Asteroid City [VERIFIED]

Woodrow glanced in the rearview mirror. The town shrank behind them. The crater was already just a dent in the earth.

Then the sky flickered.

Stanley was a celebrated actor in another life—or perhaps in this very life, it was hard to tell. He had a habit of stepping out of the frame of a conversation, as if searching for his mark. He stood now at the rim of the crater, a man in a rumpled seersucker suit, and stared down into the geological punchbowl. The impact, millions of years ago, had fused the sandstone into a glassy, malformed obsidian that reflected the sky in distorted, funhouse fragments.

"Because," she said, "that's what we're all doing here, isn't it? Looking for something we lost." At midnight, the town's power failed. The military generators hummed, but the streetlights died. In the darkness, the children escaped the diner through a loose floorboard. Led by Woodrow and Andromeda, they crept to the crater's edge. The cube was still there, pulsing faintly in the dust. Asteroid City

"It looks like God dropped a contact lens," Stanley said to no one in particular.

"I think," he said, "they found each other. And sometimes, that's the same thing."

From behind the bleachers, a figure emerged. It was approximately four feet tall, with a bulbous head the color of a spoiled plum, and skin that seemed to be made of cracked, dry mud. Its eyes were two vertical slits that glowed with a soft, amber light, like banked coals. It moved not by walking but by a series of short, jerky rotations, as if its joints were on backwards. It held in one three-fingered hand a small, pulsing cube. Woodrow glanced in the rearview mirror

She wrote something in her notebook. Then she tore out the page and handed it to him. It was a single sentence: The alien was looking for its child.

Stanley sat on the porch of the motel, watching the dust settle. Midge sat beside him. Her notebook was closed.

Then the screaming started. The aftermath was a bureaucratic fever dream. Military jeeps arrived within the hour, followed by men in black suits who had no names and no smiles. The town was quarantined. No one in, no one out. The Stargazer children were confined to the diner, where they drew pictures of the creature on napkins with remarkable calm. Andromeda, Woodrow’s daughter, finally took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. She drew the creature’s face with exacting, anatomical precision. Then the sky flickered

Woodrow knelt beside her. "What makes you say that?"

Andromeda pointed. At the far end of the crater, where the shadow was thickest, a second glow had appeared. Smaller. More hesitant. It was a juvenile creature, half the size of the first, its skin a paler, more fragile purple. It was trembling. It was alone.

The power came back on. The military men ran in circles. The sky remained stubbornly blue. The next morning, the quarantine was lifted. There was no mention of the event in any newspaper. The men in black suits took the cube and left a check for the town—a sum large enough to pave the roads and install streetlights and build a new wing on the diner. The Stargazer children were given certificates of participation. Woodrow did not win Junior Stargazer of the Year. The title went to a girl from Nebraska who had built a solar-powered marshmallow roaster.