annashay 
by Jaime Gill
BAYAARA PARKS THE CAR outside the observatory, leans over to his granddaughter, and zips her fur-lined coat tight around her face to protect her from the Mongolian night—a night so cold it has teeth. Only her eyes are visible through her hood now, marmoset huge.
‘I want to see, Grampaw,’ she pleads, after they step outside. ‘I can’t see.’
He wishes he’d put her to bed an hour earlier, at the time his daughter, Varvara, instructed. He shouldn’t have let her stay up watching those Korean cartoons. If he’d been a better, stricter grandfather, she’d be sleeping through all of this. But what’s done is done. He couldn’t pretend that nothing unusual is happening, or leave her alone at the cottage.
He helps her climb onto the hood of his decrepit car, a rust-mottled Lada Niva. From there, she scrambles onto his shoulders. The days when his back would have allowed him to crouch for her are long gone and Nataliya’s seven now, heavier than last time she visited from Moscow.
He looks west as three new white streaks tear across the star-smeared sky. He doesn’t need a compass to know they’re heading south-east, towards Beijing. He’s an astronomer—the sky is his compass.
‘Why can’t I wish on the shooting stars, Grampaw?’ Bayaara again wonders if his ex-wife filled his granddaughter’s head with this superstitious nonsense just to annoy him.
‘I told you before, monkey,’ he says. ‘Tonight’s not about making wishes. Tonight’s when people’s wishes are granted.’ This is the truth—though Bayaara doesn’t say what kind of wishes or who made them.
Her weight shifts on his shoulders. She’s twisting to look south, so Bayaara turns that way. This is why he wanted to come to the observatory, after all. Not for the telescopes, for the view. The observatory’s perch on Bogd Mountain offers a panoramic perspective and is far enough away from Ulaanbaatar that light pollution is negligible.
Beijing lies a thousand kilometres away, concealed by the earth’s curvature, but the horizon glows peach and the distant sky blooms with flashes of violet. If Bayaara’s memories of his long-ago nuclear studies are reliable, those are plasma waves unleashed by nuclear missiles detonating on land. China’s vaunted sky-shield has failed. Perhaps the CCP exaggerated its effectiveness, or Russia’s AI worms penetrated their satellite system and immobilized it. Perhaps both.
‘Are those lights really people becoming angels?’ Nataliya asks.
‘Yes, that’s what they wished for.’ Bayaara has always disliked euphemism and whimsy, but tonight sees their value.
Nataliya’s legs are trembling. She’s been outside too long.
‘Let’s go inside, monkey.’
‘I want to watch the wishes come true,’ Nataliya moans, but her teeth chatter.
‘We can watch from inside.’
Bayaara stoops to maneuver through the observatory’s door, his lower back screaming. He helps Nataliya scramble down onto the bench where backpackers used to sit, waiting to be shown around Mongolia’s National Observatory. When they realised that Bayaara, their guide, was also Mongolia’s Chief Astronomer, their mouths sometimes twitched with amusement. He didn’t mind, really. The wild oscillations of life had gifted him with a sense of humour by then, one he’d lacked as a younger, more celebrated man.
He flicks a switch and low lights reveal three hulking manual telescopes dominating the observatory’s domed interior. When Bayaara was a senior astronomer in Moscow, he’d commanded a dozen telescopes, some computerised. But then the Wall tumbled and the USSR with it. Forty-five years ago, though they feel like five or a thousand, depending on Bayaara’s mood.
Bayaara lost everything—his job, his residency permit, his apartment with the Moskva River view. He’d had little choice but to return to the homeland he’d left as a fourteen-year-old prodigy. He knew he could adapt to reduced circumstances, but his Moscow-born wife decided she could not. She stayed behind with their daughter, Varvara. He’s seen his ex-wife twice in all the decades since, his daughter a dozen times at most.
It’s warm enough inside the observatory for Bayaara to remove his gloves. He manually adjusts the smallest, nimblest telescope until he finds Betelgeuse. As ever, the red supergiant is pulsating, huge convective cells rising and falling through its vastness like bubbles in a pot of boiling water—although each bubble is larger than Earth’s own sun.
He helps Nataliya clamber onto a stool so she can squint through the viewfinder.
She scrunches her face until it comes into focus and then gasps. ‘Oh! It’s dancing!’
‘Yes. That’s the place angels go to celebrate,’ Bayaara says. ‘Would you like to watch for a while?’
Nataliya, enraptured, doesn’t even answer.
Bayaara steps back outside and looks up, seeing at once what he feared. A dozen streaks racing in Moscow’s direction. His eyes fill with tears for the first time in decades. Varvara is still there. She’d sent Nataliya to him three weeks ago for safety, panicked by the escalating hostilities between China and Russia. Bayaara had lived through many false nuclear alarms during the Cold War and told her she was being overcautious, but Varvara argued that the US’ declaration of non-intervention in this War of the Bears was tacit incitement.
Bayaara wished he could call Varvara now and tell her she’d been right and he loved her and not one day had gone by without him thinking of her, how on each of her birthdays he’d drunk a shot of vodka for her. But by the time Bayaara noticed the sky’s discolouration, his mobile signal had already gone, perhaps knocked out by an electromagnetic pulse or a satellite strike.
What should he do next? Bayaara’s brain has always been sharp, but it can’t pierce the future. It’s been a century since the last atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The world has leashed these dragons since, but—now they fly again—how long before other nuclear nations are pulled into the fray? Bayaara has enough food for a year, but will fallout poison it even inside its cans? His nuclear knowledge is half a century old, and there’s no way to renew it now.
He lights a Marlboro, sucks a chilly lungful of nicotine, then thrusts his freezing hands into his pocket, cigarette dangling from his lips. He glances back inside the observatory. Nataliya still has her face squashed up against the telescope, watching Betelgeuse. She doesn’t know that it dances because it’s dying. She doesn’t need to. One last night of childhood, he can give her that.
More missiles streak overhead, passing under the constellation known as the Archer. Bayaara’s eyes linger there. The Babylonians first wrote of those stars three millennia ago. A thousand years later, the Romans named them Sagittarius. Perhaps Bayaara’s conqueror ancestors took inspiration from them as they rode out from the plains of Mongolia, bows in hand.
Ancient history for humans, but utterly insignificant in the billion-year lifespans of stars. Bayaara once found that perspective comforting, but not tonight. And when he sees a real shooting star—a meteor—scratching the sky high above, he makes the first wish of his adult life. He wishes as hard as he knows how to.
It doesn’t come true. Time keeps moving forward, an arrow unleashed.
oOo
Jaime Gill is a queer, British-born writer happily exiled in Cambodia, where he works and volunteers for nonprofits. He reads, writes, boxes, travels, occasionally socialises. His stories have appeared in publications including Trampset, Blue Earth, Orca, Pangyrus, New Flash Fiction Review, Litro, f(r)iction, and Exposition Review, won several awards including a Bridport prize, and been finalists for the Smokelong Grand Micro and Bath Short Story Awards. He’s Pushcart-nominated and writing a novel and far too many short stories.
More: www.jaimegill.com, www.instagram.com/mrjaimegill,
www.twitter.com/jaimegill
