“I thought you said there would be other kids my age.” Her duffel bag was slung over her shoulder, stuffed with clothes from the shopping spree that I’d used to help soften the blow of leaving home. My granddaughter stood beside me, examining the line of people behind us. “Don’t pay those nut jobs any mind,” I told Yumi. One of the Kennedy Space Center guards shoved his baton through the chain links to beat the man down. These are the signs of judgment.” A man wearing an American flag T-shirt and a fanny pack tried to scale the fence. We see the signs, the rising seas, the fires. But beyond all this, perhaps fifty yards away, there was a fence barricading the chanting crowds: Second chance, second chance! A woman with a bullhorn shouted: “You can’t leave us! Planet X will collide with us soon. As the hangar opened, we could see the ticketed spectators behind the velvet ropes flanking the red carpet-my sister and nieces, my gallery dealer, who’d arranged a final showing of my plague victim portraits a few weeks earlier, children in astronaut onesies waving toy models of the Yamato. This is the first step for humanity to become a part of whatever is beyond our solar system. We are at the dawn of a new age, a NASA official said to applause.

Yamato-Launch Day, December 30, 2037Īll two hundred of the crew lined up in our flight suits, waiting for the hangar doors to open to reporters and relatives and those who dreamed of one day traveling the stars. Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He is the author of the award-winning short story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone and teaches creative writing at St. Nagamatsu is a Japanese-American writer and managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine, an online quarterly dedicated to innovative prose. The following is excerpted from Sequoia Nagamatsu's new novel, How High We Go In the Dark.

How high we go on the dark