Anthony Deaver

Wal­ter pressed his eye against the rub­ber of the eye­piece for a few sec­onds, pulled away and wrote a few notes. He sighed and began pag­ing back­ward though his note­book, the frown on his face grow­ing as the entries grew in size the fur­ther back he went.

He had been star­ing through tele­scopes on his back porch for almost fifty years, and noth­ing ever changed. Unlike so many of his peers, he hadn’t been able to spend as much time star gaz­ing as he use to. Work had become more and more scare as he got older, and so had his spare time. Add to that the fact that he was hav­ing to go to bed ear­lier and ear­lier as the years passed, and he began to seri­ously con­sider pack­ing away the tele­scope or giv­ing it to lit­tle Ben as a gift. And idea of that hor­ri­fied him, as he knew with­out a doubt the device would have about a three month life span were he to do that.

With an overly dra­matic sigh, an action which amused him since he was alone and the drama was com­pletely wasted, he flipped through his charts and notes to find the coor­di­nates of Sat­urn. It had been his favorite celes­tial body to gaze at for.… well, for­ever really. His father had first shown it to him through a tele­scope when he had been seven and he had instantly fallen in love. The majesty and beauty of the orange rings had grabbed his imag­i­na­tion, and the idea that a planet could even have rings had totally cap­ti­vated him.

He smiled as he thought about that moment for the first time in many years.

Locat­ing the coor­di­nates he leaned for­ward and began mak­ing adjust­ments to the dials and knobs on the tele­scope man­u­ally. He had ignored all the com­ments of oth­ers over the years to' mod­ern­ize' the scope and, pre­fer­ring the feel of mak­ing the adjust­ments him­self, his sin­gle con­ces­sion was a com­puter that con­nected to the tele­scope, allow­ing him to take images and video with the press of a key.

He cen­tered the scope on a tiny, dis­tant, slightly orange, pin­prick in the sky and again pressed his eye against the rub­ber piece and became lost in the grandeur of it all.

Sud­denly Wal­ter bolted upright, a look of shock and con­fu­sion spread­ing slowly across his face. He checked his charts, then checked the scope and con­firmed that he did indeed have the cor­rect set­tings. Press­ing his eye once again against the rub­ber eye­piece he took a deep breath.

"Impos­si­ble."

Not for the first time he wished some­one were here with him, though this was the first time he wanted them to ver­ify he wasn't insane.

He stood up and walked over to the cooler, took out a bot­tle of water, and downed the entire thing. He reached back into the cooler, cupped his hands and brought a hand­ful of ice cold water up, splash­ing it against his face.

The shock of it made him gasp, but it woke him up. Once he had his breath back he tow­eled off and walked back over to the tele­scope. Tak­ing another deep breath, he once again looked through the metal and glass tube at the dis­tant planet.

Imme­di­ately he sucked in a breath and held it. With­out tak­ing his eye off the scene, he reached over to his com­puter behind him and, after a few sec­onds of grop­ing, found the key­board, and pressed a key that started tak­ing pho­tos every cou­ple of seconds.

Finally he pulled him­self away and sat back, run­ning his hand over his face and turned to look at the monitor.

There, in full color clar­ity, he saw the planet and rings he had fallen in love with dis­in­te­grat­ing as the planet imploded and col­lapsed on itself.

© 2012, anthony. All rights reserved.