The Stones Cry Out (Flash Fiction)

No one knew what to expect when all the stars aligned.

Oh, there were theories. Stretching back to ancient times, the philosophers and madmen said that when the celestial entities formed a vast conga line in the sky, a gate would open to the underworld and the world would be swallowed up at last. Perhaps Zeus would go bowling with lightning and knock them all out of the sky, or Fenrir the daemoniac wolf would wake up peckish and devour them. And all of our modern madmen in white lab coats and strings of letters in front of their names told us that nothing would happen. They all explained that the stars weren’t really lined up, that the stars only appeared to align from the earth’s surface because the atmosphere warped our view of space. But they were widely ignored.

Surely something as momentous as this, something as vast and outside ourselves as this, must make something happen. So breaths were held. The media wouldn't shut up about it. We knew the exact moment they would be aligned, down to the last second. So for the minute leading up to it, the world was quiet, waiting. Televisions were silent. No one spoke. Even animals stopped barking or squeaking or rustling, sensing some inevitable cosmic shift. Cars were parked on the sides of highways and even the cities turned off their lights. Their inhabitants, used to living under a veil of glow-smog, could see the stars. People traveled to make sure they saw the stars at night, but they needn’t have bothered—the stars were bright enough, and there were so many of them that they showed up even in daytime. Everyone looked at the sky and held their breath, till all that could be heard was beating hearts and eyelids blinking.

The world beheld the sky.

Three, two, one.

From this vast line in the sky, a perfectly white band of ten million billion stars, from this circlet banded around the cosmos, came a single thing.

A chord. 

Vast echoes and reverberations shook all. No one clapped their hands to their ears, but rather reached up, up on their toes, watching the band. Tears leaked from their eyes, their eyes that all reflected a white stripe in their blackness. The sound was profound heart-ache, like everything had been leading up to this one event, as if it were all—human history, the dance of celestial bodies, getting up in the morning and going to work—as if it were all a prelude to this marvelous song, and the anticipation of it fell far short of reality. Each star played a cosmic note, which in tandem with the rest was of such intricacy and elegance that this chord transcended anything anyone had heard in the remotest, sweetest dream-song. Such a revelrous cacophony could only be performed on the vast stage of space, with ceilings high as infinitude.

It was only truly heard for a moment. But it continued to vibrate in the mind and the very atoms in the fabric of reality seemed to quake with the memory of those vast vibrations. People looked down from the sky and it felt like standing up from a seat after an hours-long symphony, looking at one another weakly and unable to adequately comment on what they had just witnessed with the limited tool of speech. It was as if a cosmic, many-fingered hand had swept through space to strum the universe. 

And everyone realized that the music of the spheres has not ceased, that this was just a tangible truth about the baseline of reality. The music played at all times, faintly, emanating from celestial bodies, yes, but also from the very subatomic particles of our own bodies, quivering with the delight and joy of being.