Galagog, Part 1
Obscure Sorrows. 600 words, 2 minute read. With Grok.
The observatory dome split with a groan, dumping Tessa Kane into a night so sharp it bit her lungs. Stars glared down, unblinking, as she hunched over the console, headset hissing. A signal—new, alive—slithered through: a jagged pulse, too steady for static.
“Got something,” she said, voice low. Her fingers, numb from cold, teased the waveform into focus.
Raj’s laugh crackled back. “ET drunk-dialing? Bet it’s a balloon farting noise.” Down at base, he’d be stirring that tar he called coffee.
“Listen.” She patched it through—a drone, woven with a cracked-flute melody. The sky loomed, and galagog hit: her sister’s voicemails, the eviction notice, shriveled to nothing in a universe too vast to notice. Yet the rarity—her alone hearing this—prickled her neck.
Tessa hadn’t meant to chase riddles. Astronomy was a job—data, cash, no loose ends. But the sky unpicked her, left her thirty-four and frayed, her apartment a tomb of bills and a dusty photo with Mia, pre-silence. Raj called her a stargazer. She didn’t say she’d run out of room for anything else.
She sent the audio. “Freaky, right?”
A beat, then Raj: “Yeah, that’s… not right. Like a busted lullaby.”
She paced the scuffed floor, smirking. The signal burrowed in, a buzz in her teeth. She flicked Mia’s lighter—Sis, don’t burn out—its flame a pinprick against the dark. Her life shrank, laughable, but the sound pinned her.
Raj burst in later, laptop under arm, hair wild. “It’s not random.” The screen flared: the signal’s peaks twisted into a glyph—ring, spiral, thorns.
Tessa’s pulse jumped. “That’s deliberate.”
“Who’s sending it?” Raj glanced at the gray sky.
She clicked the lighter. “Someone waiting.” The galagog flared—wonder, dread—and Raj’s smirk faltered. They’d bonded over grad-school beers, but this was different.
“You’re all-in on aliens,” he said, half-grinning.
“Don’t bullshit me,” she snapped, tossing the lighter down. It skidded. “You feel it.”
He snorted, but the signal spiked—quick, urgent—and they froze. Her throat caught; his hand twitched. The galagog stitched them tight.
The signal grew claws, rattling the dome, sinking into Tessa’s bones. They traced it past Neptune, a nowhere spot. She slept clutching the lighter, dreams dripping spirals, her old self—walled-off, scared of Mia’s voice—sloughing off. The galagog made it a joke, but forged her raw, reaching. Raj softened too, sketching the glyph on stained napkins.
Snow crunched outside, the sky a bruise. Raj kicked at it. “If they show, I’m not talking.”
Tessa traced the lighter’s engraving. “They sang first. We wave.” Mia’s plea—Call me, Tess—echoed, a thread to this.
Her fight was the pull to retreat, let silence win. But the galagog burned it down—her smallness a rasp, her place a flare.
On the seventh night, the signal screamed. The sky ripped—a streak of fire slowing to a hover. Tessa stumbled out, Raj cursing, and saw it: a craft, ringed and spiked, pulsing. She dropped the lighter, snow swallowing it, and sank to her knees—not fear, but a flash: Mia, tiny, whispering Look up, it’s bigger than us. The craft flared once, a note for her, then vanished.
Raj grabbed her shoulder, voice rough. “Now what?”
She stood, face lit by starlight. “We listen.”