on, Julian.”
Saul stood and put his hands on Absalom’s chest. “Don’t go, Absalom.”
“I told you to call me Abbie. I hate that fucking name.”
He tried to push past, but Saul grabbed his shoulders and held him.
“Let me go, Saul.”
“Wait. Just wait.”
“You wanted this. You called me from Reno in a panic.”
Saul flinched at the mention of Reno. He wondered what his brother suspected about the trip. He mustered detachment into his voice. “Just wait.”
Saul was bigger, tough from ranch labor, Father’s plow horse. His look was stern as rusted iron, but his eyes wandered Absalom’s face with uncertainty. Absalom would lose the fight, but his lean frame was tense, and he seemed ready to throw the first punch. They had fought before.
“I wanted this too. I agreed because I thought we needed it.” Absalom gestured to Julian, who was still staring away.
Saul sighed with relief. “We do. Sit.”
On the other side of Absalom, Julian jerked and stood and pointed above the horizon. “What’s that?”
Absalom turned towards his younger brother. “What, bud?”
“A light in the sky! It just exploded. Or broke up. It got brighter, and then there were smaller lights.”
Saul rolled his eyes. “He’s imagining it. Just sit.”
Absalom sat. “Do this right.” He turned to his younger brother. “Julian, sit.”
Saul sighed. “Yeah. Sure.” He stared into the fire and wondered what Absalom wanted him to say. How were you supposed to eulogize a father like theirs?
Saul cleared his throat. “I didn’t like our father. He was mean and demanding. He tried to grow us up righteous. And I guess that’s as it should be. And he taught me…”
“Whoah! Another one!” Julian was up again and pointing.
“Shut up, you little idiot!” Saul twisted in his chair and glared at Julian. “At least he taught some of us respect.”
Absalom put his hand on Saul’s arm. “We’re all the family we have now.”
Saul jerked away. “He’s only half our family.”
The concerned disappointment in Absalom’s eyes made Saul falter. Their mother had sometimes looked that way. Before father chased her off. Saul stammered, “Well, what about you and your meetings? Does family keep secrets?”
The wind gusted and flames billowed, and Absalom flinched against the grit blowing into his face.
“Say your piece, Saul, and then I’ll say mine, and Julian his, and then we’ll get out of here and leave Father behind.”
Saul stared quietly into the fire, chastened. “He taught me…”
He thought about his father’s homilies about hard work and God’s love. Then he thought about his father screaming him out of bed, forcing him to memorize Bible verses, locking him in the closet to think about his sins; he recalled the sting from Father’s palm. He thought about giving up every teenage summer to frame houses for the “family business” that Father had sold out from under him once Sindee came along, Father’s new wife, younger than the oldest son.
But why say all that again?
“He taught me the world doesn’t care what I want, and I have to get whatever I need for myself. Amen.”
“Look! It’s not stopping.” Julian was pointing above the southwest horizon.
“Shut up, you little…”
A flash in the southwest sky caught Saul’s eye, and around that flash tiny points curved or zipped or looped like a cloud of gnats and then disappeared. But before the mesh of pinpricks had completely dissolved, another smaller flash exploded in the same place, ejecting its own pixels into the black. Saul stared, silent now. He didn’t know what to think at first. And then there was another flash nearby. And another. And he remembered something he’d heard two bigwigs in Reno talking about. Another flash. White to bright blue. And another. White to white-orange and red. Flare after flare across the southwest sky. Something had started.
“What’s happening?” Absalom’s jaw hung open, and for once Saul felt the satisfaction of understanding at least a little better than his know-it-all brother.
“The satellites.” Saul spoke without turning his face away. “They’re exploding.”
“But why?” Absalom was rapt.
The explosions were happening throughout the southwest sky now. Every second. Every half second. Across most of the sky thousands of pinpricks still sped by. But the explosions grew more frequent, and lower in the sky streaks of glowing dust trailing fire had begun to cascade.
Saul’s voice was reverent. “And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.”
Julian had rushed to the firelight’s edge. His whole body seemed to vibrate, as if some energy from the explosions had settled into his flesh. He was jumping up and down. He was an eleven-year-old beneath a falling sky.
“Aliens are shooting the satellites down!”
“This isn’t one of your sci-fi comics, Julian.” Restrained panic had replaced the haughty confidence in Absalom’s voice. Saul smirked. For once he wasn’t the only one bothered by the boy.
“The colonists, Abbie! The ship that left for Mars. It got there!”
Saul laughed. “Those fools are dead in space.” He addressed Absalom. “This is all Sindee. She encouraged Father’s cowboy nonsense and filled this one’s head with Star Wars.”
It was as if Julian couldn’t hear him. “I bet when they got there, they found an underground Martian city. I would try to steal the Martian weapons because ours aren’t as good, even if we’re braver. But I bet they were captured and the aliens tortured them; they’re meaner than we are—and they found out where Earth is, and now they’ve come to take us over. We have to defend our planet!”
Absalom’s tone was worried. “Did you hear anything in Reno, Saul?”
Julian piped up before Absalom could finish. “Yeah, Saul! Did you see any recruiting stations? I want to be a soldier!”
“Bud, hush! There are no Martians.”
The entire southern sky was pulsing now. Verses out of Revelation harrowed Saul’s thoughts, but he also felt superior, and he feigned stoic acceptance.
“What would I have learned in Reno, Absalom?”
Absalom threw his hands up. “There’s newspapers. Or underground… you know… publications. Or the libraries. They’d have the whole open internet. If I had spent two days in Reno, I’d have learned something, God damn it!”
Saul blinked. “Don’t blaspheme. You’ve got a library with the internet in Elon.”
The night felt colder, and Saul saw that the fire had gotten low. He gestured. Absalom chuffed and stomped to the wood pile and balanced a log on the fire. “Lithium Nevada isn’t giving us open access. Elon’s a company town.”
Saul was smirking. “Go to Winnemucca. Just because you went to college doesn’t mean you have to be a snob.”
Absalom stared, another log clutched in one hand. “Don’t throw that in my face. I didn’t get to finish.”
He let the log drop roughly onto the fire, which collapsed in a swarm of sparks. He trudged to his seat and slumped into it. “It’s not like I wanted to work at the mine to keep his ranch running.”
They sat together in silence. Saul saw in Absalom’s discouragement a reflection of his own trials. He guessed his brother knew it too. But still there stretched stony and wind-scoured miles between them, the vast darkness of Father’s country isolating each son from the other. Even Julian’s exuberance was tempered, and he crossed and sat in his chair. He spoke in a soft voice. “What did you see in Reno, Saul? Were there robots?”
“No, Julian. I didn’t see any robots. The rich people must keep them to themselves.”
Julian frowned. “Flying cars?”
“No, Julian. They had some taxis without drivers, but people would rush on and off like they were afraid. I saw a lady catch her jacket in a door, and the car dragged her five feet before the people inside figured out how to stop it. And once she got free, everyone just walked around her like nothing had happened. There were drones flying everywhere. Like the one Father gave you, but bigger.”
Absalom cut in, staring above the horizon. “Can we keep the land? Even just to sell it?”
Saul spoke to the distance. “I’m working on it.”
The sky’s whole dome strobed above them now. The skirmishes in the south had expanded into an insurrection across the heavens.
Absalom craned his neck to watch the sky. “What if it’s the Diggers?”
Saul sighed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and the rocks of the mountains.”
Julian looked puzzled. “What’s that mean, Abbie?”
“Revelation, Julian.”
Julian only looked confused.
“Rich people use those satellites to control us. Without them, we would be free.”
Saul cocked an eyebrow. “You think the New Diggers are blowing up satellites? Do they have spaceships? Did they get them from the Martians?”
Absalom glared at Saul. “They could have infiltrated a few companies, hacked the satellites’ guidance systems, made them crash into one another.”
Saul laughed. “I expect smarter from you, College. You’re no different than the boy. Spacemen and revolutionaries. Comic books.”
“Aren’t we all equal in God’s love? Don’t we all have the Holy Spirit in us? The land should belong to everyone as a common treasury.”
Saul glared. “This land belonged to Father. He sold our lives, yours and mine, to get it. I’m trying to make sure it stays in his rightful line. Or did you want me to disown our sinful property?”
Out beyond the light, coyotes began to yip to each other, and Julian was peering into the darkness again.
Absalom’s indignation collapsed. He seemed to be struggling with something, opened his mouth to speak, closed it, stared into the fire.
After a moment he spoke quietly, “There are some guys at the mine, Numu guys; they said this place is sacred. Their people lived on the land by learning from the animals, moving with the seasons, not exhausting it. But there were treaties and theft, and they lost it. There was silver, then copper, then lithium to mine.”
Saul snorted. “So I should give up our land, then?”
“The company will only let us keep it until they want it.”
Absalom took out his phone and looked at it, then held the screen up, trying to find a signal. “Things are going to change.”
Saul rolled his eyes. The lack of signal on the phone unnerved him, but he wouldn’t show it. “I’ll keep what’s mine.”
Caterwauling erupted to the west.
“Do you hear that?” Julian turned to them wide-eyed. “I heard rocks tumbling. They’re digging him up!”
He bolted into the dark, yelling and waving his arms.
“Little fucking idiot,” roared Saul. He flipped on a flashlight and tore after his youngest brother.
He caught up to him at the gravesite, where Julian was frantically testing the rocks and walking in circles around the stones they’d piled up. Pitiful. Someone so senseless would always be a burden on everyone around him. Saul grabbed Julian’s arm and held him still. He thought about his father lying in a crate beneath the stones because they couldn’t afford a fancy coffin. He slapped Julian’s face, and the boy began to cry. He felt the sting in his own palm. Behind him, Absalom was yelling something about how he needed to calm down, but Saul could barely hear him.
He shined the light into Julian’s face and then over the grave. Strange shadows collected between the stones, as though a blackness were seeping from underneath. The flashlight beam began to quiver and then to shake. “Do you see?” He was yelling, but he didn’t understand why. “Still there! Under the rocks!”
Julian’s sobs had turned into screams. Saul was holding him roughly against the pile. “Do you feel how heavy they are?” Shadows seemed to seep up and wind around Julian like tendrils of smoke. Saul’s heart was pounding and his mind frantic, and he feared the tears that threatened to trickle from his eyes, and damn it, they wouldn’t, and his rage pressed the anguish back down inside and convulsed his hands, so his fingers clenched more tightly around Julian. His rage held the boy. And the boy screamed louder.
“I should pile a few on you! Then you’ll know.” Saul wondered what Julian saw when he looked at him. And whether his pupils were as black as the darkness between the stones.
Suddenly Saul was stumbling sideways, bowled over by Absalom’s rushing force. He hadn’t heard the running footsteps. He fell onto the pile and felt the flesh tear on his palms and forearms. He rolled and banged his head on a rock and had to blink away a darkness in his vision. Everything above was swimming, wobbling, exploding, and he couldn’t tell what was behind his eyes and what was in the distant vault above. Somewhere nearby, Absalom was picking Julian up. Somewhere nearby, Absalom was shushing him. Absalom was saying let’s go now. We have to go now, Julian. Absalom was leading Julian away.
And Saul felt a pain in his shoulder that he knew would linger, and a wetness trickled down his temple, and he put up a hand to smear it away, but when he looked there was only blackness across his palm and blackness all around, except for the sky exploding above. And he patted the ground for his flashlight and found it and flicked its switch and shook it, but it would not turn on.
He sat up and his head swam, and in the distance, he saw Absalom with his arms around Julian, comforting the sobbing boy, both enveloped under a radiant dome. Sunk in darkness himself, he watched them embrace in the fire’s light.
Saul fought to his feet and the dome of light jostled in the crowding gloom with each step of his shuffling gait. Absalom was kissing Julian’s forehead. Absalom was motioning for him to wait. Absalom was digging through his backpack.
“Absalom!” Saul thought his own voice sounded like a demon speaking out of the night. “I know you carry that gun, Absalom. I took it out when you asked me to get your bag, and I locked it in your truck.”
Absalom kept digging. Saul could hear his voice saying, “they’ve got to be here,” and the frantic note in it made Saul feel ashamed, and that shame made him angry. Julian shivered and whined.
Saul drew the truck keys from his pocket and held them up, and they faintly jingled with each step.
Now he was standing at the firelight’s dim perimeter. He had blood smeared in his hair on one side of his head, and a rough-looking gash on his right forearm. Absalom looked up at the sound of the jingling. He stood and pushed Julian behind him.
There were tears in Saul’s eyes, but his lips curled with anger. “Are you going to walk out of here, Absalom? It’s miles.”
“Good idea.” Absalom lifted his bag. “Come on, Julian.” He took his brother’s hand. “The road’s this way.”
Saul’s eyes widened. Everything seemed to still—the wind died, the fire fell back into its bed, and Saul couldn’t feel its heat. He shuddered. He needed his brother not to leave. “Wait!”
They stood on opposite sides with the campfire between them. Absalom paused.
“Absalom, I’m sorry. Please come back.” Saul fell to his knees in the dirt.
Absalom looked at Saul, then turned to look at Julian. A bruise was forming on the boy’s cheek where Saul had slapped him. His eyes were red and wide as a rabbit’s.
Absalom turned back to Saul. “I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”
Saul’s shoulders slumped forward, his eyes searched the dust. “I’m sorry, Julian. Please come here.”
Julian hung back and Absalom rested a hand on his shoulder.
“It was wrong to hit you, Julian. I won’t do it again. Father got to me. I can’t put enough rocks on top of him to keep him out of my head.” And in saying it, Saul believed it was true, and he was afraid.
Julian sniffled. “Why did you hit me, Saul?”
Saul didn’t know how to answer. He thrust his face forward. “I want you to hit me, Julian. I deserve it. Close your fist. Hit my face.”
Julian met Saul’s gaze and held it, his eyes surprisingly confident though tender. Saul felt the urge to look away, a frantic voice whispering that the boy could see into him. But his pride would not allow it.
Julian stepped to within an arm’s length of Saul.
“I don’t want to hit you, Saul. I love you.” And he put his arms around his oldest brother. Hesitantly, Saul hugged Julian and closed his eyes against the desert and the darkness and the exploding lights in the sky.
And he wanted to fall into the embrace, but Father still lay under the pile of stones, part of the land now. Father stretching out bleak mile after mile of cracking dirt and dry scrub, thrust upward as craggy buttes, black monoliths against the teeming night sky. And there was the construction company that could have been his. Was supposed to have been his. And Father’s voice through the closed door: “the only Sin I’ll have in my life.” And Sindee’s: “I’ve been so sinful, Zeke; I hope you’ll teach me another lesson tonight.” And the strange feeling of coveting Father’s wife, who would have had him call her mother. And here was this soft child, her actual son, who thought that Martians would come to disrupt the will of fathers and that a lifetime of pain could be salved with a hug. And there was the letter from that lawyer that came after Father died, and that Saul didn’t tell them about, the one that said Father had changed the will.
Absalom spoke in a hush. “The life Father built around you and me wasn’t really his, Saul. And then Sindee gave him permission to do what he wanted. He was selfish, and we don’t have to forgive him. But it helped me to see that she gave him back a dream.”
Saul let go of Julian, but found his youngest brother gazing into his eyes, kind, genuine, and innocent. He turned his face away and got to his feet. “He owed us. We were the oldest.”
“People are more complicated than you think. You know, Sindee really cared for him. She wasn’t just some gold digger. In the hospital, before she lost consciousness, she talked about his curious soul. She said she was sorry he had been so severe. She said no one had shown him how to love. And she asked about you, Saul. I remember she was wincing from the pain, but she worried that she hadn’t loved you enough.”
Saul’s jaw clenched, his face like exposed sedimentary stone.
Absalom shrugged. “I have to go now. It was good of you to apologize to Julian.” He put his hand on Julian’s back to guide him away.
“What’s this meeting you’re rushing off to?”
Absalom sighed. “I’d prefer not to talk about it, Saul.”
“Those big tankers come in at the beginning of the month, the ones with the warning labels. Is it acid in them? For the processing?”
Absalom’s face remained inert. “I don’t know about the processing side.”
“Weren’t you working on a chemistry degree?”
“I don’t know anything, Saul.”
Saul sighed. “Alright, but let’s sit together a while longer. I messed up. I want to find some peace with you. The world might be ending.”
He walked to where his chair had landed, righted it, set it in front of the fire and sat. After a moment, Julian came and sat by him. Absalom stood apart from them at the firelight’s edge. Then he crossed to the fire, added a piece of wood, and sat between his brothers.
All around, showers of sparks and cascades of smoke drifted from above into the lower atmosphere like rainfall below stormy heavens. The night sky seemed less crowded, though tiny explosions still flared in every part of it. And yet, some still small points shone through, light from distant stars older than Lithium America, and older than America; older than the McDermott Caldera, and older even than the Earth. There was more stillness in the busy sky than they had ever seen.
“It’s beautiful.” Absalom’s voice was reverent. “I didn’t know it could be this way.”
Julian spoke, his voice tentative. “I wasn’t afraid the coyotes would eat him.”
Saul rubbed his head. “What?”
Julian spoke more loudly. “I kept imagining if they moved the rocks he would get back up, and I didn’t want that.”
Absalom’s tone was hushed. “You know that can’t happen, bud.”
Julian nodded, but his voice gathered strength. “He didn’t spoil me. He was mean. He didn’t like when I read comic books or played imagination games. I could tell he tried to be nice around mom, but he was ashamed of me. When she wasn’t around, he called me an idiot.”
He turned to look at Saul. “Like you do, Saul.”
Saul felt a feeling that he couldn’t name, and it made him want to be angry. He looked at Absalom, who was staring back at him with trepidation. He said nothing and listened instead.
Julian looked out into the darkness. “It got worse after she died. He never hit me, but it was still bad. He said I didn’t know about the value of work. He said I was lazy. You would be out fixing a fence or digging or working with the stock, and he would tell me I needed to learn from you, or I’d never amount to anything.”
Saul’s stomach lurched.
“He came into my room one night after mom died. I realized he was drunk. He said I was his child of joy. He said I was supposed to be his greatest triumph. He started to cry. He begged me to grow up and not be useless. He kept asking me what he had done wrong.”
Julian’s voice got quiet again. “I’m not supposed to feel happy he died.”
Saul sat quietly. He was thinking about the will, was thinking about traveling to the probate court at Winnemucca and the sonofabitch in the silly tie who told him there was nothing he could do because his father had changed the will and that was that. And he was thinking of how he had told Absalom that the company was trying to steal the land, but really Father had just given it all to Julian, his child of joy. And the land was worthless; his idiot father had bought a scrap of dirt without any mineral value. Why would any company steal worthless land? He had asked whether there was an older version of the will. His father wasn’t well at the end. Didn’t that matter? “Look buddy,” Mr. Silly Tie had said, “You ain’t rich enough to buy me off.”
So he had gone to Reno, not to do research or to find better lawyers, but because he got a meeting with someone he thought might be rich enough. And in Reno there had been cars without drivers and people walking around in flashy clothes and a sky full of drones and stores full of gizmos to buy. But there were no robots. No recruiting stations. And he saw a report on a TV in a bar about how that space company had lost contact with those Mars colonists but kept it quiet for almost a year, had lost complete contact, like the ship had drifted off course or been struck by a meteor or had a mutiny or who knows what, but anyway the company’s stock had dipped, though they were promising another attempt before the year’s end. And the rubes were signing up. And the company’s stock was blasting off.
And waiting in the lobby at the Lithium Nevada offices for his meeting, he had overheard two rich-looking guys wearing spotless cowboy hats and suits talking about how nobody knew what was going to happen. Corporate negotiations about sky rights had broken down again. And volatile nations were talking about shooting satellites down. And other nations were threatening retaliation. And nobody knew the difference between company interests and the law. And one of the guys looked at the other and said, “But they’re not going to end the world, right? This is all going to work out.” And they had laughed and gone out.
Saul had laid it all out in his meeting: Sindee’s long illness draining the family coffers, a short period of mostly unsuccessful ranching after her passing, and Father’s decline and death. Pitiful as his lament was, the man across the table stared with detached evenness at Saul, right through him really, and more than once Saul wondered whether the man was actually a robot. “I’m sure that all sounds very sad, Mr. Winters,” the machine-man had said without a shred of sympathy. “I think we can help you with that will, but what will you do for Lithium Nevada?”
Saul stood and spoke abruptly to his brothers. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Let’s go.”
And then they heard from the direction of the road a car door slam and footsteps grinding in the dirt, and Saul felt a spike of horror like he had never felt before and looked with stricken eyes at Absalom.
Julian hailed the figure materializing out of the darkness. “Hi, Sherriff Rusk!”
The sheriff’s voice sounded congenial, but there was an anxious undercurrent to it. “The Winters brothers! Just who I’ve been looking for. Lucky, I saw your campfire from the road.”
Absalom was on his feet, his body moving with the automatic action of instinct. Saul heard the sheriff call out, “Abbie, don’t!”
Then the sheriff was sprinting past Saul, and Saul was rooted in place. He didn’t want his brother locked up, knew it in the moment and with anguish. He had been wrong. But there was no stopping the law. Not now. It whirred away like a machine always circling above and outside, and it was pointless to resist it. The law, like fathers, persisted.
The sheriff tackled Absalom and pinned him just outside the circle of firelight.
Julian was screaming. “Abbie! What’s happening? Saul, stop him! Sherriff, stop!”
The sheriff was holding Absalom’s arms and yanking him to his feet and jerking his wrists behind his back to handcuff him.
“Absalom Winters, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit sabotage and unlawful assembly with radicals.”
Deep inside Saul a wordless howl reverberated, an inscrutable cry full of grief and loneliness and self-loathing. He recognized in it his father’s voice, keening beside Sindee, and he remembered how his father’s cry had been muffled because Ezekiel had ordered them all out of the room so he could be alone with her corpse, so they had listened to him grieving through the walls. It echoed through the cavern inside him and shivered all the way to his throat, but he would not let it escape his lips. He held it, as Father had taught him to do.
Absalom’s eyes turned up to the sky, where they fixed on one of those still small points. He became calm, and a dangerous quiet of waiting infused his body.
The sheriff yammered. “I don’t know why you had to make this difficult for me. The staties sent over the warrant before everything went tits up, and I can’t get any explanation or even get anybody on the horn, but I can do my job. What are you doing fucking with the mine, son? That’s people’s jobs. That’s somebody else’s money. Lots of money.” It was as if he wanted Absalom’s permission to arrest him.
As they walked past Saul, Absalom stopped and turned and looked wordlessly at the sheriff, who, overwhelmed by his intense gaze, stopped hustling him forward. Then Absalom peered into his brother’s eyes. “The old world is going up like a parchment in a flame, Saul, and it is drifting back down as embers and ash.”
Saul felt his brother looking deep into him. And the corners of Absalom’s mouth turned up. “Don’t pile the soot over yourself. I forgive you, Brother. Now, stand up.”
Saul felt tears brimming that he did not fear. A shiver ran down his spine, and he felt a warming in his chest, as the grace born in his brother’s love filled him up, and he felt blessed as he had never felt before.
Absalom’s voice was soft, a command of love. “Stand up, now.”
Then the sheriff led him away. And Saul heard a car door slam and watched headlights dwindle into the distance.
Julian was whimpering, but Saul held his hand down, palm open at his side, and Julian quieted. The fire guttered and gulped in the breeze. The night had grown nearly silent. No coyotes. No talk. Only the distant wail of wind flaying its back on the sharp corners of stony passageways.
To the west, a fireball streaked out of the sky and collided in a bright flash and a terrible crunch with the ground two hundred feet away. Julian jerked and sped towards the points of fire burning in the near distance, and Saul ran after him, calling out, “wait, Julian!”
Julian was shouting from up ahead. “It looks like a piece of a spaceship!”
A flaming charred hunk of twisted metal, still glowing with the heat from reentry, had crashed into the pile of stones over their father’s grave, scattering some of them around. Here and there, smaller flames licked at the wreckage strewn from the impact.
Saul looked at the metal hulk burning amid the piled stones. Then he looked at his brother. He got down on one knee and met his gaze. “I guess he won’t be getting up now, Julian.”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t have hit you. I won’t do it again.”
“OK.”
They stayed that way, Julian standing and Saul kneeling, and watched the flames die. The sky had grown almost completely still, only now and then did a single faint point zoom by, while a quiet celestial company stared solemnly down on them.
“Abbie’s going to get free, Saul. He’ll kick out the grate in the sheriff’s car and make him swerve, and the sheriff will get knocked out in the crash, but Abbie will get the handcuff keys and get free. And he’ll go into hiding in the hills so they can’t find him. He’ll get food and water wherever he can. Eventually, he’ll come out of hiding and find us. He’ll be covered in dust and muck and have a long scraggly beard. But we’ll recognize him right away, and when he sees us, he will hug us and tell us how much he missed us. He’ll help us fix this, whatever has happened. I know it’s not really Martians. I don’t know what it is. But Abbie will know how to fix it. He’s smart. He’s going to be a leader one day.”
Saul could feel the heat off the metal, even from this far away. He opened his arms to his brother, and Julian smiled and nestled into him. Saul closed his eyes. Low and close to Father’s grave he still felt the weight, some dark gravity drawing him towards it.
Then he felt the boy’s delicate frame in his embrace. This time, his mind didn’t wander from the contact. Their father lay buried under the burning heavens, and Saul felt newly stable, with one knee to the open earth, and strong. Julian’s breathing slowed and deepened. Saul found his own was slowing too. The desert breeze was faint now, but each breath carried the subtle scent of sagebrush to remind him that he held the world inside himself. And that the world held him. Held them both. Held them all. The silence was comforting. He opened his eyes.
“When he gets out, Julian, I believe Abbie will come and find us.”
Saul stood.
He rested a hand on Julian’s shoulder. Together, they watched the unencumbered stars burn brighter and listened to their sweet stillness.
Kurtis Hessel lives in Boulder and teaches writing at the University of Colorado. His scholarly work on British Romanticism and the history of science has appeared in journals including Studies in Romanticism and Configurations, among others. He especially enjoys teaching science and nature writing, which dovetails with his passion for hiking and backpacking in the mountains and canyonlands of the American West. This is his first fiction publication. Learn more at www.kurtishessel.com.
Author’s Note: “The seed for this story was planted when I watched a chain of Starlink satellites creep across the sky during a backpacking trip in the Utah backcountry. I had recently learned about space junk and the Kessler syndrome from a student essay in a science writing class. Standing in the isolated stillness of the wild, confronted by how fragile our outer darkness now seemed, I wondered what would happen if someone who had grown accustomed to a sky clogged with satellites watched—without understanding—as those lights suddenly began to explode. Saul, Absalom, and Julian, with their Rashomon-style explanations, grew out of that speculation.
“For Aunt Jenna, who taught me to love storytelling.”
“Above the Vaulted Sky” by Kurtis Hessel. Copyright © 2026 by Kurtis Hessel. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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