My Boyfriend Is a Missing Constellation

How it begins

Asha had been seeing Leon for eleven days when the constellation disappeared.

Not dimmed. Not hidden by cloud. Gone.

She checked the telescope's tracking system, the archive, and the backup camera. Then she checked the photograph he had sent from the bakery.

In it, he was smiling beneath an awning, holding two pastries. Along his wrist ran seven small marks in the exact pattern missing from her sky.

She called him.

“Where are you?”

“Still choosing breakfast.”

“Come to the observatory.”

“Is the almond one acceptable?”

“Bring both.”

By the time he arrived, three other observatories had reported the same absence. The navigation service was asking whether the published star chart contained an error. Asha had spent six years helping produce it.

Leon stood inside the dome looking happier than the circumstances justified.

“I've never been up here.”

She projected the missing pattern onto the wall.

He stopped smiling.

“Do you recognize it?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me why.”

He put the pastry bag down with great care.

For eleven days he had been attentive, curious, and strangely unfamiliar with basic things. He knew the sea's old names but not how to use a ticket machine. He had cried at a dog drinking from a fountain. Asha had assumed he was having an unusual year.

“I thought there would be someone to take my place,” he said.

She sat on the edge of the instrument bench.

“What place?”

Leon rolled back his sleeve. Seven points of light moved beneath his skin, arranging themselves into a familiar outline.

Outside, the telescope continued following coordinates that no longer contained anything.

“I wanted,” he said, “to find out what happened between sunrise and sunset.”

Asha looked at the pastries, still warm enough to leave translucent marks on the paper.

For once, she had no idea which question should come first.