no stars no more

In the evening they escort us to the bunker, after the Careggi's hospital, and we all go like cows, slipping. We go like cows, except the cows went back to their stables themselves, no herding needed. My sister Sasà accepts everything, docile. I wonder what her head has been thinking for the past fourteen years. Her hair, still wet from the shower, reach down to her ass. She has short shorts and tanned legs.

“When I was your age they all had an Insta profile,” I tell her. And she says, "what is Insta?”

I'd be afraid for her. But aliens treat us well, they know how to deal with mass panic. And she's not my real sister. Ten years ago they brought this child to my door, they told me, she doesn't have her parents, now it's your deal, this bundle of nothing.

Its ok, I got this. I should have said.

Now aliens like Chachacha and Cabròn escort us. They exude a strange sense of safety. Cabròn is in an exoskeleton that looks like one of those toy quads gifted to rich kids, to get them used to doing road crimes. Cabròn's toy tractor is covered by a dome of pressurized plastic that magnifies his black eyes.

First contact was in Argentina. The aliens understood a shit and a half of Spanish, liked it well enough, then they embedded some universal translator bullshit and stopped caring for linguistics. But the names stuck. I wonder if Latin America is still a thing.

The sunset is on fire and I don’t think it’s fair to spend every night in the bunker. I tell Sasà to be good, to stay close to Cabròn, then I slow down, I get out of the line, I lag behind. An alien passes by me on his motorized car, looks at me, must know what I'm planning. He, she, it, they tell nothing.

I'm done pretending.

Lights are out in town. Florence has lost that perennial cloak of smog which used to make us sweat, so now we've got normal sunsets, red and orange until it's all deep blue and black.

Cabròn says they don't know why that is. Their species has the technology to drug any star with new hydrogen, extending their lifespans. Their gravity tractors played pool with pulsars and neutron stars.

They don't make that nomore. They are little, they are dwarfs, like us, they are scared.

I sit on the hood of a rusted car. A broken-tailed, mangy tomcat comes out from underneath to look for mice.

Aliens have a policy for cats as well. They give them this drug that makes 'hem happy, then they lower their heads and gut them as they purr. They say it's better, this way. The mangy tomcat is smarter, anyway, because it runs as I make a sound.

I chose a night with no moon, to better look at the sky. When the sun has gone behind the buildings, I can see it. A uniform slate of black.

That's that. I wish I could use one of the old telescopes. Then maybe I would be able to see, weak, an infestation of white dots, of the arm of the milky way, lines of stars that cough like the lung disease ward. And then the other galaxies, unreachable, used to be fiery, now just faint.

Cabròn says we're not the only ones.

They just don't know why our little Sun is still healthy while everything else dies.

Let's go, I told him. Let's take a ship, me, you, Sasà. Let's get to the bottom of this. There must be a place we can look into, a solution to be find, something to be done. There must be a place better than here. But Cabròn had no shoulders to shrug, so he didn't.

I'm making my way to the bunker under an empty sky. The alien guarding the door doesn't even ask me why I broke curfew. I find Sasà trying to teach card game to three younger children. Cabròn has his eyes on her. Motherfucker. I wonder if he wants to give her the drug, the one that makes one happy.

Lift up your three eyes on me, Cabròn. They says they can’t read minds, but I would be dumb to believe.

"It's not fair that you don't show us," I tell him.

“You have seen. ”

Yeah, and nothing happened.