annashay 
by Elizabeth Collis
HUNDREDS OF REPORTERS have set up outside my home, microphones and long lenses aimed this way like space telescopes. They jostle for the first picture and words of a man who has been burst open and scattered by the blinding destruction of a star. Everything I’ve known and lived has detonated in a supernova explosion. The journalists scrambling for me won’t find a person, only scraps of interstellar matter fading among clouds of dust.
I’m not the man who abducted a teenage girl, starved and abused her, stuffed her in a cramped closet every night for three years. If I was that dude in Cleveland, the neighbor who heard a woman scream for help and rescued her with two other women and a kid, I’d be a hero. But I had no clue this was happening.
And that’s the problem–because I live in an old duplex with paper-thin walls, and the closet was just on the other side of my bedroom, and the girl did everything she could to attract my attention for the year I’ve lived here. She scraped, banged, and knocked on that wall constantly. And I never realized.
The media watches the place she was rescued from, and I watch the media. Camera flashes appear on my TV screen at the same time they light up the blinds I’m hiding behind. The CNN reporter points at the next-door house and then mine. As she tells the world about my abductor neighbor, the girl, and me, I spread my hands on the dividing wall, searching for the noises I didn’t register as distressed, though I must have heard them.
She has a name. It’s scrolling at the bottom of the screen: Samantha Green, Sammy to her friends. Above is a school photo taken a few months before the abduction. A sweet, unblemished face with blonde hair hanging over one eye. She had braces, for God’s sake. I wonder what state her teeth are in now.
I sit on the bedroom floor with my back against the wall, looking inward. I didn’t hear Sammy’s desperate signals because I hardly sleep, and when I do, it’s slumped over my computer downstairs with my headphones on, not in the bedroom. See, outside of work, I don’t live on Earth as a forty-one-year-old nerd. I’m a galactic explorer.
Ever see the NASA images of outer space from the Hubble telescope? Those magical time-lapse videos of comets, menacing black holes, the soft moons of Pluto. Spectacular galaxies colliding and merging billions of years ago, spinning off dust and radiation. The colors—exquisite roses, hazy blues, sharp whites. That’s my domain.
I listen for hours to the soundscapes they make to go with the pictures. Ethereal music: clear, lingering harmonies which fill my emptiness as they blossom in my ears, which take me out of this shoddy house to enjoy brush-stroke nebulae and ancient formations blowing bubbles of gas.
Every spare moment, I explore astronomical telescope images, enthralled by long-gone stars whose light has taken billions of years to reach Earth. It takes me higher than any drug. I forget to eat or drink, shower even—never go out—I’m addicted.
I joined the Galaxy Zoo project as a citizen scientist—they call us “zooites”—and now I watch with purpose, with other fanatics all over the world. To categorize the cosmos for the professional astronomers, we divide a million galaxies into groups. It’s all about pattern recognition, stitching bits of data together, searching for bars and bulges in these distant masses. We identify aberrations, anomalies, irregularities. I’m really good at it, one of the best. In fact, I’m a bit of a hero in my particular orbit.
Sammy, I think, must have sought patterns in the dark as well; noted regular and irregular movements. Rustling clothes hangers, shoes dropping on the floor. Swooshing drapes, clicking light switches. Coughs, taps, footsteps, bed creaks, water glasses thumped on the bedside table, slippers shushed to the bathroom. She would have started her attention-getting noises the first night I moved in, so for me the sounds were normal; I did not notice any aberrations, anomalies, or irregularities. While I traveled freely through a vast cosmos, Sammy suffered in that coffin-space.
Early this morning, rescuers pulled open the closet door only an arm’s length from me. They freed Sammy from her tiny prison, where she crouched in darkness, knees forced against her chin, mouth duct-taped shut, waiting for her daily cycle of fear, despair and pain to start again. I imagine the moment this pattern was broken, when they gently drew her out of that space, the releasing light was too much for her and she had to close her eyes.
My cell phone buzzes for the thousandth time. I’m in the fetal position now, shivering on the floor, my back pressed against the scuffed baseboards, eyes shut. Waiting outside are stark TV lights, barking reporters’ questions, hostile camera lenses. More than anything, I want to open my laptop and escape to deep space. But if I succumb to the gravitational pull—the black hole—of that urge, I know Sammy’s luminous face will haunt me for ever, even there.
Our cosmos never stops fluctuating. When two galaxies collide in space, shock waves alter, but do not destroy them. Instead, they spark the birth of new stars from old matter, disrupting the pre-existing pattern. Then the celestial bodies regroup, regenerate, and pour their searing light into the dark once more. Like the detonated stars, I can gather my dispersed pieces and re-form myself, as Sammy surely will. What I must do is open my eyes, get up, and recreate my universe.
I yank myself to my knees, then my feet, and stumble downstairs. I don’t look up at the familiar but indifferent sky when I open the door. The camera operators crowded in front of my house swing their telescopic lenses toward me in a swoop like flocking crows. Staring ahead, I brace for the flashes.
oOo
Elizabeth Collis’ work has been featured in Pithead Chapel, Intrepidus Ink, Ellipsis Zine, The Good Life Review, Tangled Locks Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from the United Kingdom, she lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she is happiest in, on, or beside the Atlantic Ocean.
Find her online at Home | Elizabeth Collis
Bluesky @elizabethcollis.bsky.social Instagram @collis.elizabeth.
