ALEX CLARKE

Light Pollution 

The boxes have been half full for weeks. It’ll only take a few more hours to fold up the last pieces of clothing and wrap my dusty tchotchkes in scarves, but the moving company isn’t coming until Monday. For now, I’m kneading my grimy feet into a cheap IKEA bedspread, holding my phone out in front of me like baby Simba. 

A star graphic falls across the screen when I click to confirm a 39 Euro purchase through the Divine Oracle app. Even though I know someone’s about to call, the ringtone shocks me. 

“Hello?” 

“Is that Julia?” The woman’s voice on the other end is raspy, slightly accented. 

“Yes.” 

“Wonderful. I’m Celeste.” 

Convenient name for a psychic. “Hi.” 

“And where on this great planet do you find yourself today, Julia?” 

She should probably know that. 

“Germany. Berlin.” 

“Oh! Berlin. I heard it’s a great city. Wie geht’s?” 

“Hah. I’m not actually German. I just live here. Not for much longer, though.” Not very perceptive, Celeste. The seconds tick by and I find myself wanting to test her, my inner skeptic smelling blood. My boyfriend would make so much fun of me for doing this. Pay me to tell you you’re wonderful, he’d say. I’d even do it for free. 

Celeste likes to kick off every new call with a general energetic reading, she says. “To give the oracles a chance to get to know you.” 

“Sure. That’s fine.” 

Apparently I have beautiful cosmic energy, but there’s something blocking that easy flow. A negative presence, a dark force. 

Tja, I think, borrowing the impactful little word from German. It’s more like a sound, one that means, “sure,” and “whatever” and “fuck it” all at the same time. I already know what’s blocking my flow. It’s this dusty, dirty city. It’s my stupid iPhone, growing hot against my ear.  

“Is there anything specific you wanted to ask the oracles?” 

Oracles sounds kind of like popsicles. And with that useless thought, something else appears: sadness. 

“Sorry,” I sniff. “Gimme a moment.” 

“Sure, honey,” she purrs. 

“Yeah, so, I guess I’m wondering if my friend Magda will ever speak to me again?” 

Celeste’s breath gets heavier. She murmurs so quietly, I have to ask her to repeat herself. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. No. The oracles are saying that the connection has been severed in this lifetime.” 

I was the one who wanted to get rid of Magda in the first place, to shrug her off like a heavy winter coat. The more distance I tried to put between us, the closer she wanted to be, suggesting we go for dinner, for coffee, for lunch, or how about the Planetarium? They do a Sternstunde, she texted. It’s really beautiful, you stare up at a big dome covered in the starry sky. The emcee takes you on a tour through space. 

No talking, I thought. Perfect.  

She hugged me for too long when I showed up in the lobby with only two minutes to spare and I wriggled out of her arms like a toddler. 

“Let’s go,” I barked. “That guy’s telling us to hurry.” 

The teenage usher, who had done no such thing, glanced at our tickets and directed us to go up the four flights of twisting stairs into a darkened room with movie-theatre-style plush chairs and a giant, gleaming dome covering us like the lid of a bell jar. 

It went dark. 

Magda looped her arm in mine as if we were teenage lovers at a horror movie, not a kid-friendly presentation on the solar system. 

My arm grew heavy and disconnected itself from my body as the emcee welcomed us, asked us not to take out our phones. “They cause light pollution,” she breathed into the mic. A man sitting three seats away brandished his, taking a selfie with the night sky as his backdrop. 

 The emcee cleared her throat. “Great, thanks for demonstrating. Light pollution prevents you from seeing the stars that are normally visible to the naked eye. The same thing happens every night in Berlin. You have to go out to Brandenburg to escape it. But for some reason, no one really wants to go to Brandenburg. Hah, hah.” 

I used to love this city, too. To the exclusion of everywhere else, not just places like Brandenburg, but also my own rural Canadian town. I’d compare everything to Berlin, scoff at the people and places who took things so seriously, like graffiti, dress codes, traffic lights. That was back when I considered Magda, a born-and-raised Berlinerin, my best friend. My guide to the city, to the culture and language that felt at once so foreign yet so familiar, like a leather glove you find at a flea market that plants ancient dirt beneath your fingernails. 

The planets raced above our heads. “Here’s Mars.” The emcee’s voice was melodic. “The planet of war. Inhospitable, though some are trying to colonize it in case things go wrong on Earth. It’ll never happen—and I’d rather those billionaires spend their time and money saving the planet we have.” 

People around us chuckled and Magda’s body trembled. Her hardest laughs were always silent. Gums bared, shoulders heaving, chest concave. Breathless guffaws releasing from her throat like yesterday’s hiccups. She used to laugh like that at my long-winded stories, the way my English-trained mouth tripped over long words, said Kügel and Sprüdel. How I reduced complex narratives into brute generalizations whenever I was tipsy on cheap beer, summing things up with a shrug and a, “You know what I mean? You know what I mean.” She used to be my perfect audience. 

Now, her laughter felt juvenile. What the emcee said wasn’t even funny. I wrangled my arm out of her pretzel-like grip to dig around in my purse, pretending to look for a tissue. At the intrusion, my phone reacted like an eager lover, lighting up as if to say, You needed me? I snapped my purse shut. 

Magda tsked jokingly. “Lichtverschmutzung!” Light pollution. 

“Hah.” 

“Shh,” breathed the emcee into the mic. 

Against my better judgement, I let Magda drag me to a smoky bar after the show. 

“One drink,” I said. “I have to get up early tomorrow.” 

She ordered a mineral water and I raised my eyebrow, judging her uncharacteristic sobriety silently but not commenting on it. Her nervous fingers peeled the label off, a subversive act in a country diligent about returning bottles for their deposits. Without the bar code, this glass shaft was now defunct. 

Magda’s fingers, covered in silvery dust, came to rest. 

I pretended to look something up on my phone. 

She took a deep breath. “What’s going on with you? Are you . . . mad at me for something?” 

I answered before I even had time to think, laying my phone face down on the sticky table. “No, no, not at all. Alles gut.”  

It wasn’t exactly true, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I’ve never been good with ambiguity. 

The sides of her lips turned up in a sad smile. “Okay.” Her eyes grew more giant than usual, the result of a thyroid issue she’d battled her whole life, one that I didn’t comprehend. Health issues were the kinds of topics we only ever brushed upon because our friendship wasn’t really based on real-life stuff like that. It was based on exchanging ideas and meeting each other on an intellectual plane. There were many things we didn’t discuss: her abusive father, my impatience, her clinginess, my apathy. We never held up the mirror for one another, never revealed to the other their real place in the world. Rogue stars, not gravitationally bound to any particular galaxy or solar system. Not to each other, either. Certainly not to each other. 

So when she disappeared into the bathroom, I decided it was time to detach from her gravitational pull for the evening. I paid and slipped off into the night. She’ll figure it out, I thought. She’ll be fine. 

But she hasn’t answered my texts since. 

Celeste’s unambiguous for the first time on our call. “Your friend is going through something big, and she feels as if you’ve deserted her.” 

“Mmkay.” Can an iPhone get water damage from tears on the screen? “It was more complicated than that, but okay, sure.” 

“Was it really, though? Oops, honey—we’ve gone a bit over. Do you want to add another half hour?”  

“No.” I sniff hard. A countdown notification flashes across the app’s screen.  

“For what it’s worth, the oracles aren’t infallible. You could try reaching out to your friend.” 

“Tja.” 

She says something else but the app counts down to zero, cutting her off. 

I twist my phone in the IKEA blanket and stuff them both into a moving box. Its useless, leaky blue light can’t offer me anything anymore—aside from the knowledge of how severed off I’ve become. 

Alex Clarke is a Vancouver Island and Berlin-based copywriter and communications strategist who runs a co-working space in an alley. She’s working on her first novel, a revenge thriller set in a remote BC town beset by wildfires. Find her at clarkealexandra.com