The Wrong Sky
—
Chris Scott
TO BE HONEST, I BARELY noticed it at first. The sky, just slightly wrong, would have likely simmered undetected in the background of my subconscious for days if Alex hadn’t said something on our walk to school that first morning.
“The light is weird, Dad.”
He was right, of course. We stopped in our tracks and looked up, shielding our eyes. The sun held its position amongst the clouds, same as always, but the way its rays attached to the trees, the houses, the pavement, was off somehow. Shadows were cast incorrectly. Objects seemed to fluctuate at their edges, briefly surrendering and reclaiming their definition in irregular patterns. The ambient space between everything skewed more pink than it should, or not necessarily pink, but vaguely unreal, tinted, textured. The creamy shade of a half-forgotten memory, and not the crisp, clear moment as you’re currently experiencing it in the here and now.
“Maybe some kind of atmospheric anomaly,” I suggested, the kind of thing an adult says that doesn’t actually mean anything. We continued walking. The sky was wrong, simple as that. There was really no other way to put it.
NASA gave exactly one press conference about the situation a couple days later, once it was clear the sky was doing this everywhere, and nothing was changing. They said a lot of it was classified, and understanding the particulars would require so much complicated context and a comprehensive understanding of physics that it would go over 99.9% of the public’s heads anyway, but basically: Our sky was no longer ours. It had been visited upon us from another planet. The NASA administrator’s blank televised face let those words hang in the air forever and then, as if anticipating millions of people simultaneously and psychosomatically choking on their own oxygen, he quickly clarified that it was still our atmosphere, just not our sky. As if that distinction could possibly mean anything.
He further clarified, in the kind of way that doesn’t clarify anything at all, that we had almost certainly switched skies with some place else. Meaning there was a good chance our sky was out there somewhere in the cosmos, belonging to another planet now, maybe a lot like our planet, maybe with beings not unlike ourselves, who were perhaps also, at this very moment, looking up at their sky—our sky—and, like us, trying to figure out what had happened. Gazing upon their harshly defined surroundings, the crystal clear blueness of their world and wondering where everything had gone so horribly wrong.
Group chats lit up. Memes appeared everywhere. Instagram became insufferable. Camps hastily formed: New Sky vs. Old Sky. A 24-hour news cycle ballooned into a 48-hour news cycle, and then 72 hours, before it was eventually displaced in the endless churn of Something Else Happening. Alex had so many questions for me over the days and weeks that followed, but my answers were always inadequate. They embarrassed me. I wanted to talk about something else. He wanted to talk about the wrong sky.
“Wrong sky is a bit of a misnomer,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “The sky can’t be wrong. The sky is just the sky,” I told him. “You’re still my son. Homework is still homework. Soccer practice is still soccer practice. Nothing has changed, if you think about it, not really.”
“What if other things change though?”
“Well, everything is always changing,” I reassured him, in that way only fathers can fail at.
The government began distributing special glasses for everyone. I got a pair for Alex from a mobile delivery unit outside my office. Purple frames (his favorite color), lenses tinted with some special chemical compound to help people adjust, to make everything look more or less how it was before. So we could adapt to the change and move forward together, under our new sky.
But I never took a pair for myself. I grew fond of the otherworldly hue, the odd effect it had on my temporal placement of events, as though I inhabited a constant, everlasting memory of the past. Making me nostalgic for my morning walks with Alex even as they were happening. Making it easier to ignore the clouds that had begun to arrange themselves in impossible geometric shapes above us, the increasingly rubbery spring of the once solid ground below us, the way our footsteps lifted us, little bit at a time, higher and higher above the earth. Making it easier to pretend that all of this was a foregone conclusion, that it had already happened, that this world was how I always remembered it. •
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Chris Scott’s work has appeared in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, Okay Donkey, HAD, hex literary, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. He is a regular ClickHole contributor and elementary school teacher in Washington, DC.
Website | Bluesky | Instagram
“The light is weird, Dad.”
He was right, of course. We stopped in our tracks and looked up, shielding our eyes. The sun held its position amongst the clouds, same as always, but the way its rays attached to the trees, the houses, the pavement, was off somehow. Shadows were cast incorrectly. Objects seemed to fluctuate at their edges, briefly surrendering and reclaiming their definition in irregular patterns. The ambient space between everything skewed more pink than it should, or not necessarily pink, but vaguely unreal, tinted, textured. The creamy shade of a half-forgotten memory, and not the crisp, clear moment as you’re currently experiencing it in the here and now.
“Maybe some kind of atmospheric anomaly,” I suggested, the kind of thing an adult says that doesn’t actually mean anything. We continued walking. The sky was wrong, simple as that. There was really no other way to put it.
NASA gave exactly one press conference about the situation a couple days later, once it was clear the sky was doing this everywhere, and nothing was changing. They said a lot of it was classified, and understanding the particulars would require so much complicated context and a comprehensive understanding of physics that it would go over 99.9% of the public’s heads anyway, but basically: Our sky was no longer ours. It had been visited upon us from another planet. The NASA administrator’s blank televised face let those words hang in the air forever and then, as if anticipating millions of people simultaneously and psychosomatically choking on their own oxygen, he quickly clarified that it was still our atmosphere, just not our sky. As if that distinction could possibly mean anything.
He further clarified, in the kind of way that doesn’t clarify anything at all, that we had almost certainly switched skies with some place else. Meaning there was a good chance our sky was out there somewhere in the cosmos, belonging to another planet now, maybe a lot like our planet, maybe with beings not unlike ourselves, who were perhaps also, at this very moment, looking up at their sky—our sky—and, like us, trying to figure out what had happened. Gazing upon their harshly defined surroundings, the crystal clear blueness of their world and wondering where everything had gone so horribly wrong.
Group chats lit up. Memes appeared everywhere. Instagram became insufferable. Camps hastily formed: New Sky vs. Old Sky. A 24-hour news cycle ballooned into a 48-hour news cycle, and then 72 hours, before it was eventually displaced in the endless churn of Something Else Happening. Alex had so many questions for me over the days and weeks that followed, but my answers were always inadequate. They embarrassed me. I wanted to talk about something else. He wanted to talk about the wrong sky.
“Wrong sky is a bit of a misnomer,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “The sky can’t be wrong. The sky is just the sky,” I told him. “You’re still my son. Homework is still homework. Soccer practice is still soccer practice. Nothing has changed, if you think about it, not really.”
“What if other things change though?”
“Well, everything is always changing,” I reassured him, in that way only fathers can fail at.
The government began distributing special glasses for everyone. I got a pair for Alex from a mobile delivery unit outside my office. Purple frames (his favorite color), lenses tinted with some special chemical compound to help people adjust, to make everything look more or less how it was before. So we could adapt to the change and move forward together, under our new sky.
But I never took a pair for myself. I grew fond of the otherworldly hue, the odd effect it had on my temporal placement of events, as though I inhabited a constant, everlasting memory of the past. Making me nostalgic for my morning walks with Alex even as they were happening. Making it easier to ignore the clouds that had begun to arrange themselves in impossible geometric shapes above us, the increasingly rubbery spring of the once solid ground below us, the way our footsteps lifted us, little bit at a time, higher and higher above the earth. Making it easier to pretend that all of this was a foregone conclusion, that it had already happened, that this world was how I always remembered it. •
Chris Scott’s work has appeared in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, Okay Donkey, HAD, hex literary, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. He is a regular ClickHole contributor and elementary school teacher in Washington, DC.
Website | Bluesky | Instagram