Free Noctuidae by Scott Nicolay

might even start spinning backward next—and if it did, would it take them back to when Ron was still with them? Or were the movements of its damaged hands altogether meaningless, irrelevant to their current situation, the malfunction simply coincidence?
    Pete rocked in place, spoke a cryptic sentence —I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.
    Sue-Min shivered. —What the hell was that about?
    He turned to her. —It’s from this play I was in, back in my UNM days. Beckett. I have this jones you know, for nerdy smart girls, and one I dated for a while was a theater major. She had this idea I’d be a good actor, kept pushing me to try out for plays she was producing. I finally did and got a part in this Beckett thing. It was weird shit—I played this guy in a wheelchair who kept a bloody handkerchief over his face most of the time. I still remember most of my lines though. My memory’s good like that.
    Sue-Min struggled to wrap her thoughts around the image of Pete the thespian but it was too much for her to process. Her mind was already overloaded and all she really wanted to do was go back to sleep, return to the sleeping bag whose upper half still smelled like Ron. Was this faint and fading fragrance all she had left, all that remained? She could not accept that. Ron was resilient, Ron was Ron. Unless she saw definite evidence of his death, she would keep holding out hope he was still alive. And probably needing their help if he was. . .
    At home if Sue-Min couldn’t get to sleep she would just
    . . . it was the only thing that helped her fall asleep most nights. How long could she go without jilling off? She thought of the Seinfeld episode, The Contest. Hadn’t Elaine been the first one out in that?
    Pete would want to do the same of course. Would he even make an effort to be discreet? Ick. She groaned softly to herself. Once again their situation added levels of complexity to simple quotidian acts.
    She shook her head again to clear it then asked Pete —What does your watch say now? She spoke without turning in his direction.
    He did not answer immediately, did not turn toward her, did not even look at his watch. Sue-Min kept her peace. It was not as if she had anywhere to go right at the moment.
    Finally Pete examined his watch as she observed him. She remembered the device as an old school analog, an inheritance she guessed, his dad’s or his granddad’s originally. He stared a long minute at the face beneath the crystal but neither moved nor spoke. Finally he said to her without turning —Still 9:15. The second hand moves but I don’t think the other hands have even budged from where they were before.
    —That’s weird.
    —You’re tellin’ me.
    His voice was bitter, hopeless, beyond even cynicism. Sue-Min considered how much worse the betrayal of his watch would hurt him if it really were an heirloom. She turned away from him toward the opening and. . .
    —Pete! Look! Look outside!
    He turned slowly but once he faced the exit she knew he saw what she saw too. The sky was lighter now, what she could see of it to either side of the silent immensity at least. No question. The shape of the thing did not resolve itself in relief and continued to defy her efforts to make sense of it overall.
    —Do you see it? The sky is definitely getting brighter.
    —But that thing is still there.
    —Still here now . . . We don’t know how it got here. We don’t know how or when it might leave.
    — If it leaves. How do we know it’s not here to stay?
    —Can you be a little less pessimistic? It was your idea anyway about it leaving with the light. Don’t you want to test out that thought, see if you were right?
    —I don’t want to know if I was wrong . I just want to get out of here. We’ve got to find a way to escape.
    —Let’s see how bright it gets and what the monster does. Come on—if it’s really after 9:00 now, we should definitely be getting sunlight down here, even