The Photograph That Was Missing Something

The whole block went dark at once, the way a held breath stops.

"Outage," said Soren. He was sitting on the windowsill with his grandmother's old phone, scrolling her photos because there was nothing else lit up in the apartment except the screen.

"Look outside," Maya said. She was already at the glass. "Everything's gone. The signs, the streetlights, the tower. All of it."

"The building across is still on. They've got a generator."

"But look up."

Soren came over. Between the two dark buildings there was a strip of sky, and it was doing something it had never done before.

"There are more stars," he said.

"There are so many more stars. Where were they?"

"They were always there. The lights were just louder."

Maya pressed her forehead to the window, then pulled back because the glass gave off the day's heat. "Count them."

"You can't count them. That's the point of them." Soren held up the phone. "Grandma's got a picture of this. I thought it was fake."

He turned it toward her. In the photo, over a village with no lights at all, a river of pale smoke ran across the whole sky, thick in the middle, frayed at the edges.

"That's a cloud," Maya said.

"That's what I said. She got mad. She said it's not a cloud, it's the Milky Way. She said when she was our age she could see it every single night. She said it went right over the roof."

Maya looked from the photo to the strip of real sky and back. "I don't see it out there."

"Neither do I."

"But the streetlights are off. That was the thing making the stars quiet. So it should be there."

"Should be," said Soren. He looked at the photo a long time. "The building across is still on."

"So?"

"So one generator, one building, and we still can't see it. Grandma's village had zero lights. Not one. For miles."

Maya sat down on the floor under the window. . "So it's not just our street."

"It's the whole city glowing. All of it together. Even with our block dark, the rest of the city is throwing light up into the air, and the air scatters it back down, and that light is sitting on top of the Milky Way like a lid."

"A lid," Maya repeated. "So the galaxy is up there right now."

"Right now. Over the roof, exactly like she said."

"And we can't see it because we've never turned the city all the way off."

They sat with that. Somewhere below, a neighbor laughed in the dark stairwell. A car alarm gave up halfway through.

"Say it slower," Maya said. "The Milky Way is the galaxy."

"It's our galaxy. All the stars we ever see, every single one, they're all in it. We're inside it."

"We're inside it."

"We live inside the Milky Way. That smoke in Grandma's photo, that's what the inside of it looks like when you look sideways through it. All those stars packed together so far away they blur into a smear."

Maya turned this over. "So it's not that she saw something we don't have."

"No."

"It's that she could see the thing we're standing in. And we can't."

"We're in it right now," Soren said. "We've been in it the whole time. Since we were born. We just never once looked at it."

Maya stood up fast. "How many people is that."

"What?"

"How many people have never seen it. If a whole city hides it, and there's cities everywhere, how many people are walking around inside a galaxy they've never looked at?"

Soren pulled out his own notebook, the paper one, and clicked the pen he kept clipped to it. He did not turn on a light. He wrote in the dark by feel, the letters going crooked.

"Grandma said a scientist told her once," he said. "One out of every three people alive. A third of everybody. Never seen it. Not once."

"A third of everybody," Maya said. "Is inside the Milky Way and has never met it."

"Including us. Until Grandma got mad about her cloud."

Maya went back to the window. The strip of sky between the buildings had a few dozen stars in it now, more than she had ever seen there, and she understood that the few dozen were the loud ones, the near ones, the ones bright enough to shove through the lid. Behind them, thick as smoke, was everything else.

"I want to see it," she said. "The real one. The smoke."

"You can't. Not here. You'd have to leave. Get far enough that no city is throwing light up. Grandma's village, or somewhere like it. Somewhere the ground is completely dark."

"Then that's a place I've never been that I have to go." Maya put it on her list, the one in her head, near the top. "There's a whole galaxy over my roof and I have to drive three hours to see my own address."

Soren laughed, and the laugh caught, because it was true and enormous at the same time.

"That's the strangest thing," he said. "It's not far. The Milky Way isn't the far thing. The far thing is finding a place dark enough to look at what's already here."

The lights came back.

All at once the block flooded, the streetlight below flickered orange and then steadied white, the sign across the street began to blink its letters again, and the strip of sky went blank and pale as if someone had wiped it with a cloth. The few dozen stars thinned to three, then one, then none.

"There it goes," Maya said.

"There goes the lid, back on."

They stayed at the window anyway, both of them looking up at the emptied sky, at the exact place where the smoke had almost been, where the grandmother's cloud was still pouring silently across the roof, over the city, over the third of everyone, unseen.

Maya lifted her hand and pointed at the blank bright nothing above the building. "It's still there," she said. "Right there."