Samantha Edmonds’s short story, “Collide,” is from MQR’s Winter 2020 issue. Her story collection, A Preponderance of Starry Beings, is out now.
I first hear about it on the evening news, my heels kicked off, blazer on the floor, drive-thru fries cooling on the counter, seconds after my daughter tells me, Tomorrow Bryan’s taking me to the movies. On the TV, newscasters call it Milkdromeda: the galaxy we might or might not be alive to live in after the collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda, our spirally galactic neighbor. When they merge, it’s unsure how Earth will be affected. My fourteen-year-old daughter, standing on the top stair, where she had emerged from eating dinner in her room, like she does every night, bounds down upon hearing words like galactic and annihilation, and sits on the floor too close to the TV. Cool, she says. Hey Mom, you should hold off on sending in our rent check! You know, just in case. We can spend it on plane tickets or something instead. Where do you wanna be when it all ends?
Very funny, I say.
Apparently, it’s been fated since the Big Bang that the two galaxies would come together—oh, the Milky Way may try to put it off, stop time if it could, move mere inches in millennia, but Andromeda was its destiny, the trajectory chosen long ago. They are flying toward each other, no way around it. And, my daughter and I hear next on the news, the longest we have been in the same room together all week, my solitary nightly wine glass forgotten, gone warm on the coffee table, that it’s our fate, too, to be here for it. The scientists look intelligent and baffled. We thought this was thousands of years in the future, but it’s mere days away. It’s right now. Things in the universe have sped up, is what they’re saying, you can see it with your own eyes, right in front of you, just look—and there’s a possibility that we could be tossed away from the new union and shot into space. We could be blown apart, scattered in pieces. We could be crushed and compacted. We could lose ourselves, is what they’re saying, we could be completely, devastatingly destroyed by this union. I am suddenly sorry for a lot of things.
Still, this is only a slim possibility, the scientists are quick to say, and there’s a greater chance nothing will happen—when the Milky Way slams into Andromeda, the stars and planets of each may never touch, not with all that empty space between them. In that case, the Solar System will have a new galactic address, but nothing else will change. I relax into the couch cushion. So it’ll all be all right, then, I say. It won’t really matter, not in the long run.
My daughter’s furious. How can you say that? Two universes are colliding. Of course this will matter!
You heard them, there’s only a small chance anything comes of this.
Who cares, my daughter says, what do they know? and I feel a tickle of familiarity. Something inside me plunges and dives. She’s thinking, you don’t get it, Mom, and you never will. That’s what she’s always thinking. Eyes on her phone, I imagine she is texting Milkdromeda??!! to all her friends. She’s already looking forward to the collision, I can tell, the sensation of slamming yourself into another and emerging, if you emerge at all, irrevocably changed. I watch her for what feels like a long time but is only seconds. Time is always tricking me that way.
She looks up from her phone, arms out: We’re going to be the best intergalactic couple in the history of the universe! Now that I’ve stopped arguing, she’s excited, laughing and looking at me, and when is the last time she’s done both at once? She’s spinning, dancing like she used to; for a second I’m not worried, glimpses of childhood in her whirlwind hair. This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me!
I remember two things then at the same time.
First: Who’s Bryan?
Second: I imagine the rest of the women in my Greenville High School Class of 1994 hearing about this galactic collision tonight, too, sitting on couches after supper, some still in pantsuits and heels, some already barefoot wearing fuzzy lounge pants, everyone without makeup. Their husbands are napping, or reading, or dismissive, or ten years absent (fuck you, Jack). Milkdromeda causes the back of their necks to tighten. It causes our stomachs to somersault as if already spacebound. They, like I, listen to daughters squeal at the TV, and remember something they had long forgotten. A kind of weightlessness, a sick-to-your-stomach sensation of falling straight up.
He’s just a boy from school, my daughter says, not even turning. She’s sitting in front of the TV crisscross applesauce, that’s what she called it when she was younger, and for a second I can almost believe she’s eight years old again, watching something with a peppy theme song, the words of which she’ll sing and dance to in multiple performances, her stage the living room, the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom, while I showered, peed, put on makeup, all the while her demanding, Mama, Mama, are you watching, are you? Yes, with her back to me, too-big sweatshirt on, knees sticking out either side, she could easily be eight, and that’d be why I’ve never heard of a boy named Bryan.
Don’t sit so close to the TV, I say. Bad for your eyes. And she cricks her neck to look at me, wearing blue eyeshadow and dark eyeliner, Okay, Mom, but she doesn’t move. Instead she Googles images of the saucer-shaped star clusters, all blue and orange and red. (She doesn’t sing around the house anymore, but she dances on the school team, practices in her room after dinner with the door closed, doesn’t want me to see.) The news station runs an outrageous headline across the bottom of the screen: APOCALYPSE AT LAST? My old classmates, I bet, watch their daughters’ faces light up, too.
This is going to change everything, she says, and I answer, It’s probably not, but I’m remembering so much now, how I had once been just like her, and so I say, Honey, have I ever told you about my first galactic collision? but she’s again no longer listening. My classmates and I are watching our teenagers dance in the living room; sing It’s the end of the world!; send texts with too many exclamations; bound up the stairs to find GIFs, read BuzzFeed articles, Photoshop fanart for the galactic wedding of the century. Our daughters don’t hear their mothers’ sighs, the stories they want to tell. It’s impossible to think their mothers were once fourteen, that they will one day be their mothers’ age, that this will not change them. No, for them, this is the end of the world; a collision will come to pass—and something must always come from a collision.
I look at the TV. I can feel the eyes of all my old classmates looking, too. Together we berate the scientists. How dare they get our daughters’ hopes up. How dare they make a promise of cosmic consequence they cannot keep. They have infected our daughters with the delirium of destruction. Don’t you know how big space is? we say in our separate homes. Don’t you know how empty? Years ago, as teenagers, or rather, as children—we’re old enough now to recognize there was little difference—we learned about a dwarf galaxy, consisting of four globular clusters, in our high school science class a week before the prom. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, or SagDEG, we will never forget its name—you never forget your first—had floated into the Milky Way’s front door and taken a seat.
This charmed us; we appreciated boldness. We became obsessed. We spent the weekend reading books, poring over articles, searching for keywords at the library. We mispronounced globular to the reference librarians. We misspelled Sagittarius. We could feel it inside and pointed to our bodies as if to prove it. Right here. We feel it right here. We grew to love this first foreign galaxy, whose stardust mingled with our stardust until the scientists couldn’t tell where either ended or began. We were asked to the prom by boys in our class whose names our mothers had never heard. We’re all spirals, we said back then, and we have no end. We bought prom dresses in groups of six or more, we made dinner reservations and rented limos for sixteen or eighteen, and all the while SagDEG was inside, wrapped warm around us, and we were happy knowing we were not so alone in all the wide black space, that another galaxy out there had found ours and sidled close. Yes, I remember being fourteen.
We made T-shirts with pictures of SagDEG and hung posters above our beds and pinned buttons to our backpacks and wrote poetry: A star is a kiss one galaxy gives to another. We went to prom and showed our dates the night sky before they took us into their backseats and locked the doors, and we laughed naked for the amazement of it all and on our backs we clutched the arms of our boys above us, and we said, noses in their necks, This galaxy thing is for real, oh, and you are my great love. And our dates laughed, too, but meaner than we had, and we didn’t know why. The Monday after, when we wore our Love and Galaxies Stay Forever T-shirts to science class, our teacher laughed like our prom dates had. Are you talking about Sagittarius? That’s not going to last.
What do you mean? we asked, and he explained that the dwarf galaxy had its own orbit to complete, separate from ours, and someday it would pass out of the Milky Way as seamlessly as it came in. There’s a chance it could get absorbed entirely into ours, but it’s unlikely, he said.
You’re wrong, we said. What do you know? Everything is different now. We would not have believed then that we would have daughters that would someday become us.
The teacher was unmoved. This wasn’t an isolated event, he explained—the Milky Way had been entered by other small galaxies before. This is pretty standard stuff, said the teacher. Galaxies come together and fall apart all the time and it never affects us. There will be others, said the boys who’d taken us to prom. Don’t you know how big space is? the teacher said. Don’t you know how empty?
And then we went home and returned the library books and tore up the poetry and burned the posters and threw away the T-shirts and stopped taking boys’ calls and tried to forget. But that night it kept us awake, a dull ache for some, a kind of itching for others, for all an awareness of our bodies we’d never had before. In the morning, just before dawn, we drifted off. No one ever told us that our world might end, but we wanted it to. We longed for something to point to, proof that something had happened to us.
Only a couple of hours later we jolted awake, certain we were changed. We looked at the still night sky and felt we would pour out, straight up, soak into the constellations. When we looked in the mirror, we thought we could see the weight of the galaxy bulging from our chests. Now do you believe us? we said to our mothers, who said we were fine, but then we frightened them when we didn’t get out of bed, blankets burying us to our chins, or when we tried to do the chores and got hysterical with the litter box scoop in our hands, speechless and gaping, unable to breathe through everything coming out of us, not galaxy dust or star tails or cosmic fire, all of which seemed more appropriate than these everyday snotty tears.
Our mothers took us to doctors, who said everything looked normal. We won’t survive this, we said, but the doctors said we would, showed us the X-rays, the CAT scans, the MRIs. But we all believed in the mini galaxy born that day inside each of us, replacing our blood with stardust, organs with planets and asteroids, platelets with burning spheres of light and gas. We believed this thing that had happened could never un-happen—impossible that a galaxy once slipped inside ours could ever slip out again without at least destroying everything—and maybe that was why the years passed quietly and without our really noticing, and some moved away and some married boys who weren’t our prom dates and some got left by men who weren’t our first loves, but it didn’t matter. We fell out of touch even with each other.
And maybe none of the class of 1994, despite what they’d believed at the time, ever thought of SagDEG again—until now, on a Tuesday after dinner, the face of Milkdromeda reflected in the eyes of their teenage daughters, who are over the moon like mine. After an hour on the internet she comes downstairs to say, Mom, this Milkdromeda thing’s for real. And again I say, Have I ever told you about my first galactic collision, and this time she is wide-eyed and says, No, what was it called? She takes a seat beside me on the couch where she hasn’t sat in years, leaning into me so our shoulders touch and I can smell her strawberry shampoo, remembering summers long ago in the backyard, just us, swinging as high as we could and then jumping off, screaming: Girls rule, boys drool!
I decide not to tell the story. I can already hear her voice: Those were dwarf galaxies, Mom. Andromeda is way bigger than the Milky Way, so this is totally different. She runs her hands through her hair. Her ears are pierced, her hair has hairspray in it, and when did she get so grown up? Oh, she says in my silence, Bryan wants to come over, if that’s okay. Because this might be it, you know?
And all the daughters of the women from the class of 1994 must be saying the same thing to their mothers, none of whom believe in galactic couples anymore, that the universe will never come back from this, that it’s okay. They want to be destroyed, or else irrevocably absorbed into this union, to collide so completely there’s no telling the difference between two separate entities anymore; and I, we, the mothers of the class of 1994, don’t have the heart to tell them, and so we don’t, that space is vast and mostly blackness, and that they will probably not slam into something else or be ejected or absorbed or burned or destroyed, but rather met with silence and a lot of nothing, and afterward, in all likelihood, survive; instead we only say, Yes, of course Bryan can come over. I can’t wait to meet him.
