Starlight

My brother and I sit in the backyard on a couple of lawn chairs. We drink and look at the stars. There aren’t any streetlights in town. We can see the milky way tonight. Not a cloud in sight.

The flowers are blooming. The pink dahlias shine in the darkness. I feel the beer in my stomach. Heavy. But I’ve never felt more ethereal. As if I could reach out to my brother and my hand would pass through his solid-state.

Then he speaks.

“You ever wonder how different things would be?”

“If what?”

“Here me out.” He takes a swig from the beer bottle in the sandy soil by his feet. “What if we nuked North Korea?”

I see the silent screaming and desolation. The front-page headlines cascading out of the presses. The horror of that imagined reality. The destruction. The smug faces of General MacArthur and President Truman. A totality of time alteration rivaled by never finding the power of splitting an atom.

“What if,” I say.

“We’d have altered the entire course of the Cold War.” I shift in my seat. I do not like this conversation. I don’t like the revisions.

“Think about it,” he says.

For fifteen minutes the entire world is edited by the mouth of a middle-management employee at a tech company. Events like Kennedy’s assassination, the space race, the dissolution of the Soviet Union are called into question. I ask if MLK gets to survive in this alternate reality.

“Why not,” my brother says.

“What about today? Are we still doing this?”

“I don’t see why not.”

We watch the stars overhead. I point out a constellation I remember from an astronomy class I took at the JC in the town over. It’s Ursa Major.

The flowers will continue to bloom. The stars will spin overhead. I have my brother. He has me.

A moth lands on the dahlia, wings fluttering in the starlight.